Where do student who are average in their class (around the 50th percentile) at very prestigious boarding schools (like Andover or Lawrenceville) get into college (assuming they have no hooks)? Assume these students also score 1450 on the SAT (the average SAT at these schools) and and have an average amount (and quality) of extracurriculars compared to their classmates.
If you attend such a school, it likely has dedicated college counselors who can tell you (and will encourage you to apply to such colleges).
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For some perspective on this, you can view college matriculation information, such as that for Lawrenceville, Groton, Hotchkiss and St. Andrew’s:
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They get into excellent schools!! There’s no way to give you a more specific answer.
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One of the benefits of attending a school with a price tag of $76K is that it has a low counselor: student ratio. They are the best resources for creating an appropriate college list for you. Where others got accepted to is immaterial
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This is an anecdote of one but S22’s good friend attended Andover, was at the 50% (at best) and is attending the University of Rochester. Regardless of what school you attend - public or private - the college counselors (or GCs) at your school will have the best sense of where kids are being accepted. Even then, every student is unique and there are no specific guarantees of admission to any school.
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Our private HS is what I would call feederish, which means it is not as nationally famous as those high schools but it is well-known regionally and does a demonstrably good job at college placement.
Understanding that people will have their own personal preferences, the reported results indicate our median students are usually going to a college which would be ranked by US News (at least until this last evolution) as a top 50 national university or LAC, but not a top 25 (it is usually more like 30% of our class, give or take depending on the strength of that class, that goes to top 25 universities or LACs). I’m using 25 and 50 not for any reason of my own, it is just one of the summary statistics we get from the HS that happens to be useful.
Anecdotally, I think this range for our unhooked kids usually includes a lot of popular public universities (a lot of OOS Big 10, for example, minus Michigan which is going to be a tougher get at least OOS).
Possibly some privates and LACs too, but this gets complicated because some students who are probably a bit more competitive than the median also want to go to, say, Boston U, Tulane, Case Western, Denison, or so on. And it is further complicated by the fact we have recruited athletes, not so much for the big publics but more for the privates.
But if I was naming privates I think are at least somewhat more concentrated among our more median students, I would suggest maybe Lehigh, RPI, Villanova, Dickinson, Rhodes . . . something like that.
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Some end up at tippy tops - because they are athletic recruits of major donor legacies.
Many end up a selective LACs (most NESCACs, for example) and many choose schools for specific attributes/programs. Many kids are tired of the small community and head for the honors colleges at their state flagships or urban schools like BU or NYU.
In our experience, the CCs at BS did a great job of helping kids find excellent matches. Iirc, of the 155 kids in DS class, they matriculated at 125 schools. Harvard, Bard, Reed, Penn, Swat, U Rochester, Syracuse, Pitt, CMU, USC, BU, NYU, Tufts, Wake Forest, Bucknell, Rutgers, Haverford, Columbia, Smith, Kenyon… look at the lists above and you’ll see an enormous range - something for everyone!
If you are worried about this as an applicant, I would suggest that many kids who think they would be val at their LPS and that that would get them into Harvard have a good chance of being wrong. You’ll never know, of course, but lots of vals do not get into uber-selective schools.
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Thankfully my family is paying quite a bit less than 76k
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At my school, Lawrenceville, an actual median student would go somewhere like NYU most often. Georgetown also accepted everyone with above a 3.8, which is about top 35% or so (I mean everyone; the scattergram is exclusively green).
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This indicates especially common acceptances for St. Paul’s students:
ED to Colgate, NYU, Wash U, Kenyon, Colby, Bates…
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My son was a Lawrenceville grad (class of 2018). Obviously I don’t know the rankings of each of his classmates. But the most common colleges that students matriculated to were: Georgetown, Princeton, Cornell, NYU, UPenn, Brown and UChicago. Farther down the list, there are colleges like: University of Oklahoma, Sante Fe College, Penn State.
As you can guess, graduating at the middle of the class at a competitive boarding school is not a great place to be for college admissions purposes. The top colleges like to accept top students. They generally don’t give extra weight to attending a boarding school (unless you have some other hook like legacy, athlete, etc).
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The data supplied above for the college admissions results does not support this statement.
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Indeed, it is likely that middle layer of students that benefits the most from attending competitive boarding schools or top urban day schools.
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OP: I doubt that you would believe me if I shared my knowledge in this area.
The more important observation would be why were median and below median students accepted by such elite colleges and universities. Typical reasons were/are URM status, recruited athlete, & legacy status.
Some elite prep boarding schools consistently deliver more impressive results than others. Some schools (for example, Lawrenceville/Princeton & Milton Academy/Harvard) have close relationships with certain schools for various reasons (one being that faculty children of those elite universities attend due to proximity).
Pre-covid, some elite boarding schools tended to over perform regarding college placement (Andover, Groton, & St. Paul’s for example) while Exeter appeared to under-perform (and I have nothing against Exeter–in fact, it is my favorite regarding location).
By actual figures, Milton sent 9 graduates to Harvard this year, second only to Georgetown (12).
And for the classes of 2021-2023, Milton sent 25 to Harvard second only to 27 to Georgetown. University of Chicago was third with 14 Milton students matriculating. (However, none of these are pre-Covid figures.)
I’ll assume we’re done parsing Milton’s matriculation data, particularly since AFAIK, Milton does not attach GPA deciles to their Harvard/GTown matriculations
Is your friend happy or disappointed that after attending Andover…the person matriculated at UR?