Colleges "not knowing" a HS

bclintonk
Mon, 27 Jul 2015 18:19:47 +0000

I’ve heard many admissions officers for elite colleges talk about how they “know” the high schools in their assigned region. I’ve always thought this a somewhat preposterous claim. There are something like 30,000 high schools in the U.S. There’s no way they can really know more than a small fraction of them. What’s telling is that when admissions officers for elite colleges and universities come to our area, they all do their little dog-and-pony show at all of the most exclusive private high schools and at a handful of the wealthiest suburban schools. They generally don’t bother with urban schools except for an occasional foray specifically seeking out potential URM candidates. As best I can tell they spend little or no time in public schools in less affluent suburbs, or in small town and rural Minnesota. In some ways this is just efficient from their point of view; it’s the high-end private high schools and most affluent suburban public high schools that are going to have the largest concentrations of potentially qualified applicants, so they might as well invest their time and energy where it’s likely to yield the greatest rewards. So the admissions officers cultivate relationships with the GCs at those schools, and the GCs are only too happy to reciprocate because it gives the kids coming out of their schools an inside track over some random perfect GPA, 1550 SAT CR + M kid with great extracurriculars and impressive academic drive coming from some less distinguished school where such stats are more of a rarity and therefore the school rarely, if ever, sends its graduates to elite private colleges. It’s no wonder that half or more of the student bodies at most elite private colleges are full-pays, given where those colleges do their heaviest recruiting. Bottom line, I think when admissions officers say they “know the schools” in their region, they pretty much just mean they know and have relationships with the schools they consider to be the top feeder schools–elite private high schools and public schools in the most affluent suburban districts–and they relegate all the other schools (a far larger number) to a generic classification of “other.”