@skieurope, “succeeding” at any elite American college (outside of the tech institutes) isn’t terribly challenging, honestly, so long as you’re allowed to change majors and you have a fairly liberal definition of what “succeeding” means (and work hard, of course). These schools aren’t Oxbridge (or Caltech).
Probably every kid who’s in the top 10% of American HS grads can graduate from any non-tech Ivy/equivalent if they work hard enough.
@Happytimes2001:
“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.”
The first may not be bad and the second may not be good. What’s most valued on a Street is a bright kid who also has street-smarts and went to a good school. They would rather take a kid who is a streetfighter and isn’t even all that bright over a kid who has all the talents in the world but lacks a backbone.
The first has a chance of making it. They may not, but there’s a chance. The second has zero odds of making it.
Actually, I had a short conversation with someone at Caltech that indicated they do have schools they view as feeders. But, the school is so small that they are thinking 1-3 students/year.
At a parent reception last fall we happened to be talking with someone who works in alumni development ($ that is). She said she didn’t participate in admissions, but followed who was attending and from where. It’s only 235 students per year, so not that much to follow. (Faculty participate in undergrad admissions decisions at Caltech, and alumni are still salty that they stopped having undergrads in on the admissions panel within the last decade.)
She asked where we were from, and said “Yes, we only have 1 from that school this year, 0 the year before (don’t know why), but 3 the year before that, and 1 before that.” (She didn’t know that all of those students were in the same math circle, which probably has about a 33% admit rate to Caltech.)
We asked what types of schools had more. She mentioned Gunn, Mission San Jose (in Fremont), “other schools in Silicon Valley,” TJ, and “other big STEM magnet schools.” She didn’t mention any prep schools, though I suppose Harker might be one.
Perhaps there is less focus by the scions of wealth on studying what is commonly seen as a more employable major? After all, if one has a parental safety net, or connections that will ensure a job regardless of major, the need to be able to find a job immediately after graduation is not the priority it is for those from lower and middle income families.
Plenty of wealthy boarding school students study “employable majors”. CS, econ, engineering are among the most popular. You just don’t need to go to GA or CA to do it. Plenty of highly ranked schools in the northeast churn out very employable grads in those majors. I wouldn’t be surprised if schools like Cal Tech are on some students lists but my guess is it isn’t their first choice. A lot of the kids I know from boarding schools who excel in STEM are very well rounded/multi-faceted and often seem to look for schools that can fit different sides of their personalities. I know CS students who double majored in things like Philosophy, History, and English. I don’t think they were seeking out tech schools as their preferred choices.
Wealthy kids can be very driven as well. Many were raised to be competitive.
@PurpleTitan Wholeheartedly agree. A hard worker who is street savvy is the way to go. When hiring it’s tough to get someone under 25 with the right attitude and work ethic. Everyone has a degree but how many are coachable and hard working. I do believe that some of the difficult HS put the work ethic in kids when they are very young so it carries thru college. BS and magnets might also give kids that competitive spirit ( not all bad) so they want to work hard and do well. That translates into life.
I also agree with DosChicos, wealthy kids are often raised to be very competitive (even when they are lagging, parents tell them they did great). Some become very competitive as it takes a certain level of competition in life to make a lot of money ( outside a trust fund that is)
I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned, but not all prep school students are rich (also not all prep school students are smart, although luckily there is some overlap between the two groups). There are certainly a lot of factors that come into play in college admissions - many of them hidden - and good reason for cynicism about the process, but despite all that, the smart-but-not-rich prep school students (even those who are not legacies or great athletes) do just fine in college admissions (although they are not the kids going to NYU).
Anecdata here: I definitely know some smart but not (that) rich kids who went to NYU, and one very smart, completely penniless kid – orphan, kicked around the foster system for years, ultimately living in a group home – to whom NYU offered a meaningfully better financial deal than Columbia, and he took it. (This was back before the Ivies went loan-free for low-income students.)
You might try to get some more geographical dispersion of schools, including some more elite day schools, especially in the Midwest. How about John Burroughs (St. Louis), Blake (Minneapolis), St. Mark’s (Dallas), Lab School (Chicago), Cranbrook (Detroit)? I don’t know enough about schools in the South or Southwest. I bet there are some great schools in or around Chapel Hill, Atlanta, Phoenix, Tulsa.
And for that matter, how about going south of Princeton on the Amtrak Corridor? Sidwell Friends and Georgetown (DC), St. Andrews and Tower School (DE), Haverford, Baldwin, Germantown Friends (Philadelphia).
I am a little bit surprised at the low percentage of kids going to LACs at the schools you looked at. The equivalent schools around here with which I am most familiar, at least when I was paying more attention, sent about 25% of each class to top-20 (or so) LACs. On my block, which is not a large block, there were four kids who went to Wesleyan, and others who went to Carleton, Barnard, Lafayette, Goucher, Colby, Rollins. The private school with which I was most familiar had kids who were arguably the top in their class go to Wesleyan and Amherst ED, while others went to HYPS, etc.
Blair wanted Yale but settled for NYU. Serena attended Columbia then transfers to Yale. Nate goes to Columbia. Scholarship student Dan gets into Yale but attends NYU for money reasons. Bad boy Chuck went to Deep Springs.
Gossip Girl has this handled.
^ Best post.
^ I agree…and totally forgot Chuck went to Deep Springs.
(Georgina went to NYU too but probably just to stalk Blair, and so did Vanessa…i think they kept as many of them as possible in NYC to keep the show going)
LOL, I actually thought about applying to Deep Springs back in the day.
The OP reported that from the set of high schools s/he tracked, 22% went to LACs. I assume that was to any LAC. However, it may be the case that your top ~20 do account for many among the OP’s 22%.
My own counts show few schools accounting for many matriculations and many schools each receiving few matriculations (a Pareto distribution).
I haven’t counted the number of LAC matriculations as a percentage of all ~6K matriculations I tracked. However, among the top 100 matriculation target schools, the number of LAC target schools (41) nearly equaled the number of private research universities (42). The remaining target schools among the T100 included 12 state universities and a few foreign or uncategorized institutions.
The target schools with the top 100 matriculation numbers accounted for 5752 of the 5926 matriculations I counted. Among just those matriculations, 1261 matriculations were to LACs. That’s ~22%, same as @CollegeRep18 found. The LACs that got the greatest number of matriculations (Wesleyan, Williams, Barnard, Colgate, Amherst, Middlebury … ) tend to be among USNWR’s highest-ranked LACs.
Among the same T100 schools, the 8 Ivies accounted for 28% of the 5752 matriculations. If I add matriculations to Stanford, Duke, Chicago and MIT to the 8 Ivies, I account for 38% of those 5752 matriculations – the same percentage @CollegeRep18 found.
Suppose I remove matriculations to the T20 target schools (which only include 1 LAC, Wesleyan), and count matriculations to the #21-100 target schools. Of those matriculations, about 1/2 go to LACs.
Despite their large size, state universities account for only about 8% of matriculations to the T100 target schools I tracked (464 of 5747 matriculations).
@tk21769 yes, you’re right! My updated list has about ~7800 matriculants from 16 schools.
The top 10 most popular LACs (receiving about 1700 matriculant - 22%) I analyzed were:
Middlebury College
Bowdoin College
Williams College
Trinity College
Wesleyan University
Amherst College
Colby College
Colgate College
Bates College
Barnard College
The top 10 most popular public colleges (receiving about 760 matriculants - 10%) were:
University of Michigan
University of Virginia
University of California, Berkeley
University of St Andrews (UK)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
McGill University (Canada)
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
University of Connecticut
University of Oxford (UK)
The top 10 most popular ‘other’ private colleges (receiving about 2300 matriculants - 30%) were:
New York University
Georgetown University
University of Southern California
Boston College
Tufts University
Washington University in St. Louis
Northwestern University
Carnegie Mellon University
Boston University
George Washingon University
A top prep school in NJ (typically in top 3, not Catholic) sends a lot of kids to these schools in addition to your IVY’s:
UMichigan (Better in Engineering and Business than some IVY’s or other schools with <10% acceptance rate)
Notre Dame
College of William and Mary
Georgetown
Tufts
Ooops, sorry. I got mixed up and thought the 10% was LACs, not public universities.
I would say that the list of LACs is very familiar from my world, but a list of the most popular would also include Swarthmore, Haverford, Oberlin, Pomona, Carleton, Reed, Vassar, Smith. And then a whole bunch of colleges in the next tier of popularity: PA (Lafayette, Dickinson, F&M, Ursinus, Bucknell), NY (Hamilton, Union, Hobart), OH (Kenyon, Denison), WI (Lawrence, Beloit), MN (Macalaster, St. Olaf), CA (the rest of the Claremont Colleges), various places in the shallow South (Davidson, Roanoke, Rhodes), and of course other women’s colleges (Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr) and former women’s colleges (Goucher, Connecticut College).
This was calculated a couple of years ago and is based on the concentration of representation for Forbes’ #1 ranked Trinity School (minimum 5 TS matriculants, 2011-2015):
More recently (2013- 2017) 10 or more Trinity students matriculated at:
1.Brown
2.Colgate
3. Columbia
4.Cornell
5. Dartmouth
6. Duke
7. Emory
8. Harvard
9. NYU
10.Northwestern
11.Princeton
12.Stanford
13 University of Chicago
14.University of Pennsylvania
15.Yale
It’s noteworthy that Colgate is the only LAC that has 10 or more matriculants.
https://www.trinityschoolnyc.org/page/our-program/college-counseling/trinity-school-matriculation
That’s really an amazing shift away from LACs over the course of only 7 years! In the '11-'15 period, 8 of the top 15 destinations were LACs, including ##1, 3, 7 & 8. But over '13-'17, only one. They must have sent a ton of kids to LACs in 2011 and 2012. NYU, Northwestern, and Cornell seem to have sucked up a lot of the difference. It’s stunning to think that Trinity isn’t averaging 2 kids per year at Amherst, Wesleyan, Bowdoin anymore.