Counselor talks to Admission Officer

mathmom
Thu, 07 Oct 2010 09:46:01 +0000

Pizzagirl, our high school fell off the Best High School list a couple of years ago (and were near the bottom when we were on it.) Every year at least the top 25 students (and probably more, but those are the ones whose college choices are announced in public) get into HYPSMC and the top LACs. Plenty of kids like my son’s best fried who got into Harvard as a legacy and Yale where he was not a legacy. He was a great kid - #3 in the class, active in theater but not a star, played bass in the orchestra, headed a rock band that wrote its own music. But he didn’t have national awards or anything like that. There are still feeder schools for sure, but there are plenty of slots for kids from schools no one has heard of. That said top colleges have missed better kids for years - admissions is an imperfect art - sometimes from public high schools, but sometimes from the private schools too.

My nephew went to one of the top schools in the country and his mother felt that in many ways it was a disadvantage. He would likely have been a star at a public school, but he was a runner up there. The story has a happy ending though. He went to Rice (which turned out to be a far better school than he realized) for undergraduate, did spectacularly (including being an author on what dh described as “the paper of the century”) there and was accepted at every PhD. program he applied to.