In the case of a selective college that admits one or two students from a particular high school, does the performance of those students in any way affect how that high school is viewed by the college? In other words does the admission committee monitor the GPA of the admitted students when determining subsequent applications from the high school.
Anecdotal evidence suggests this might happen, but wondering if anyone knows of harder evidence.
There are anecdotal claims that if a student from the high school backs out of an ED admission, the college may hold a silent grudge against the high school and automatically silently reject future applicants.
But such claims are based on anecdotal observations from the outside; there have been no confirmations or denials of such practice from any college.
I’ve never heard that an accepted students’ performance is tracked by admission!
Backing out of ED - yes. Tons of students applying, being accepted, and no one matriculating - yes.
I have. Perhaps not a formal review. But do I know this to be the case? No. They are merely anecdotes, so take it for what it is.
During an interview with the regional AO at the LAC that my daughter ended up going to, the AO told her “We know your high school school and we know that kids who come here from there tend to do well here.” She went to a small, good (but not particularly rigorous or competitive) private school in an urban area. So, anecdotally, there may be some informal tracking going on, perhaps in particular with smaller schools where the AOs have time to get to know high schools.
I would not be surprised if bigger universities (particularly state universities) tracked aggregate data regarding enrolled students’ performance and outcomes in college by high school (or prior college for transfers), although it may be for other purposes besides admissions.
When my D visited Harvard spring of junior year, we sat in Agassiz Theater in the admissions building along with probably 100 other families. When we were flipping through the admissions brochure, we noticed that a girl from our high school (large public HS in suburbs in NE) who had graduated a few years earlier was one of the profiled students in the brochure. Obviously, we have no idea if Harvard tracked the progress of admitted students from our high school but we assumed that Harvard at least had a favorable impression of this particular student and hopefully of our high school in general. Fast forward 2 years later and my D was accepted SCEA and is now a freshman at Harvard.
Way back in the dark ages I helped out in the admissions department at the University of Georgia, and they tracked avg GPA and matriculation percentage for all of the high schools in the state. I’m sure they track a lot more now.
What a school like Harvard tracks and how they weight it is different though. They probably don’t have enough admits from most high schools to tease out anything of value.
They may be looking at the various admission factors and ratings compared to how the students did in college to see how far they can dip in the ratings for admission applicants in the various preference categories without risking graduation rates, for example.
I stand corrected! I love how much I learn from this site!
This comes under the purview of the admissions counselor assigned to your school. In certain cases, if someone in Admissions knows your school, it can help. Most good HS college counselors will have relationships with their counterparts at popular colleges, and most HSs seem to have a core group of colleges that accept a good number of their students year after year. If you’re talking about 1-2 students over three or more years, your school will have a track record with admissions. If kids from your school often flunked out or caused problems, it would be noted by the college. YMMV.