<p>merryecho:</p>
<p>The previous GC may have been lazy. But what got the students into some schools that were previously not open to them was not hard work on the part on the new GC but connections.
The colleges felt that they could trust what the GC told them about students because they knew him/her. That may well be why some of our best students got into schools such as HYPM but not others.</p>
<p>I also echo mikemac.</p>
<p>Oh, an in terms of liking or not liking a school: if schools have accepted students who turned them down, they become wary of accepting more. Also, smaller schools do track the quality of students they get from a school and if they don’t feel the students were well-prepared, it may influence how they see that school.</p>
<p>boston college hated my high school. only 1/7 applicants accepted, and he was off the waitlist! it’s so strange.</p>
<p>mikemac >>>
As a side note, ethics sure can be a funny thing. mom2collegekids, didn’t you suggest in a post a day or two back that a college student who did poorly at USC and is now at a CC could “forget” to mention the 1st school when applying to 4-year colleges?
<<<</p>
<p>I didn’t suggest that the OP should do that. I told the story of someone I knew who DID that … BIG DIFFERENCE…can’t you tell the difference?</p>
<p>I purposely stated that I didn’t know if that was wrong or not, so that someone who might know could come forward. Later, someone posted that the apps require such info. I didn’t have a problem with that. I learned what the policy is. It would be different if someone had said, “that’s wrong,” and then I said, “go ahead and do it; no one will likely ever know.” Then you’d have a point.</p>
<p>So, for me…ethics sure isn’t a funny thing…and neither is logic.</p>
<p>idad…</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Do you live in a state or region that doesn’t have many kids applying to those schools? I’m fascinated as to why this sort of thing happens.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Yale apparently hates ours. Or at least Yale ignores it. </p>
<p>Every year our large public HS sends the top two or three kids to some permutation of HPSM - but no Y. This year the two co-vals went to Stanford and Dartmouth. Both applied to Yale and, like all their predecessors, both failed. Yale has not accepted a single kid from our school within living memory. I don’t think the school was kicked off Yale’s list so much as it was never on it. No one knows why.</p>
<p>It would be curious if a regional newspaper would take this issue on and ask these univ why the students’ from their local school(s) don’t get accepted. The media could go with transcripts and such (names removed), and ask. I wonder what the response would be?</p>
<p>I’d think that such media attention might get some of these colleges to ask themselves…are we being lazy by having a few “go to” schools to get future students? I suspect that is what is happening. They have too many apps to go thru, so they use their “go to” list of schools for each state or region.</p>
<p>There just isn’t a logical explanation for why some schools have a lot of ivy acceptance, while other schools do not when the stats/hooks are comparable…</p>
<p>Can someone please explain naviance?</p>
<p>Naviance is a suite of products and services that are marketed to high schools. One of the products/services sold is an ability to make scatterplots of the individual colleges that a high school applicant from the high school applies to with the result listed. On one axis, you plot GPA; on the other axis you plot SAT score. </p>
<p>If you have enough data, you get a general idea what GPA/SAT ranges a certain college is looking for in the students it accepts. Of course, an application is more than GPA/SAT scores, but when everyone in a certain quadrant gets accepted, you can feel more comfortable if your stats fall in that area.</p>
<p>This isn’t made by naviance, but it is an example of the kind of graphs that Naviance would produce.</p>
<p>[AHS</a> c/o 2008](<a href=“http://www.arcadiachineseparents.org/college.html]AHS”>http://www.arcadiachineseparents.org/college.html)</p>
<p>edit: oops- I cross posted this with ellemenope. </p>
<p>It’s a subscription based online system that offers lots of functionality for the college search and application process. Highschools purchase subscriptions and students and their families at the highschool receive an account that lets them use the system. Within Naviance, a student or family member can search and compare colleges across different dimensions, record their favorites, look for matches, see upcoming college visits to campus, do career assessments, record information about oneself and communicate with guidance counselors. I’m still exploring it myself so obviously leaving out lots. </p>
<p>Within Naviance, I see three general categories of information that one can use for cross referencing: information about oneself (the student), information about each possible college, and information about one’s highschool. The latter is what is talked about most on CC. Highschools enter and store historical data regarding which colleges their students have applied to in the past, the average stats of the students who have applied (e.g. psat, sat, gpa), and the outcomes of those applications (e.g. accepted, waitlisted, denied, withdrawn). Thus one can see for college X that 50 have applied, 30 were accepted, 10 were denied, and 10 were waitlisted. For a given college, one can view the average SAT of those who applied from one’s highschool, the lowest SAT of who was accepted and the average SAT of those accepted. Or for a given college one can look at a scatterplot of GPA and SATs for different outcomes from graduates of one’s highschool. This data can be more useful than general information about college acceptance rates and freshman stats because it is specific to a given highschool.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I’d think that such media attention might get some of these colleges to ask themselves…are we being lazy by having a few “go to” schools to get future students? I suspect that is what is happening. They have too many apps to go thru, so they use their “go to” list of schools for each state or region.</p>
<p>There just isn’t a logical explanation for why some schools have a lot of ivy acceptance, while other schools do not when the stats/hooks are comparable…
<<<<<<<<<<</p>
<p>Just wanted to add to my above post…</p>
<p>The more I think about it, the more I think this could work. Either contact your local bigger media outlets or contact John Stossel (where is he now??) . </p>
<p>Tell them what you know…that students from your school(s) don’t get accepted to the ivies (or Stanford or wherever). Provide them contact info for students who have high stats that were rejected. This is something John Stossel would look into if he felt it was a widespread problem in certain areas in the country.</p>
<p>The headline would be something like: “Why Doesn’t Harvard Like our Local Students” (or something like that).</p>
<p>Something like this would likely embarrass the ivies into looking into their ways of determining who gets admitted.</p>
<p>And, hopefully, any local ivy grads would be outraged enough to also complain.</p>
<p>The idea of involving an investigative reporter seems like it would sever any chance for someone from your school/area being admitted to these schools. And, providing contact information for high-scoring students rejected by these schools? Providing contact information for a student other than your own? I don’t think so.</p>
<p>Marite- that is exactly my point- the old GC’s had no connections, the new one does. But the old ones made no effort to make new connections- they were comfortable with the same ones they always used. Connections take some effort to acquires.</p>
<p>At my school we have something called a junior conference, where the GC goes over the whole admissions process with the student and parents for about an hour. During this, my GC particularly warned me about Swarthmore. No one had gotten in during my GC’s entire time at my school, over 20 years, despite, she assured me, the applicants being very well-qualified.</p>
<p>Nobody really gets into Princeton. No one’s been accepted to MIT since 1995, but considering the acceptance rates and the number of applicants from my school, no one thinks that those two hate us.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>I doubt that…and, no one’s getting accepted NOW, so what’s the point of not trying to investigate That’s like saying minorities shouldn’t have complained when enough non-whites were getting admitted, because then they would purposely not admit people of color out of revenge.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Certainly, with their permission.</p>
<p>We just had a thread that wanted the Ivy’s and other elites to boycott Milburn HS because of hazing.Now we want an investigative reporter expose because some schools apparently are boycotted for unknown reasons.</p>
<p>Private schools have every right to boycott certain HS and favor others.</p>
<p>Thanks for the explanation. I guess our practically bankrupt school district can’t afford this. Our school tracks where kids go, but doesn’t track where they are admitted as closely which matters.</p>
<p>mimk6 - I would be curious to know how exactly does your school track where kids go?</p>
<p>I just attended a college/scholarship info night at our school. They do not have Naviance.
I asked if they know which top schools like our kids/ what are the admission stats of succesful applicants/ etc. I brought an example of MIT vs Caltch asking which one our students have more lack with. The answer from both GC present in a room was “Caltech hands down. The last time we had an MIT admit was 3 years ago”
But was it really? My son spoked to his physics teacher asking him if he was able to place his students at MIT. The prof. answer was that they sure get in but chose instead places like Princeton 
From reading the Robotics newspaper from our school I found out that last year the school had 2 ED admits to Caltech for the total of 3.
GC responded to my question that kids are very private and though they (GC) know which schools the kid is applying to, in the end they only know which school the kid matriculated to. They do not find out about rejections, apparently.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Private schools have every right to boycott certain HS and favor others.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<</p>
<p>Right, that why there isn’t a legal way to put pressure on them. They are private. </p>
<p>So, the one way Americans have traditionally been able to put pressure on the private-sector when some of their practices are questionable is to expose the unfairness thru the media and the ensuing public pressure. </p>
<p>The private sector is exempt from much gov’t interference, but they aren’t exempt from having the media or the public put pressure upon them when it’s exposed that a practice is unfair or unreasonable.</p>
<p>mom- their practice may be reasonable. They may feel the students from the school just do not add to the quality of the class they are trying to create.</p>