<p>Please tell me how my school will affect admissions:
We have not had a kid go to a top 15 school since the 1980’s
Average Class Size of 200 (parochial school)
Average ACT score for top 25% of class is 28.6 (Pretty good, right?)
97% to 4 year college (average is what, 90% 95%?)</p>
<p>We’re not a ‘dumb’ school it’s just that no one considers top 15 schools, it’s just not something that happens.</p>
<p>Will I be looked on as having an easy school because no one applies, or will it be an asset. (I’m guessing they keep files on schools since GPA and class rank is relative.)</p>
<p>Being from the Detroit area and now currently recruiting on behalf of my Ivy alma mater, I’d say the drawback may be that adcoms may not be familiar with the strengths of your school. However, if your app file is strong enough, it shouldn’t matter. In the Detroit area, there are several schools that are traditional sources for applications to my college. I would say the advantage for my school is that they know the offerings of these schools and can evaluate with great confidence the strengths (and weaknesses) of applicants from these. Downside is you can’t hide or fluff stuff if you attend one of these (think Cranbrook, DCD, Renaissance, AA Pioneeer, AA Huron, UD Jesuit, Andover, Troy, Seaholm, Cass, etc.).</p>
<p>However your school’s 97% college attendance rate is fantastic given that the state’s graduation rate is about 70%. No way near 90% go to four year colleges for the vast majority of high schools, 1MX. You have it good.</p>
<p>My school is somewhat similar in that it offers academic strength(at least the top 25%, heavily tiered, bottom 25% are worthless, but a very strong upper group), but nearly everyone goes to MSU or UM. Maybe 2 people apply to Northwestern each year, one will get in, but go to UM. No one even looks at Ivies, even when they are 32+ ACT, top 3%, tons of 5’s on AP’s, great EC’s.</p>
<p>“that’s exactly how we are. We had a kid who had a 36, 4,0, and 8 5’s a few years ago. He didn’t even apply to a top 10 school.”</p>
<p>Which is 100% fine. The valedictorian of my graduating class at Renaissance was a 4.0 uber-genius – I don’t even want to hazard a guess at her scores. Frankly her intellectual skill was just levels beyond the rest of us mortals. She was very content to take a full scholarship at Wayne State. And the earth didn’t split apart… LOL</p>
<p>To be frank, the Eastern schools might as well be on Venus for the majority of kids. I felt the same way until one of my classmates (who went to Williams) suggested I look into applying to Brown. Once I opened my eyes, then I got interested in other East Coast schools. Sheer chance really for me. No one in my family suggested that I go Ivy. I was U-M bound as well.</p>
<p>My son’s roommate at Dartmouth came from a working class suburb of Detroit. When he would say that he went to college at Dartmouth, home folks would act puzzled. He tried to clear up the confusion by saying that Dartmouth was “the Michigan of the East”!</p>
<p>I’m in a similar situation about the whole MSU / U of M thing. Most of the students at my school (small public outside of Ann Arbor) just go to MSU, U of M, one of the other state schools, in-state liberal arts colleges (like Alma or Grand Valley) or perhaps other big-10 schools. We actually got two people into Harvard this past year, but they were the first ever to get accepted there from my school I think. And I guess some people go out of state, of course, but most of the seniors that I heard talking about colleges last year just mentioned in-state schools.</p>
<p>Does it help at all if previous valedictorians DID go to Ivy League schools? Do adcoms look at previous students when they look at your application?</p>
<p>^A lot of this is probably unique to Michigan or for that matter California, Michigan, Virginia, and North Carolina. States whose State Us are so good that there’s not really any reason to go out of state. </p>
<p>For a middle class family, staying in state probably at an honors college where your education costs will be half to one quarter of what they would be at an Ivy is really a no brainer.</p>
<p>Ya, michiganders are spoiled having UMICH as the safety school for anyone applying to ivies. My brother goes to UMICH, and it actually costs my family 10k more a year at UMICH than if I was accepted to an ivy (based on need-based aid estimates)</p>