<p>YoHoYoHo- It may also be that certain schools attract kids who like a certain type of environment. It would be interesting to know where the top kids at the 1-3 percent schools sent their top students. If it’s LAC’s like Williams, Amherst, Pomona and Swarthmore it may well be that these students are choosing smaller schools over large universities. I think when parents look at private schools they sometimes make the mistake of looking only at Ivy matriculations. </p>
<p>On the flip side I do think some schools are known quantities to specific colleges. My son attends a small, slightly quirky prep school and it was fascinating to look at the school’s Naviance results. It was clear to me that some schools “get” the school while others do not. Kids were getting overwhelmingly rejected from certain schools while at the same time getting accepted to other schools with much lower acceptance rates and higher overall admissions stats. By that I mean that a kid in the 75th-100th percentile of stats from his school was rarely admitted to school A while that same kid could consider school B, where his stats fell into the 25th-50th percentile range, a safety.</p>
<p>We also had two different college admissions officers comment to our family that they “love kids from [son’s school].” These were schools that had a similar ethos to his secondary school.</p>
<p>This is a great site for information on which private schools are sending their students to the toughest to get into colleges.
[Matriculation</a> Stats](<a href=“http://matriculationstats.org/]Matriculation”>http://matriculationstats.org/)
It was put together by a member of our own CC community a few years ago. The info. is from 2011 but still current enough to be quite useful. What I like about it is that it lists not only the Ivy+ schools, but the full selection of what are deemed to be “strong schools” and uses a weighting system to indicate which secondary schools are most successful in college admissions.</p>