ninakatarinaRegistered UserPosts: 1,517Senior Member
I zoomed in as far as I could on the map in the report that @Mwfan1921 linked (thank you so much for those links). Luckily my town is one of the urban areas that's shown in slightly more detail. I suspect that the map the schools are working off of is even more detailed.
Neighborhoods are color-coded from red to dark green. My local area is a mix of orange, yellow, and very light green with a thin strip of 'rich folks' in a medium darker green. It's not quite street-by-street but it's close. My house appears to be either in the yellow or orange, our school is in the orange but our middle school is in the yellow. Which is somewhat ironic since our middle school has a terrible reputation but our high school is a magnet and somewhat decent if you're in the magnet/advanced program.
Magnets do distort the effect of base neighborhoods, as do scholarships at fancy private institutions. It looks like they have a bit of a nod to that. The tool dashboard has a neighborhood report and a high school report, so it would catch your full ride kid there, @Center
HS profile that accompanies transcript usually covers ACT and SAT ranges, demographics of HS community, etc., and admissions has access to that. So I imagine that fills in some holes.
^ Yes. I think what's new is the dashboard, the tool. This "environmental info" has been available a long time. Not just from the School Report. You can Google and find various sorts of demographics and assessments. Adcoms have not been guessing. CB probably got the data the same way.
Agree with @lookingforward that the information has been around and used by AOs for a while. As far as ACT scores go they are most likely using converted SAT scores if they only have ACT scores. Many if not most schools convert to SAT anyway so they readily have that converted data.
We live at the very edge of one zip code - literally one block over and the demographics are completely different. I'm sure it didn't hurt my D's chances even though in reality our residence is more in line with the demographics 1 block away.
I think local demographics work best with extremes. Many zip codes or local areas have, as a friend put it, "The wealthy neurosurgeon living next to the hourly wage earner. Some uber rich areas have diverse SES.
Replies to: New College Board tool helps admissions officers
Neighborhoods are color-coded from red to dark green. My local area is a mix of orange, yellow, and very light green with a thin strip of 'rich folks' in a medium darker green. It's not quite street-by-street but it's close. My house appears to be either in the yellow or orange, our school is in the orange but our middle school is in the yellow. Which is somewhat ironic since our middle school has a terrible reputation but our high school is a magnet and somewhat decent if you're in the magnet/advanced program.
Magnets do distort the effect of base neighborhoods, as do scholarships at fancy private institutions. It looks like they have a bit of a nod to that. The tool dashboard has a neighborhood report and a high school report, so it would catch your full ride kid there, @Center
I'd think it's a double plus. Andover is a plus and being from Newark, NJ would be another plus.
We live at the very edge of one zip code - literally one block over and the demographics are completely different. I'm sure it didn't hurt my D's chances even though in reality our residence is more in line with the demographics 1 block away.