For my data I calculated concentrations only for the 20 colleges with the greatest number of matriculations
(which each accounted for 97-271 matriculations from the 10 high schools I tracked).
Concentration = Matriculations / UG enrollments.
This was for data collected/posted in 2014.
The following were the top 20 (for total matriculations) re-ranked by concentration (i.e. percentage of students from 10 top high schools in the UG populations):
4.2% … Wesleyan University, Yale
3.9% … University of Chicago
3.8% … Columbia University
3.3% … Harvard University
3.0% … Stanford University
2.9% … Brown University
2.7% … Princeton University
2.3% … University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth
2.1% … Tufts University
2.0% … Georgetown University
1.9% … Johns Hopkins University
1.8% … Cornell University
1.6% … Washington University
1.3% … Emory University
1.2% … Northwestern University, University of Southern California
1.0% … New York University
0.7% … University of Michigan
I did not record 2014 enrollment figures for other schools.
If I use recent undergraduate enrollment numbers posted to Wikipedia, then divide the 2014 matriculation numbers by these recent enrollment numbers, I see concentrations >= 2% for Williams (3.9%), Amherst, Scripps, Barnard, Swarthmore, Kenyon, Colgate, Middlebury, Pomona, Hamilton …
So I think LACs would have fairly dominated the T20 by “concentration” circa 2014.
I suspect that the concentrations of kids from elite private high schools continue to have a strong influence on the campus atmosphere at some of these colleges.
Oh, I see. I was comparing apples (concentration) in @merc81 's 2015 data to oranges (# of matriculants) in @CrewDad 's 2017 data. There wasn’t necessarily any huge shift away from LACs in enrollments.
One thing to keep in mind is that colleges themselves vary in the number of students to admit. For instance, Pomona only admitted 750 last year while Williams and Wellesley admitted 1250, Amherst 1200, Swarthmore and Bowdoin 1000, and Middlebury 1780. Other top LACs admitted more as well- Colby at 1770, Wesleyan at 2000, and Carleton/Hamilton at 1380. Such a gap means that Pomona will not have as high of a matriculation or schools represented among admitted students, but it doesn’t mean it is inherently less popular.
Furthermore, the LACs are conscious about geographic reach and representation, so I’m not sure if looking at individual schools is useful.
I thought the information above was based on enrollment, not admission. It’s true that Pomona is smaller than Williams; it enrolls fewer students. The difference in enrollment – Williams is about 18% bigger than Pomona – is considerably less than the difference in admissions – Williams apparently admitted 67% more applicants than Pomona. I doubt comparing enrollments between LACs disfavors smaller LACs that much.
Size differences explain why research universities dominate the figures for highest number of enrolled students from a particular high school, but not the figures for concentration. If a school averaged three students per year going to Harvard, and one to Pomona, Harvard would be high on the enrollments chart, and Pomona might not even make the chart some years. But the concentration of alumni at Pomona would be almost 70% greater than at Harvard.
Bethesda Magazine details where students apply and are admitted among numerous well-regarded schools in Maryland. You can search it to find the table; it’s called “Where Bethesda-Area High School Grads Applied to College”.
Amherst had 53 applications and admitted 7. Let’s say 3 matriculated.
Carleton had 32 applications and admitted 11. Let’s say 4 matriculated.
Colby had 50 applications and admitted 14. Let’s say 6 matriculated.
Pomona had 49 applications and admitted 3. Let’s say 1 matriculated.
Williams had 55 applications and admitted 7. Let’s say 3 matriculated.
If you presented me a listing of just where Bethesda-Area High School Grads matriculated, I would think Pomona was far less popular than the others. If you presented me a listing of where they were admitted, same thing. What brings it to position is the number of applications, which are relatively the same except for Carleton. The four LACs are thereby of comparable popularity among Bethesda-Area high school students in this one year.
Now, I don’t know the numbers for the elite prep schools. But if I had to guess, I’d think that Pomona was harder to get into than most other LACs per not only the super low acceptance rate but also the lack of the ED athletes/legacies that are admitted and enroll to the NESCACs. On paper, Pomona might only matriculate 4 in 5 years while Bates has 8, but Bates and Pomona could have the same number of applications (this is accounting for regional emphasis, too- Pomona got 9045 applications last year while Bates got 5316). So is Pomona two times less popular? Not exactly.
I’m not trying to position Pomona above all others, just trying to describe a complicating instance to think about. If you look at the most applied to LACs from the Bethesda link, Swarthmore is at the top with 78 applications. Of course, Pennsylvania borders Maryland, so there’s a regional tug. I would not be surprised if Williams and Amherst got 2 times as many applications or more from Exeter or Andover than does Pomona.
Makes sense. And regional ties play a larger role than that. Naviance indicates that at our school in California, it is quite a bit easier statistically to get into Pomona than into Amherst or Williams. That may be because we have more Pomona legacies? Hard to say.
Isn’t it kind of funny how they are all the best at one specific factor? And what’s stranger, Bowdoin is the toughest to be admitted to (7/108, 6.4% admitted) and has the highest SAT (1490), but it also has the lowest GPA at 4.38.
As I previously mentioned, looking at an individual school to figure out the larger picture is just flawed, especially when the context (race, legacy, recruited athlete) is unknown.
Not sure what the point of this thread is, but I always laughed at the Choaties who wouldn’t consider Wesleyan because they just considered it “Choate North.” One Parents Weekend we wanted to see the Wesleyan campus, but our son wouldn’t get out of the car because he didn’t want former classmates to see him there. Our kid was the outlier who chose a service academy over the usual suspects. Saved us a ton of money, but not sure about it being a “smart” decision.
Even those contexts ignore essays, recommendations, extracurriculars, etc. that can be important application attributes that are subjectively graded. But because they are not visible to outsiders (with respect to the college admission office), most people tend to assume that they are unimportant compared to things that are visible and comparable to others (GPA, rank, test scores, legacy, race/ethnicity, whether one is a recruited athlete).
The point (for me) was to describe the matriculation patterns of a particular population of HS students. These students have more money, higher scores, and presumably better GC advising than average. Their schools have more resources to support AP courses and extracurricular activities. So, this population of ~6K students would seem to have more freedom of choice (and be better informed) than average in selecting colleges. Which colleges (or what kind of colleges) do they seem to prefer? For me, data like this is a potential counterpoint to other opinion/preference driven inputs such as the USNWR “peer” and GC assessments.
Or, to switch perspectives, which colleges appear to have the highest concentrations of students from elite high schools? Many CC posters seem to be interested in whether a college is “preppy”, “snobby”, “elitist”, “intellectual” or “competitive”. I sometimes have a hard time understanding what people really mean by these terms. So here is one approach to defining and measuring demographic patterns that may have a bearing on some of those (or other) characteristics.
@ChoatieMom: I suspect that many boarding schools students consider LACs as a continuation of the boarding school experience albeit on a slightly larger scale.
Absolutely true. And that’s also why some shun them; they don’t want four more years of the boarding school experience. I just found the “Choate North” phenomenon funny.
There is a group of colleges that Choate CC used to refer to as “The Choate 16.” These are the colleges that, year after year, remain most popular with Choate students. They are all included in the lists posted here.
No, I have one BS student who matriculated to Berkeley (large public) and one BS student who matriculated to Pomona College, a small LAC. Neither student is experiencing college as a continuation of boarding school. The one that goes to a LAC wanted more immediate opportunities to do research with a college professor and without grad students saw a LAC as a welcoming opportunity. She also does an internship program during college and goes to work one day a week to gain real life work experience. From first hand experience with a student at a LAC who went to BS, the only thing that is similar is tight knit community of scholars.
Also, Pomona College is a bit of an exception since it is part of a multi-college consortium (plus the fact that it’s full of hardworking geniuses).
The Claremont College consortium is like Andover, Exeter, St. Paul’s, Choate & Miss Porter’s School grouping together with cross-enrollment privileges.
My experience – which is more with elite-type day schools – is that LACs are important there, too. And a big part of the appeal is that the scale and style resemble (or appear to resemble, or resemble more than the alternative) what has been successful for the students at their schools.
It’s also a demographic thing. Both my parents, and their siblings (except one) went to LACs. If you are basically in a community of affluent, highly educated, native-born white people in the Northeast, you know people you respect who have gone to LACs, and you understand that they are a serious option. At the urban public academic magnet from which my kids graduated, the guidance counselors (who tended to be older, white, Jewish) were constantly trying to convince kids to apply to LACs. With whom were they successful? Their children (all of whom went to LACs). And some percentage of relatively affluent, sophisticated, native-born white kids who were demographically similar to the kids in private schools who were also applying to LACs. Anyone else? Yeah, my son’s last high school girlfriend, a class behind him. Hispanic, low income, first in her family to go to college (including several older siblings). When I first met her, she assumed she would be going to a directional public if she didn’t get an appointment to a service academy. She wound up going to Haverford. There’s no question that a year of hanging out with my son and his friends had a ton to do with that.
Of my daughter’s ten closest private school friends (who had been her classmates for 5-10 years before she changed schools), six went to LACs: Carleton, Trinity, Pitzer, Smith, Oberlin, Reed. The equivalent number for my son would be five: Vassar, Wesleyan, Guilford, Kalamazoo, Bates. Half the children of our closest friends went to LACs: Wesleyan (x 3), Carleton, Amherst. Part of my daughter’s application strategy was to apply to an “LAC safety,” so that if she woke up one day in April and really wanted someplace smaller and more intimate for college, she would have someplace to go.
My kids chose LACs. After high school classes of 6-13 kids, they had no interest in a college academic experience of lecture halls filled with 100-400.
Families who choose a private day or boarding school often do so because they want to avoid large public school classes, want close relationships with teachers/professors, a sense of community, very personal academic and career advising and so on.
LACs are the college version of that, so it makes sense.
The consortium aspect of the 5Cs and Pomona College makes sense that it’s a much bigger school. My student did think that Williams was very similar to Choate’s campus.
@doschicos My kids just the opposite. After a suburban public school of 2300, anything that was even remotely that size was a huge turn off. 5000-6000 was as small as they were/are willing to go.