My daughter is entering her 2nd year at Lawrenceville, she entered as a repeat 10th grader from our LPS where she had a high GPA, mostly honors and AP classes. She wholeheartedly loves Lville. She is happy and grateful, and for the first time in her life engaged and not bored in the classroom. I see how hard she’s working, and I’m thrilled to see her put in the work and fight for a B+, rather than phone it in and still get an A at our LPS. Her GPA is good, but not the top of the charts she was used to (and I do not expect that). She won’t graduate with an arms-length of achievements at the top of her class like she likely would have from her LPS.
My question, which I am inarticulately asking, looking to the future, do College Admissions officers understand the differences and the rigor of schools when they are looking at applicants? Thank you!
Yes.
Do they understand and consider the difference? 100%. But many will say- and I think they’re probably right- when talking about an Ivy or other “top 20” school, a top decile public school kid will probably have a better chance than a 3rd decile prep school kid.
For me personally, going to public school fared better than private school in admissions. When I was at BS, I think I was around the 3-4th decile (so above average, but not special). I was capable of more, but I didn’t really care enough to be honest. At LPS, I breezed through in the top 10% (I still go to a pretty rigorous HS, it was honestly just as rigorous as BS, but slightly less competitive and had more academic support).
But I don’t think I would’ve gotten into my college if I stayed at BS.
My LPS is a little bit of a feeder-ish HS, so perhaps not the best comparison.
I do believe that at the next tier down from the tippy top, BS kids have an advantage. Those next tier schools (in my opinion) would take a 5th decile BS kid over a 3rd decile LPS kid.
It’s just a numbers game. At Lville, the guidance dept should be good enough that they should be able to tell you what # of kids with your kids stats get into their school of choice.
My experience agrees with the answer from @DadOfJerseyGirl. University admissions seems to understand the differences between different high schools, and adjust for it quite well.
A good fit is however important. Thus…
This is what matters IMHO (assuming affordability).
100% they do. And they do a good job of helping make good matches and writing recs that demonstrate that.
Also, AOs also know that not all kids with super high school records are super. It’s pretty easy to fall into the worry trap, but your kid couldn’t just as easier have been val at her HS and not had amazing application success.
Your D will be so prepared for college as well, in so many ways.
Sending reassurance your way!
Of course they understand the difference and AO’s at many schools will be familiar with Lawrenceville. That being said, just being a solid student at a top BS isn’t going to get you into a T20 - especially if you are not hooked in some way. Where BS excel is finding great fits for their students and they tend to get a lot of kids into schools in the T20-50 range.
The Ivy-plus universities are exceptionally difficult admits for unhooked boarding-school kids, even ones at the top of their class. (Probably the best chance among these universities would be U. Chicago, but that’s no certainty, either.) Unhooked below the top 10% or so have virtually no probability of acceptance. Also very little chance, even for the tippy-top kids, for the most prestigious Southern universities. I think it’s more likely to get into most of the Ivies than a Duke, for example, for boarding school kids.
However, recent admit rates for some “second 20” universities and of some of the nation’s most prestigious liberal arts colleges do seem to reflect an appreciation of the differences and rigors of select boarding schools like Lawrenceville.
They must, as I would suggest that is really the only way to completely explain those high schools’ such high placement rates in highly selective colleges. Sure there are more legacies, a skew to higher test scores, and so on. But that stuff alone would not do it, so those colleges must also be accounting for context and rigor.
That said, not everyone from such high schools is going to one of the most famous/selective private colleges, and I think a lot of the value can instead come from excellent placement in personalized alternatives. Like if you use them this way, the counseling staff can help you find great LACs that fit you like a glove, or fun public research universities strong in your areas of interest, or excellent private research universities outside of the most popular markets that may offer you merit, or so on. And I think their great placement continues in alternatives like that, so that is a lot of opportunities for a great result for any given individual kid.
Of course kids and parents who find places like this forum can get similar help really exploring the full range of available options. But I think a lot of kids/parents end up with very similar lists coming out of some high schools because they don’t have such counseling, they don’t find places like this, and their peers are basically in the same situation. And that works out OK (usually with a lot of good students going to their in-state publics), but I think in some cases some of those kids could have had more personalized alternatives that they simply never knew about.
As a final thought, I think sometimes people overlook the “prep” part of prep schools, meaning I think there is a lot of value in actually ending up really well prepared for college. It sure sounds to me like your daughter is on that path, doing the sorts of things that will help her be prepared to do the work and succeed in college. And that to me is so much more important than exactly where a kid goes to college.
Indeed, a lot of kids go from that 4.0 to fighting to be in the middle for the first time in college, and it doesn’t always go well at all. So I really think your daughter being seriously challenged before college is going to be great for her down the road.
This is the value of a prep school education, not any particular college result. Students who are well-prepared do well at whichever colleges they attend, and that is the goal.
They do, but note that prep school students are not being compared to students from your local HS (or any HS school they didn’t attend). They are evaluated within the context of their respective prep schools/pools, so they are only competing against their extremely well-prepared classmates, some of whom ARE earning those top grades. College admissions officers are not converting that prep school B+ to a public school A. Instead, they are considering how well the prep student did among their accomplished peers and how effectively they consumed the rarified resources offered by their school, which is why we warn here that if only a handful of highly selective colleges is any student’s goal, they may want to think very carefully about entering the highly-curated pool of high-achieving prep school students for any of those limited slots. Certainly, some students do attend those colleges but, in any given prep class, most don’t. If it appears that some of these preps are disproportionately represented at some colleges, it’s because the pool of students at the preps is already cherry-picked. No one should underestimate how difficult it is to end up at the top of this elite pile or how advantaged some of these students are to begin with.
On the other hand, if you look at the matriculation data for any prep school your student is interested in, you’ll find that every student ends up at a fine college where they are well-prepared to succeed. And that, as @NiceUnparticularMan noted above, is all that matters, so no worries.
Thank you 
I had the same questions as you.
My daughter’s high school uses Scoir. In Scoir, I can see the overall admit rate for a college and the admit rate to that college for my daughter’s high school. I can further see the test scores and GPAs of the people admitted and rejected by a particular college (not always–the college needs to have a certain minimum number of applicants for the data to show up).
You have to be careful. This data does not consider hooks, ECs, full pays, race, SES, essays, athletes or a number of other variables. It also may be plagued by “small N” problems. But you can draw some directional conclusions from it if your school has a lot of applicants to a particular school. Just be really careful.
For example, college X might have an average SAT score of 1300 and might admit 30% of the applicants to that school. If our high school’s admitted students have an average SAT of 1200 (below the college average) and 50% of them get admitted to this college (higher than the college average) and I can see that more than 20+ kids from our high school got accepted…I draw the “directional” (again, be careful) conclusion that this college perhaps likes our school. The reverse can hold true as well. I have seen schools were our admit rates were way lower than the college average and our accepted students had much better scores/GPAs than the school average.
In our case, the Scoir data show that our own state university system (California) doesn’t like our CA private school kids. We have much lower admit rates than the average and our accepted kids have much better stats than the average.
There are other instances where I have seen a college accepting A LOT of our kids and our kids had stats that were worse than the college’s average. Some schools in the Northeast seem to really treasure our students. Perhaps to add to geographic diversity or because many of them are full pay. But who knows?
I am sure that people will now come along, despite all of my caveats, and say that this is all bunk. But it is not. You just have to be aware of the limitations of the data.
If you want to look what the admission rates of “elite” boarding school would look like without legacies, donors, country club sports, etc, it’s best to compare them to public “exam schools” (magnet or college prep).
Boarding school may have a slight advantage, though, since their GCs are much more likely to have personal connections with AOs at “elite” private colleges.
You’re right about the relationships, but ime, they aren’t used they way most people think (which is lobbying for Jane’s admission.)
The CCs understand what the colleges’ priorities are, and help direct kids to where they’ll meet that. For example, if a school is building a new arts performing arts center and wants to make sure the programs to fill it are vibrant, the CC makes sure that the theater/music kids know. Or if they walk more kids who are interested in a certain discipline.
Often, it’s subtler – they may be looking for students who want to volunteer in the local community or who can be bridges between different groups within the school.
It’s a form of match-making that can be very effective.
I think it may a bit more. Not as much the GC giving a call, but more in the AO giving a bit more weight to the “this student is amazing” from the GC that they know, or other subtle nudges.
I also think that maybe regionalism affects admissions. There is a very high concentration of “elite” colleges and “elite” boarding schools in the NE, while public text schools are scattered across the country. An AO at Amherst or Dartmouth is much more likely to know the reputation of, say, Choatie, than of Jones or even Payton in Chicago. Most high schools like Choatie and colleges like Dartmouth are in the NE, while high schools like Payton are more scattered across the country.
Yes, I think the more selective colleges account for, and in fact value, applicants from high schools where there are a lot of very good students AND ways to discriminate among those students through a variety of more-rigorous-than-AP classes, imperfect grades even for excellent students, and so on. There was actually some discussion of this that came out of the recent discussions involving whether to go back to test required, and the bottom line is colleges get a lot more usable information about individual student academic qualifications from such high schools.
And private independent schools do not have a monopoly on that approach, but for a variety of reasons only certain public schools really compete in that space.
As for counselor contacts, my understanding is the “old” system of really close working relationships where slots basically got allocated based on school official nominations is largely dead. But I think that issue of information quality remains a live one. To be very blunt about it, a counselor promoting a student is only likely to matter if the college trusts that counselor to only do that when they really understand their college, and really have a good reason to think this individual is a great fit for that college’s needs. And that means counselors have to refrain from promoting students to various colleges when those are not the actual circumstances, or they will lose credibility.
So I do think that thing about counselors at certain high schools doing a good job steering students to colleges that might be great fits for them has a bit of an edge to it too. Like, they might not-so-subtly steer kids AWAY from colleges they don’t think are really looking for kids like them, and that may not always sit well with some kids, or perhaps even more so some parents. And while kids/parents can probably overrule that and apply anyway, I wouldn’t expect them to really get the sort of meaningful support they could get if they were working more hand in hand with their counselor.
Possibly true in the past, but less so now - this is the reason colleges have regional coverage.
But back to the OP - yes, her D’s achievements will be seen in context.
Using 2024 for the boarding school data to which I am privy, absolutely no advantage for admission to Dartmouth for unhooked applicants, no matter their grades or scores. For Amherst, kids who applied with top grades and scores had a good chance of admission.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Just out of interest - when you say “no advantage”, compared to who?
The OP wants to know whether attending a BS with grade deflation would put them at a disadvantage, so “no advantage” can easily translate to “disadvantage” if the AOs are looking at applicant’s GPAs without context of what I assume is grade deflation.
Again, BS students are only being compared to peer BS students–who are also under the same grade deflation. Regardless of that deflation, some students are still earning those As, so that B+ student is only “disadvantaged” against their A-earning BS peers. They aren’t disadvantaged against applicants they aren’t being compared to. Each of the colleges has readers by region and HS, and each of these readers knows how to evaluate each prep/boarding applicant within the context of their high school. Apples are not being compared to oranges.
But, colleges also know that the B+ students from rigorous boarding schools are well-prepared for college work and are good admissions bets as they’ve already lived away from home, dealt with roommates, completed highly rigorous course loads, learned how to study efficiently, handled their own travel, and know how to advocate for themselves and take advantage of help/school resources. They bring more to the community table than just grades/ability to do the work.
Perhaps this will help: The percentage accepted by Dartmouth from my kid’s “tippy-top” boarding school, which is quite rigorous academically, was no higher than Dartmouth’s overall acceptance rate.