<p>Good point. Our AP-Honors magnet school sends at least one kid per year to HYPS. Whether they stay there is another story. S1 had a classmate go to Harvard and he lasted one semester before transferring to our state flagship. Another kid a year ahead of him went to Columbia and has done quite well for himself. Elite, private, public HS, whatever, it all still comes down to the student.</p>
<p>Imagine for a moment that all these top colleges cared about was SAT scores. What would the public-private breakdown be then? Would it be much different?</p>
<p>Exactly. And to be clear - I’m a public hs grad, married to another public hs grad, sent my kids to public hs. But it makes absolute sense to me that the pool of applicants to elite schools is going to be skewed disproportionately to private hs kids relative to their size in the population, and it’s certainly feasible that private hs kids are, on aggregate, “more qualified.”</p>
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<p>It’s not that 10% of private school grads made up 43% of Y/P’s applicant pool. It’s that private school grads (who are 10% of all hs grad schools) might make up 43% of Y/P’s applicant pool. I wouldn’t find that terribly surprising. Do you know HOW many kids likely go to public schools where no one has EVER applied to HYP or other elite schools? </p>
<p>I don’t have the exact number in front of me, but I saw a stat for Northwestern that said that something like maybe 6-7K high schools were represented in their applicant pool in a given year. Well, there are 30K high schools in the country. So it’s kind of no-duh that the vast majority of high schools don’t have a single applicant to NU. I don’t know why it would be any different with respect to H,Y, or P. Same difference. I think some of you really have no idea how little elite schools are on the radar screen in a lot of places, which is part of the reason elite schools still do a lot of outreach.</p>
<p>I recruit at a school district with the lowest HS grad rate of any large district in the country. Approx 22% of ninth-graders graduate HS in four years (22/100). Of these, 10% go on to a 4 year college (2.2/100). Of these half graduate in 4-5 years (1.1/100)</p>
<p>That’s right. Statistically one out of 100 ninth-graders entering the districts high schools this fall will have a Bachelors degree in 8 or 9 years. What happens to the other 99?</p>
<p>How’s that for some math, folks? And HYP and others still devote time and resources to find the few diamonds in the rough.</p>
<p>“But everyone here in Short Hills knows about HYP!”</p>
<p>Saying that elite schools “favor” private school kids is about as dumb as saying that elite schools “favor” kids from the East Coast. No, more of them apply so they are going to be thicker in the acceptance pool. East Coast kids could be favored or unfavored, but they are so dense in the applicant pool that they wind up being dense in the accepted pool.</p>
<p>PG … I totally agree. </p>
<p>And come to the same conclusion even looking at this from the other end. My kids go to a great public high school … one of the top public high schools in Massachusetts. Our class size is at least 5x time the class size of any of the spiffy private schools around here (HADES schools) … and I’d be surprised if we have as many applicants to HYP each year as compared to any one of the HADES schools … and we’re a school with the east coast over-reved private school focus. I can’t imagine what the ratio looks like at a rural school in Nebraska (not picking on Nebraska but it is a state with a huge home school draw).</p>
<p>(PS - the top students at our kids school do great with their admissions … there just are not as many top-top students here as at a HADES school)</p>
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Excellent point! I taught at an urban hs where 48% matriculated to college. (This figure included community college.) Conversely, at the five large private preps in the area, 100% go on to college. Like others have said, you must look at the percentage from each sector that apply.</p>
<p>The whole public-private distinction can be very misleading. Both my kids graduated from a large public academic magnet, but they spent 9 and 11 years, respectively, at a private school famous for academic achievement. My son’s only classmate admitted to a particular HYP school was a legacy with two lawyers for parents, both of whose older siblings had graduated from private schools and gone to Ivy League universities, and who had been at a private school through 8th grade. In general, with a few very notable exceptions, the kids in my kids’ public school classes who wound up attending highly selective colleges and universities were almost indistinguishable from the kids in their classes at the private school they left.</p>
<p>The other major public magnet in my city has the class size and demographics of a private school. And there are public school districts in the suburbs whose demographics are hard to differentiate from those of a private school, especially if you look at the top half of the class. Not surprisingly, all these public schools have excellent academic performance and a great track record of admissions success at selective colleges. But the kids and their parents haven’t exactly been dragging themselves up by the bootstraps.</p>
<p>We have a college friend who for a number of years has chaired the school board in the ritzy suburban town where she grew up. She is the daughter of two university professors. Her husband spent most of his career as a partner in a large, brand-name consulting firm, with annual compensation that had more than one comma. They are both Harvard MBAs. The family lived, lavishly, in several Asian capitals while the kids were younger. All four of their children have gone to Ivy League colleges, and every one of them counts as a public school graduate. </p>
<p>There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but it doesn’t make me feel all warm-and-fuzzy egalitarian or anything.</p>
<p>I came from a pretty good high school in a smallish city in the south. There might be a kid every couple of years with the stats to seriously consider a highly selective school. In my year (decades ago), out of a graduating class of about three hundred, my SAT score (which got me into Yale) was 1530 (old version). The next highest was 1390–and that kid had not-perfect grades, went to U.Va., and dropped out. I’m pretty sure I was the only one who applied to HYP in my year. There may have been a couple who applied to Duke. I don’t think that school is much different now–it sends somebody to a private highly-selective school every once in a while.
My kids, on the other hand, attended a public magnet IB program in a suburban county with a lot of very educated and well-off people. Out of 100 graduating seniors in that program, 10 or 20 of them go each year to highly selective programs (depending on where you draw the line), including (last year), 6 (I think) to HYP, and another kid who could have gone to Y but took the big scholarship at Duke instead. I think a lot of private schools are more like my kids’ school, and it’s not surprising that they generate a lot more applications and admissions to selective schools.</p>
<p>There’s little question that “elite” colleges look for qualities in students that tend to turn up more often than average in kids whose families are affluent and well-educated. What has changed in the past generation is that a somewhat greater proportion of those kids go to public schools, and that a greater proportion of the kids like that who go to public schools besides the usual suspects are aware of elite colleges and interested in applying there.</p>
<p>I have a long shaggy dog story from college that doesn’t quite work here, but the punch line was that a Catholic-school kid had more success with women in bars in our non-coastal hometown in the late 70s by pretending he was an unremarkable student at Notre Dame than by telling the truth, that he was the all-Ivy starting quarterback at Yale, and a molecular biology major to boot. That just wouldn’t happen today.</p>
<p>Oh, I don’t know, JHS. If you went down to the Beverly neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, and said you were a Notre Dame student, that would get you far more success with the ladies than being all-Ivy at Yale!</p>
<p>Seriously, for South Side Irish, Notre Dame is where it’s at, followed (at a decent distance) by Harvard and Northwestern. It’s a sociological treatise in the making.</p>
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<p>And regional / cultural differences as well. I would have put my suburban St. Louis high school up against any east coast school in terms of where students applied and went – with particular focus on Princeton and Vanderbilt, which are schools that have some historic to-the-manner-born, genteel partying similarities. Indeed, it was far more sophisticated than my kids’ suburban Chicago high school.</p>
<p>I think it’s wrong to lump all private schools into one category just as it is to do the same to all public schools. I bet the public school in an affluent MA neighborhood would have more kids applying to ivy league colleges than a catholic school in the south. The apparently highly “over-represented” private schools are those that are quite seletive in their own admissions, well resourced and known for academic rigor. So it’s not the number of applicants but rather the number of qualified or desirable applicants that make them seem to be over-represented. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. For example, some east coast boarding schools have endowments bigger than many colleges’, and they go out of their ways to recruite students nationwide (and worldwide really as the international student presence has been increasing over the years) with pretty much the same standards as the Ivy League college admissions’ (e.g. all sorts of diversity), and offer generous need-based financial aid to many from less well-off families. Andover and Exeter, for example, both offer financial aid to about 50% of their students, and 10%+ full ride (which includes room & board, books and supplies as well as a stipend). They have Ivy League educated teachers and the-state-of-the-art facilities, and they set HIGH standards for their students. As it is already a pre-selected group of students that have gone through rigorous training (and not just in academics but also in living in a community 24/7 often through so called “pressure cooker” style life), I think it’s normal for colleges to “favor” such students.</p>
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Fair enough, although I have my doubts. But the bar in question in this story wasn’t in the equivalent of Beverly. It was more like Lincoln Park. (And the woman he was chatting up was a recent Notre Dame engineering grad and first-year Stanford law student, who knew instantly he was lying but thought he was cute enough to spend a good long while trapping in the lies.) Yale had next to zero name recognition outside the very small private school world, and a handful of mostly-Jewish middle-class students at one high school. Harvard didn’t have any greater name recognition, either.</p>
<p>By the way, I think these colleges spend, literally, millions of dollars trying to find students they like who aren’t from affluent, well-educated families and aren’t going to Andover, TJ, Harvard-Westlake, or New Trier. And they probably succeed to a meaningful extent. But public school or private, the majority of students probably resemble each other a lot.</p>
<p>Considering that the term ‘prep’ school is short for ‘college-preparatory’ school, it’s no suprise that elite colleges readily take a lot of kids from these types of schools. When Willie Sutten was asked by a reporter why he robbed banks, he said “because that’s where the money is.”</p>
<p>The reality is that selective prep schools are suprisingly socio-economically diverse nowadays, w the most elite ones having active outreach programs and granting very generous FA.</p>
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<p>Which goes to show that good looks and charm may be able to trump all, and I’m kind of not really kidding here.</p>
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<p>Agreed. There are many crappy private schools in the US. One group of examples in the south were formerly known as “Segregation Academies” whose purpose was more to allow White families to get around racial integration mandates during the '60s and '70s. </p>
<p>Relatives new to an area in Mississippi had the misfortune to send their kids to one for a year before realizing the academic levels were just as abysmal as the local publics that one was sent to an East Coast prep school and another to a more academically reputable Catholic institution. </p>
<p>A few friends from other southern states also recounted knowing top 10 graduates from such private schools failing to last more than 1-3 semesters at one of the lowest-tier directional state colleges. </p>
<p>Moreover, not every academically reputable prep school student will have what it takes to succeed academically in college. Knew quite a few at my LAC who ended up struggling in the very same classes I thought was manageable despite taking a heavier semester load and working part-time. Some ended up on academic suspension for a year.
In those cases, I agree with another commenter that a part of this is up to the individual student.</p>
<p>And then there are the private schools that exist merely to cater to fundamentalist religious sensibilities.</p>
<p>I think that elite colleges do favor kids from private schools, especially that fall into certain categories such as challenging environments, URMs, athletes, first generation, etc, and for good reason. Those kids tend to have a better chance of being academically prepared. I’ve had admissions officers visiting such schools out and out say so. THey KNOW that the chances are very good that most kids coming from a rigorous known private school will be prepared for college work.</p>