@Happytimes2001 Much of my ‘analysis’ was based on the original WSO post with even some of the wording copied. Never did I mention that any of these prep schools were ‘feeder schools’, the ‘pipeline’ analogy was just based on the most popular destination for matriculants.
Not sure how you got the idea I claimed that there were ever feeder schools for CalTech, all I stated was that CalTech does not appear on many matriculation lists.
@amNotarobot Many (incl. myself) maybe would have expected at least one prep school to send at least 5 kids to CalTech over a 5 year period, my inclusion of that point was to show that this was not the case. It wasn’t necessarily to compare NYU matriculation to CalTech matriculation. And I should have used ‘magnet’ instead of ‘target’ for NYU.
@Data10 Looking at the actual Deerfield matriculation list, Cornell receives more students than Harvard. Deerfield’s matriculation list does not reveal the actual numbers, but instead uses asterisks to denote whether 10 or 20 or 30 or more students enrol. Cornell had 3 asterisks compared to Harvard’s 2, so Cornell WAS the more popular destination for Deerfield students.
I have acknowledged the regional bias ‘problem’ influencing the results, but my analysis of results is intended for where most prep schoolers end up rather than specific prep schools and the ‘feeder school mentality’. If I had wanted to do so, I would have never aggregated my results! The ‘pipeline’ analogy was just some interesting trivia.
@CollegeRep18,
Of the nearly 6K matriculations I counted, CalTech got only 2.
Harvey Mudd got only 4;
Georgia Tech got 7.
I saw no matriculations to Cooper Union, Olin, or RIT.
More students (11) matriculated to the Rhode Island School of Design than to any of the above.
75 students matriculated to MIT (placing it 26th in total matriculations rank, right behind Barnard).
I saw only 1 LAC (Wesleyan) in the top 20 overall, but 16 in the #21-50 positions.
Only 4 state universities showed up in my top 50 (Michigan, Berkeley, Washington, and UCLA). Of these, only Michigan was in the top 20 for total matriculations.
5 of the 10 high schools I considered are in the northeast. For these 5 schools collectively, 9 of the top 10 matriculation targets were within the region (in the Northeast.) However, the other 5 high schools I looked at all had many T10 matriculations to out-of-region colleges. For example, only 2 of the T10 matriculations from Harvard-Westlake and from College Preparatory were to West Coast colleges. College Preparatory (Oakland, CA) had as many matriculations to NYU as to UCLA (and as many to Barnard, Wesleyan, or WashU as it did to Berkeley). Ransom-Everglades sent more students to George Washington than to the University of Florida.
So I don’t know, we may be seeing biases that are not entirely regional/distance biases per se.
A stronger bias may be for selective private institutions (or high-ranking institutions), many of which happen to be located in the NE.
@prepparent - not going to get into the debate about athletes here, but your comment that good students at Choate go to NYU and recruited athletes go to Yale makes no sense. Even a recruited athlete at Yale has to have stellar stats, better than students at most schools since they still have to complete the curriculum and graduate. Yale athletes are Rhodes Scholars, and many go on to med and law school - just like athletes at other colleges and universities. And no, I am not responding because my D is an athlete at Yale. Anyone who reads my posts know that she is far from being an athlete. But I guess she got the legacy boost so she is still on the list of students people think got a boost at admissions and kept someone else from “their” rightful spot.
It’s interesting Cal Tech takes kids from Choate, but the top Math-y people don’t necessarily want to go there. They prefer MIT and Harvard. Still, some kids end up there, but they’re not the top math people, and they are quirky in a non-Mathy kind of way in their own right. I loved Pasadena, and was a Chemistry major at Cornell. Looking back, had I known anything about Caltech, this would have been my first choice. Love the school and the campus.
Not to derail the thread, but I know a recruited Harvard athlete who is taking pre-calc as a senior at a private school - so the athletes don’t necessarily have stellar records.
What I have seen is rich families wanting their children to follow in their footsteps and be friends with other rich kids whom they marry and socialize with. They send them to schools with high tuition and no aid, and set them up so they can live the lifestyle that the parents have lived (and create the next generation of prep school kids).
So the bottom line is, “Really smart kids at expensive high schools with extremely competitive admissions processes go to expensive colleges with extremely competitive admissions processes”?
If you were to mine your list for the second or third tier colleges these schools send kids to it might be marginally useful, but finding out that Phillips Andover sends a ton of kids to Harvard or that Lawrenceville does the same with Princeton is neither particularly shocking nor useful.
NYU, being in the heart of the city and very expensive, attracts a lot of applications form these kids but if you look at the acceptance/matriculation data you’ll find that a much smaller percentage of kids accept an NYU offer than to many of the other top schools. What this may mean is that NYU really likes the top prep schools and has a history of accepting their good but not stellar students.
I know this is a bit harsh, but I’m not sure what the point of a list like this is. Sending your kid to Lawrenceville is not going to get them into Princeton.
“Not to derail the thread, but I know a recruited Harvard athlete who is taking pre-calc as a senior at a private school - so the athletes don’t necessarily have stellar records.”
Someone could have a stellar record and not be a math person. Not everyone is yet they excel in other areas. Someone could have come from a school system where they did not escalate students through math in middle school making pre-calc senior year very normal. When I was in high school, that was the norm for pretty much all kids. Bottomline, there are plenty of students at Ivies who aren’t going to meet the perfect grade/perfect test score model but might excel in some area or another. One I know wasn’t strong in math but was a world class debater.
^ That reminds me of an anecdote a friend of mine related about a b-school classmate at a top-30ish b-school who had gone to Princeton for undergrad. That guy was a terrific writer but had trouble understanding the basic concepts in the b-school Intro Stats class (which my friend, who is a statistics expert and who’s wife has 2 quantitative PhD’s, had trouble relating to). For group projects, my friend and other people would do the stats work then give the Princeton guy the results and conclusions and tell him to write up the report.
Wealthy families, like other families place emphasis on different things. Some spend lots of time making their kids gifted athletes ( making here is intentional since many place their kids in competitive programs beginning about the age of 5-8), others spend time doing extra math or science or what have you. Some spend Summers in France teaching their kids French. What you will find with wealthy parents is a plan. Most have them. The kids are not sitting on a beach. The kids are in specialized camps from an early age. These are also the parents who like prep schools. Maybe they went to one, or maybe they send their kids to one because they see the advantages. Parents roles in their kids eventual choice of college are formative. They start to push their kids in a particular direction. Some parents think being strong in one area is the way to go, others emphasize many EC’s. What is true is that no one can figure out the magic method to get their kid into the school they want. There is no magic wand. Never was. Today, it is even harder to figure out since there are so many talented kids in so many configurations. And there are more people who graduated from Ivies and other great schools ( or have graduate degrees from them). So there are more people who know what worked for them and think they can reuse it 25-30 years later. I would never try that. What worked in 198X, or 199X isn’t going to carry you in 2018.
Money can help in many respects. I know some folks hate that premise but it is true. If you can pay full tuition you are in a different category. Likewise, if you can afford and want to send your kids to expensive programs, boarding schools etc you will have advantages (in the near term and long term). That’s life. Sure many can do charter, magnet, and other free venues but they will be competing against kids whose path has been paved to make it easy for them. Not to mention parental help. When you live in a rich town, the kids know CEO’s, doctors, lawyers etc. They can easily get great internships, jobs and help. I have seen this first hand. Just look at the recreation department of a town with an average house price above a million. These jobs and opportunities in the neighborhood translate when it’s time to apply to college.
Having grown up with little, no one in my neighborhood volunteered for teams which reached great heights. No one went to MIT, or Caltech etc. No one owned a business. And the ones who did go far beyond were the exception. In my area, many kids do things on a national level. And they win big awards and get big successes at an early age. Why? They have money and money creates opportunity. So no, a boarding school is not going to get you into college. But a BS might be part of the overall package and world these kids live in and that will get them where they want to go with less work than someone else.
Yes, there will be some who get the bump into the best colleges through various factors. But really, the legacies and kids of the wealthy are still in the majority.
This is not universal. There is a difference between a kid who is the child of affluent professional parents (mom is a surgeon, dad is a litigator at a big law firm; they are both self-made) and the 4th or 5th generation scion of a wealthy family.
In the first case- indeed, there is a “plan” as you put it.
In the second case- well, you’d be surprised. Those kids are “gunning” for a set of colleges which are NOT on the “most competitive” lists; they are NOT working hard from the age of 5 to excel at a team sport (unless it’s tennis, sailing or squash, and not for an athletic scholarship but for personal and social enjoyment) and they most emphatically are not winning national awards for their STEM or chess prowess. And many of these kids ARE sitting on a beach every summer- an obscure town off the coast of Maine that most people have never heard of where Grandpa owns a cottage on a family compound.
You can’t paint all affluent people with the same brush, just as you can’t paint all middle class people with the same brush. I didn’t know "rich people " until I got to college. And then more of them in my adult life.
And that’s when you learn that (some) descendants of rich people DON’T want to go to Princeton to work their tail off. And they DON’T want to compete in Siemens or Chopin. Many of them go to perfectly respectable but academically mediocre boarding schools or day schools and then on to perfectly respectable but academically mediocre colleges.
Happytimes- the money only helps if your kid has the goods. Some do. Many don’t. All the money in the world is not going to transform a wealthy slacker teenager who likes to hang out at the club all summer into a go-getter who is inventing a screening device for colon cancer in his spare time.
“Even a recruited athlete at Yale has to have stellar stats, better than students at most schools since they still have to complete the curriculum and graduate.”
Sorry, not true. In fact, Naviance at my kids NOT top prep school shows that the only students getting into top 10 schools are kids with mediocre GPAs and test scores (hooked athletes). For the past few years, I know who the kids are. We see them at the signing ceremonies. Then we see their green ED checks in Naviance the next year.
As a matter of fact, I now totally get why prep schools are so athletic focused. The only kids making it into tippity top schools are top athletes.
The rank and file good students (unhooked) at our prep school go to Tufts, NYU, Trinity, Middlebury, Northeastern, BU.
In the case I mentioned, the kid was recruited at the start of freshman year for a spring sport not having either gotten a single high school grade or played a single minute of the high school sport. The student is not in the top of the school’s class in any respect (I don’t think even made it into the honor society) - the pre calc was just used as an example of not having the stats expected for an ivy.
Ivies do not do signing ceremonies but the ivy recruits are typically included with the non-ivies on signing days for the high school recognition ceremony.
I assumed she meant the signing ceremony at the HS, many of which include students who are not actually signing an NLI…
I will further go on to say, as I have said in the past, that the plural of anecdote is not data. I’m sure there is an athletic recruit or two who was accepted to Yale (or substitute the name of another college) with less than stellar stats, but I personally am of the belief that Yale would admit no student whom they did not feel would succeed academically at the school.
From my experience (not my own), kid’s from rich families have their own problems and issues. Parental love and right values are the most important legacies you can give to your kids.
Just so we’re clear on concept, a student may have caught a coach’s eye that early, and the coach may have said the s/he wanted him/her if s/he had the grades/stats, but make no mistake - s/he was not offered a spot at that point. The only person who can offer admissions to an Ivy League university is an AO, and they will not be doing so in freshman year regardless of what the kid/parent/neighbor thinks.