My public high school is extremely high performing, but you could say we’re in a suburban bubble. It seems like Columbia has taken this into account; as a result, we haven’t had them accept anyone in four years. My friend applied ED last year, was rejected, and is now at Stanford. So we definitely have qualified kids…thoughts?
While it may seem like your school has been black-balled by Columbia, that is almost certainly not the case. Highly selective schools get to select – they have so many more qualified applicants than they can take. The kid who went to Stanford had something Stanford wanted for its class; Columbia didn’t need what he was offering. Remember that qualified is only a criteria for further consideration, not the one that results in acceptance.
It doesn’t sound like it in this case, but I know that at our school, there have been colleges that we haven’t seemed able to crack. But if you talk to the CCs, they’ll often tell you that its likely to be a matter of who has applied. The kid who probably would have gotten into Claremont was the one who preferred USC because her brother was there so didn’t apply. Yet the kid who did was a ski racer from New England, so was bringing something to both Bowdoin and Middlebury, where she was accepted but was less compelling, to Claremont. The students think the schools are biased, but the reality is that for either personal reasons or institutional reasons, the “match” didn’t happen.