I don’t think parents and students (at least on this forum) are “touchy” about it; I think they’re realistic about it.
For one thing, colleges obviously accept individuals rather than the schools that they attended.
As many people have observed over the years, an objectively excellent but “unhooked” (i.e., no obscene wealth or sports etc.) student may actually worsen his.her chances for admission to these top colleges by going to an elite boarding school because now they’re competing side-by-side with objectively excellent students who are hooked. And while colleges don’t admit students on the basis of their secondary schools, they sure do seem to cap the number of kids that they’re willing to take from them. They understandably don’t want to fill their entire class with Hotchkiss or Deerfield grads.
The second and probably more important point is that admission stats don’t tell you anything about one specific kid’s chances of admission.
The overall Yale admission rate is 3.9% based on their latest Common Data Set (https://oir.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale_cds_2024-25_rmd_20250612.pdf). But those same data reveal a substantial difference between the numbers of Men and Women applicants and acceptances. Men: 1136 accepted from 24951 applicants. Women: 1091 accepted from 32540 applicants. Acceptance rate for men is therefore 4.55% and 3.35% for women. Pretty big difference!
When I look at the proprietary data for the boarding school that my kids attend, the acceptance rate to Yale is much higher than the overall 3.9% rate and much higher than Yale’s prefer-males rate of 4.55%.
But does that much higher rate represent my unhooked children’s chance of admission?
Certainly not, because our school’s data will include applications and acceptances from a great many extremely hooked classmates. And indeed, when you look at the school-specific data for admissions you see that the general correlation between GPA/SAT and admission completely breaks down at the upper reaches, which tells us what sensible parents already knew: kids are being admitted and rejected on the basis of factors far beyond academics. And once you start digging into those other factors, you’re left concluding that Hotchkiss placing X more (or fewer) kids at H-Y-P than Deerfield does over a five-year period don’t mean nothin’.
And this is why parents on this forum (maybe myself included) seem a little “touchy” on the topic of boarding schools and elite college admissions. We know that the data, which are extremely limited and therefore prone to gross misinterpretation, don’t tell anywhere close to full story of who is or isn’t getting into Harvard, Yale and Princeton.