Valedictorian last year went to Yale (chose it over MIT & Princeton), salutatorian went to Tufts. The year before the valedictorian went to Boston College, and the salutatorian went to Bowdoin College. Both valedictorians were wait-listed at Harvard.
upenn with a pretty hefty scholarship
Notre Dame
the local high schools here have many valedictorians since a ton of them have 4.0s. So I don’t know how meaningful where they went to college is, here are some:
Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA
MIT, Cal Tech, Chicago, Northwestern, Pittsburgh
Columbia, Penn, Harvard, Cornell
Pomona (maybe the only LAC)
Rice
First wait-listed at Harvard and matriculated at Georgetown. In early August, got the call from the former. After
graduating summa went to Hopkins Med and is a pediatrics professor at a top 10.
We didn’t have class rank or weighted GPA but there were 18 kids with 4.0s in my class; most went to UW-Madison or UM-Twin Cities, with one at UChicago. Lots of them applied to elite schools and were rejected (a 4.0, National Merit Scholar, and Presidential Scholar was rejected from Stanford, MIT, and Caltech and ended up at UW-Madison)
UT Austin…Texas pride is strong most top kids go to UT or TAMU with occasional outliers.
Clemson
West Point
CO 2017 went to the honors college @ Arizona State University
I moved over the summer into my senior year, so the valedictorian of my old school is going to Harvard (ED) and the one at my new school is going to Cornell (also ED).
School doesn’t name valedictorian/salutatorian but the girl who would be valedictorian had her entire transcript (which includes class rank) posted to Facebook by her mom and she’s going to UMN-TC, which is one of the more popular colleges at my school. I know of a girl who is probably close to the top of the class who got into West Point but she said she applied on a whim and isn’t sure if she’s going. Lots of ED apps to St Olaf this year too. Generally speaking the people that go off the beaten path of the state schools and local privates are ranked between 40 and 15 out of 300 because they sacrificed some study time for extracurriculars although last year the girl who was most likely val went to Vanderbilt.
We had multiple valedictorians, I remember the a couple each going to Umich, Berkeley, UCLA, Notre Dame.
my school had multiple valedictorians. most chose to either attend our state flagship (some in the honors program) or go to community college for free for two years (while getting paid to go) then transfer to our state flagship. i decided to take a gap year and am attending grinnell in the fall.
i blame the lack of kids going to top schools from my school on the lack of resources/guidance my school has/had. had it not been for this site, i would never have known going out of state for school was even a logical possibility. it’s, unfortunately, left up to us (the students) to figure out everything if we don’t want to attend community college or our state university. however, there have been some instances of kids being accepted to some very good universities. the year before i graduated, a girl was accepted to northwestern (rightfully so; she was incredibly intelligent and very accomplished). the year before her, a boy was accepted to uofmichigan. a few of years before him, a girl was accepted to nyu on a full ride. those are the only people of whom i know who have gone on to “good” schools though.
Or maybe, just maybe, you come from an area where prestigiosity isn’t really an important thing? I live in an area where, aside from a couple neighborhoods that seem to have imported a love of conspicuous status-marking from other places, there isn’t really the striving for prestige in college admissions you see so frequently on CC. As for myself, I find this healthy.
Really, given the strength of the US higher-ed sector, nearly anything that’s not for-profit, unaccredited, or in possible danger of losing accreditation is a “good” college.
Cornell
Long time ago, but Georgetown (out of a small prep school in PA).
But we had a few Ivies, too…Brown, Penn, Princeton…and schools like Wesleyan, Haverford, Wash U.
Highly selective NYC public. Does not have a valedictorian, does not calculate GPA, gives an award at graduation to the student with the highest GPA - go figure. 2014 Yale, 2015 Yale. Out of senior class that typically numbers around 180, about 60 go to Ivy+M+S
She got into Harvard and Columbia. She is going to Harvard