I think most people would draw a distinction between people who are merely full pay and those that pay for buildings and endow chairs. And need blind means the school does not disadvantage those asking for aid. It does not mean they’ll pass up a huge donation.
Possibly, but by no means a slam dunk.
“Honestly- what kid with a 1510 (absent an accomplishment like playing with the philaharmonic) thinks they are getting in to Yale?”
I’ve probably mentioned this before, but there’s been on research on why the anti-drug and DUI campaigns didn’t work and applying it to admissions, if you told HS kids that only 3 out of 100 get into Yale, they’ll think they’re one of the three.
Kids have a good idea how their peers are doing in high school and who the top applicants in the class are, scores, gpa, ECs, athletics, and who the teacher recommenders. They may not know the essays, but that’s about it. And this was also the case back when I was in hs in the 80’s.
“Even knowing who is applying where is sort of unimportant.”
I don’t think that’s true, classmates take note of who’s applying where, especially for the more selective colleges, at least here in the some of the more competitive HS. And they use the results of where these kids got in early to figure out where to apply RD.
Because kids think it is important, it doesn’t make it important :-). It is a regional pool. Not a pool local to the school. Colleges I don’t think have quotas by school.
As an example, I tell the kids that if they want to apply to a nationally reputed company for an internship, they are better off collaborating with their friends in college rather than competing with them because the internship will get applications from kids from across the country. You are not competing with just your peers in your college.
The more class rank is emphasized, the more it becomes like a quota by school. For example, consider UT Austin.
Our school doesn’t rank. These days many schools don’t rank. When I say top 5 – I mean very loosely. The kids know who the top kids in class are in a subjective sense. Reccs will depend on how the school perceives you etc. It is not a numerical thing. Some kids are just qualitatively at a different caliber than other kids.
Researching whether a school is need aware, need sensitive, need blind, meets 100% need etc. before you apply is an important takeaway from this year.
There’s a thread going now on the topic of top ranked need-aware schools.
But my point was that you can’t possibly know this from looking at matriculations alone. And even the scattergrams don’t provide enough crucial information. For example, let’s talk real numbers. How many unhooked kids are applying to Hopkins vs. Cornell and how many are admitted? Scattergrams don’t supply that information, and it sounds like your schools doesn’t either. So one is left to draw conclusions based on indefinite information. You can provide reasons why you don’t think there are too many hooks, but the fact is you don’t know for certain, and when you are talking about 75 kids spread across 22 schools even missing a few hooks can drastically throw off the numbers at certain schools.
I guess wasn’t clear. I wasn’t comparing your high school, nor do I think my experiences are representative of yours.
We were discussing @neela1’s posts. @neela1 and I are talking about similar types of schools and therefor have some shared basis for comparison.
As to your general point. agree with you that the admissions landscape differs drastically between high schools. When it comes to grades, test scores, TO, ECs, etc., I am oftentimes imploring students and families to look more deeply into the admission situation at their own school/demographic, rather than focusing on general admission statistics or worrying about kids who aren’t similarly situated. That said, when one is drawing conclusions based on limited, generalized information about one’s school, it is extremely easy to get it wrong.
I’m in the Bay Area and my little 4th grader is doing EC stuff that normally folks in high school do (and already focusing on the long-range plans for national stuff/etc). We have incredibly intellectual discussions at the dinner table, focusing on everything from political philosphy to legal theories to number theory. 
Right? My D had some idea who some of the top students in her class might be but was actually quite surprised at who ended up being #1 and #3 - I mean she wasn’t shocked but when thinking about who might be up near the top they weren’t people she automatically thought of. Maybe her class was just quiet about it. D had one friend who told her after NMF were announced and college decisions were out that his Dad told him he had no idea my D was so smart. Funny enough she ended up at a college that does not stress competitiveness at all either. They don’t publish their deans list and you find out if you officially graduated with honors after graduation. There are no cords or anything. My D literally has NO Idea what type of grades her friends and peers get.
Assuming T5/T10/T20 is a reference to a USNWR ranking, there are going to be a lot of exceptions to any assumptions about colleges with similar USNWR rankings using similar admission selection. For example MIT, Chicago, and UCLA are all top 20 USNWR ranked colleges, yet they use very different admission systems that emphasize and deemphasize different things. There is certainly a correlation between general selectivity and USNWR ranking, but even then, there are many exceptions.
It might be more clear to state which specific colleges are meant. For example, HYPS have historically used REA rather than ED, while MIT and Caltech have used non-restricted EA. Some of these non-ED colleges do favor early applicants over RD. Others seem to show far less preference. The Harvard lawsuit analysis found an average 4-5x increased chance of admission for equally qualified, unhooked kids applying REA rather over similar qualified unhooked kids applying RD. In contrast, Stanford has historically appeared to apply far less boost for REA.
Chicago is unique in offering EA, EDI, EDII, and RD. There are some indicators of Chicago applying noteworthy preference to specific application groups above over others. There is also some indication of Chicago giving far more preference to applicants from certain specific HSs than other colleges listed above.
I could go on, but the point is USNWR ranking does not capture this type of detail. Instead it’s more just generally correlated with selectivity.
Definitely. Kids are engaged in coursework and class discussion and projects together. My teachers also had us review one another’s papers post submission. They also know who is holding leadership roles or is the engine for an organization. Kids may not know one another’s grades and test scores, but they do have a pretty well rounded picture of their peers with respect to leadership, critical thinking skills, writing skills, foreign language skills, etc.
There is probably a kid out there who would surprise someone with a lower GPA or test scores, but if you to go to an average suburban high school with a graduating class of 400 and ask the 60 or so almost exclusively honors/AP kids to identify the top 6 kids, the top 12 kids, the top 1 or 2 kids…their lists would be remarkably similar.
They don’t need a class ranking sheet or to know test scores or NMF status to see those things. I went to a HS that had very few kids attending extremely selective universities. I was the lone holdover my senior year from an academic team that won a state title. The sponsor asked me to find teammates. The kids I found wound up at Harvard, Pomona, Duke, and two went to Indiana on full Wells scholarships with one of them going on to get a PhD at Princeton. 2 12th and 11th graders + 1 10th grader. 17 year old me could figure it out pretty easily.
Chasing merit aid means stepping down significantly in terms of prestige/selectivity. Especially if you want a lot of aid. The school at which you’re a high stat applicant may give you a little money. But to get the “wow, this is less than in-state tuition” named merit scholarship, you’re going to have to be above the top of their range. And that’s a great place to be for some kids–especially a very bright but not confident student or a kid who is fragile in another way. My kid is going to have enough trouble navigating independence, knowing that the college she’s attending is eager to have her and having the professors recognize her name during the orientation visit was huge. Not necessarily new this year, but increasingly true and intensified.
When I meant kids, I meant they influenced their parents and GCs on where to apply and probably know whether they can get in or not. Colleges don’t have hard quotas which are illegal but they do usually have max amounts they’ll take from a public HS. A GC said to a class a few years ago when going the school’s Naviance, that for the past few years, 100 kids applied to Stanford, every year 5 got in, don’t expect that number to change.
“There’s a thread going now on the topic of top ranked need-aware schools.”
Not sure how to say this gently, but every college is need-aware, even Harvard has a budget. If international students and some waitlists are need aware, then can you really call the college need-aware? ucbalumnus has pointed how colleges may be need blind for an applicant, but the class as a whole is really not.
Again, I don’t think this is entirely accurate. While schools don’t necessarily have hard quotas, colleges consider relative performance of students within a class. The most obvious example is class rank, but colleges also look the relative strength of rigor, test scores, ECs and even letters of recommendation. A recommendation calling the student the “best math student” is much more helpful than a letter saying “13th best math student in the class.” Likewise, a 1520 SAT isn’t going to be seen as a positive if there is an overabundance of classmates applying to the same school with 1570+.
The 7-8 private schools in the northern NJ suburbs form a pool under one regional rep from the university to that area. Likewise the NYC private schools are considered a group/pool. The local public schools also form a region. Comparisons are made among schools in each group. We have seen admissions from universities like Yale and Princeton vary widely year to year. They have ranged from 1 to 6 or 7 each in my recent memory. This year Georgetown had 6. There are years when Penn has 6 or 7 matriculants. This is consistent with the model that pools are region wide. We have also been hinted that pools are region wide. So acceptances from Northern NJ private schools will vary over a tighter range than an individual school’s range (in percentage terms). Acceptances from private schools nationwide will vary over an even tighter range percentage wise. These aggregate numbers are more tightly controlled because those are given out/published, and the university is making policy statements by taking more or less kids at that level of aggregation. There is a gradual move to cut down kids from private schools etc and take more public school kids etc. Even though intra school differences are not important, it is more fruitful to make comparisons across 6-7 schools in a pool. I would even venture to say that comparisons are likely also made across years. Where does this student stand relative to other kids we have taken from this school and region in the past several years. I do know that universities track kids that join over the following 4 years and assess what to make of a school’s recommendation in support of that kid. This helps them calibrate and assess next time when the school recommends someone.
Wow what a high achiever! So impressive. Keep up the good work!
I’m not sure I’d describe 7 or 8 similarly situated private schools as a “region,” but regardless of the terminology, the point remains the same. Whether within a single school (my example) or among similarly situated schools (your example), the relative strength of the cohort can have a big impact on the admissions chances of the individual applicants, and kids need to need to stand out among their cohort.
For schools with a track record of matriculations to top schools, by far best indicator of admissions chances is to look at the past results of similarly situated kids.
As for variation in the number of admissions for year to year, that doesn’t necessarily mean that pools are “region” wide. There are a lot of variables within a school that may cause the number of matriculations to fluctuate from year to year. For example:
And for what it is worth, while there is always some year to year variation, I see more stability in my sample than you do in yours, especially if I look at acceptances rather than matriculation. Penn accepts 10-15 students per year, more or less, over half of whom are hooked, and there are usually around 6-10 matriculations (12 this year.) There are no years where Penn accepts thirty and no years where Penn accepts one or two. (And, by the way, even though Penn accepts 10-15 kids per year, the admit rates is still generally less than 20% for for top unhooked kids applying to Penn.)
Trying to refocus on the OP, IMO it is extremely important for applicants to understand that they are being reviewed relative to those who are similarly situated, and wherever possible that is what applicants should focus on when trying to determine their chance of admissions. You may have stats which are low compared to the median, yet still be a good candidate if you stand out among your similarly situated peers. And the opposite is also true.
Unfortunately this is very difficult most kids to gauge, as they don’t have access to the information which helps them understand what their odds really are. This is especially challenging for students who don’t have access to quality counseling and/or who attend schools which rarely if ever send kids to top schools. IMO many of these kids see the crazy high stats at some of these colleges, and they don’t even bother applying, even though they might have had a decent chance if they applied.
Agree with everything you said. No one high school should send nearly half their graduating class to a T20, that does not seem right. Are they really more prepared for a top college than kids from a less well-known school? I doubt it. My oldest attended an average CA public high school and was more than prepared. He just graduated from UC Berkeley, double major Math/CS, Phi Beta Kappa, and did it without being stressed out, so clearly his high school prepared him well. I think sharing the wealth is a good thing, give some other kids a chance.
This might be a little off topic, but I just want to share what might be the sign of times.
My two daughters go to same public HS, 7 to12 grade, in CA which is a T20 ranked school in nation.
When my D22 had her promotion ceremony at the end of 8 grade, there were about 25 kids out of 150 with 4.0 GPA for two years. Just went to D26’s ceremony and there were over 50 kids with 4.0 GPA.
Are the kids getting smarter and work harder in general?
Or, is this an isolated case?
Might not be right but it does happen. Just went to a prep school graduation and 90% of a class of 100 are going to T30s, and a good chunk to T10s. HYPSM well represented.