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<p>My hunch is that you can make a pretty good guess by looking at the number of students who come from high schools that don’t rank. Many, though not all, top colleges publish this number.</p>
<p>I’m also wondering whether the percentage of private school students at HYP is a lot higher than at school just below them. I’m seeing numbers which indicate that about two-thirds of Brown and Dartmouth students attended public high schools.</p>
<p>I live right near a very high rated public school district, one that makes the top o’ the lists for best public high schools. Yes, the kids there, and at schools like New Trier in the Chicago burbs and TJ in VA get more kids into the highly selective school. Whether it’s more than say Andover or Choate, i don’t think so but I think a lot of kids going to such schools get turned down by the most selective boarding/ high schools. Compare,say , to not so elite privates, and my guess is that it would be comparable. </p>
<p>THere should be an overwhelming number more students coming from public schools over privates because there are far, far more public high schools. That it’s even 90% from publics indicate a favoritism for privates.</p>
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Some of those, like the one in my hometown, have morphed into pretty good private schools over the years. The one in my town isn’t segregated itself any more–but it still serves mostly affluent families.</p>
<p>No, cptofthehouse, you’ve missed the whole gist of the discussion. It’s irrelevant that there are far more students in public than private schools. What’s relevant is what the composition of the APPLICANT POOL looks like. Why on earth would anyone think that the application rate to elite schools would be similar among public schools than private? Haven’t they heard of rural public schools, schools in states where the state flagship is where it’s at, schools in the inner city that can barely get anyone to college? What, do you think that all public hs are like Short Hills or New Trier where everyone is seeking admission to an elite school?</p>
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<p>Because more of them APPLY. Sheesh. This isn’t rocket science. This is basic math here. If more of them apply, you don’t know - without the full horizontals – whether they are preferred or less-preferred.</p>
<p>Let’s take New Trier and my kids’ suburban Chicago hs.
Let’s say that last year, New Trier got 20 kids into Northwestern and my kids’ high school got 5. Does that mean they “preferred” New Trier kids? Well, you don’t know unless you know the applicant pool. (Assume qualifications are equally distributed.)</p>
<p>Scenario 1: NT had 40 applicants, NU accepted half. My kids’ school had 10 applicants, NU accepted half. They don’t “prefer” one school over another.
Scenario 2: NT had 20 applicants, NU accepted all. My kids’ school had 10 applicants, NU accepted half.<br>
Scenario 3: NT had 40 applicants, NU accepted half. My kids’ school had 5 applicants, NU accepted all.</p>
<p>See how it’s incredibly sloppy thinking to conclude from just the 20 and 5 that “NT was more successful in getting students in”?" You simply don’t know unless you have the rest of the picture.</p>
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In your earlier post, you wrote, “The bias is a given unless you believe that 44% of the high school population goes to private school.”</p>
<p>It is not necessary to use real numbers to show that the rate of Yale students who attended private school HS depends on more than just the % of HS population that attends private school. Most notably it depends on the difference in the rate of applicants to Yale between the two groups. In my example with only 10% of the HS population going to private school, a higher rate of expected private school students at Yale than 10% because of this difference.</p>
<p>Regarding real stats, colleges generally publish the % of class that came from public schools, rather than the % of applicants. I did find a Bowdoin news story at [ED</a> I pool yields more diverse applicants ? The Bowdoin Orient](<a href=“http://bowdoinorient.com/article/5853]ED”>http://bowdoinorient.com/article/5853) that mentions 54% of applicants went to a public high school and 46% went to private or parochial. So with no biases and an equal rate of highly qualified applicants in the 2 groups, one would expect 46% of admits to have attended private or parochial HSs. The NCSE data (old… from 1997) also mentions a disproportionately large number of applicants come from private & parochial schools. It shouldn’t be at all surprising that a disproportionately large number of private HS grads apply to selective private colleges. Reasons have already been discussed.</p>
<p>This is a simple concept. It’s called a horizontal. There is no way anyone can succeed in any kind of data analysis without understanding this. Any management consultant who didn’t immediately spot this would be fired on the spot. And yet it is rife on CC.</p>
<p>There was a poster years ago who used to compare what % of CA schools had students from MA and what % of MA schools had students from CA, without ever once considering or correcting for the fact that CA and MA are not the same size. Unbelievable.</p>
<p>We often argue that everyone should have good reading, writing, and communication skills, where science/math/technical people may lack somewhat. IMHO, it is equally important that everyone should have good quantitative reasoning and data inference skills, probably weaker among the arty crowd :)</p>
<p>The elite private schools’ college admissions are “managed” very carefully by the students, the families and the college counseling. It would be crazily counter-productive for most or all seniors to apply to HYP. I can tell you that in some most often mentioned east private schools typically no more than 1/3 of the senior class do (and I doubt more than that would in other types of private schools or in private schools in other geographic areas), and the admit rate IS a lot higher than HYP’s overall admit rate. Then again, I don’t believe attending A private school in itself is “favored” by colleges (refer to post #54). Obviously higher concentration of legacies, money, connections etc. etc. in these schools plays a role too, but it would be a lie to say that’s all there is (again refer to post #54).</p>
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<p>I completely agree with the first part of this sentence, but I think the “outreach” the elite colleges do is spotty, at best. H, Y, and P each send admissions reps to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area every year, but mainly to recruit at the top private schools in the area. They also spend some time in the most affluent suburban public high schools. They rarely, if ever, set foot in our urban schools. I remember one rep from one of the HYP schools (I won’t say which one) did spend a couple of hours at our local public HS a few years ago, one of the better public high schools in Saint Paul, but she made it pretty clear she was mainly interested in talking to high-performing URMs, not to middle-class white or Asian kids. She struck out on that visit, and as far as I know she’s never been back. I doubt they ever set foot in 90+% of the schools in the state, especially in rural areas and small towns, but even in moderate-sized population centers that are some distance from the Twin Cities. (The one exception might be Rochester which has a high concentration of doctors due to the Mayo Clinic, consequently a large number of sons and daughters of doctors).</p>
<p>I recall meeting a Yale admissions officer at a party some years back (on the East Coast, not here in Minnesota). She chatted on amiably about her job, which interested me. Then she made a rather remarkable statement, something to this effect: “Well, we know all the schools, and we talk to the guidance counselors regularly, so when we look at an application, we know the context.” I remember thinking at the time, “That’s extraordinary; there are a lot of high schools (30,000, it turns out, though I didn’t know the exact figure at the time). How can they possibly have that much information on all those schools? What would they know about my own small-town high school in remote northern Michigan, for example, and do they really talk to Mr. M and Ms. R on a regular basis?” I was incredulous, but I let it pass. I now think, however, she was not really claiming as much as I thought at the time; “all the schools” was just a manner of speaking. What she really meant was something like “all the schools worth knowing.” That statement reflected, not a claim to omniscience, but a somewhat blindered world view in which there are only so many schools worth knowing. So when they come to Minnesota, it’s the top private schools (Blake, Breck, and Saint Paul Academy), a couple of selective Catholic high schools (though the top students at those schools are pretty strongly geared toward Notre Dame), the poshest suburban public schools (Edina, Wayzata, Minnetonka, and perhaps 2 or 3 others), and that’s about it. They talk to the GCs at those schools, and they “know the context.” Not to say that an occasional Minnesotan doesn’t slip in under the radar from a school that is not perceived to be worth any effort on their part, but not insensibly, they concentrate their recruitment where they’re likely to make the biggest haul.</p>
<p>I guess one lesson to draw from this is that who ends up in the applicant pool might also reflect choices (I don’t want to say “biases” because that sounds too judgmental) on the part of the admissions machinery at elite colleges and universities. It’s not just that HYP aren’t on the radar of 90+% of the students and possibly 90+% of the high schools, but also that 90+% of the high schools aren’t on the radar of HYP. And although they’ve broadened somewhat to include more public schools, and especially to beef up URM recruitment, I think that is still substantially true today.</p>
<p>Excellent post, bclintonk.</p>
<p>Perhaps the overrepresentation is no more than the private school kids as a group have much higher SAT scores than their public school counterparts.</p>
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<p>I’d only agree with the above if the private schools in that comparison are the academically rigorous ones like Choate, Andover, Phillip Exeter, etc. </p>
<p>If you’re talking private schools in general, you may be shocked at how abysmally low the SAT scores were of even the top students from those crappy segregation academies my relatives/friends attended or knew about from close friends attending. What was considered a “good” SAT score there would have meant they’d be mandated to take a year or more of remedial classes at the local public colleges in my area (NYC). </p>
<p>On the flipside, I wouldn’t be surprised if the average SATs of a public school in a well-off area with many families valuing education/college preparation or moreso…those of a academically rigorous public magnet like the one I attended are comparable with those of those academically top private/prep schools.</p>
<p>@cobrat - I only meant to reference the well-known top schools. Their profiles typically provide details of the schools graduates attend. I was shocked at the large numbers going to the Ivy’s etc… That being said, the average SAT at these schools is close to 2100 which dwarfs our supposed high-performing high school.</p>
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<p>Sounds just like my urban public magnet HS going by the latest figures I glanced from a NYC area newspaper.</p>
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<p>I guess this explains why in the entire living memory of our large, mediocre high school in suburban San Diego, no student, no matter how how excellent, has ever been accepted by Yale. </p>
<p>We’ve had kids get into HPSM from time to time, and several get into Berkeley every year, but Yale, nada. Our school just ain’t worth knowing in their estimation.</p>
<p>bclintonk, by “we”, the Yale AO you talked to meant Mr. Grant Schafle, the regional AO for Minnesota. I think it’s an exaggeration to say they talk to GC’s from ALL schools in MN regularly, but I think they do try to get to know and leave their footprints in more schools every year, which is where the big bucks are spent for recruitment effort. On the other hand, I think it makes the regional officers’ job easier to screen schools and focus on the ones where they will more likely to find candidates who are more certain to be able to handle the academics and social life at Yale.</p>
<p>Yes, there is a wide range of SAT score averages among both public and private schools. There are public magnet schools with an average combined SAT of as high as 2200+ (a 99th percentile score), and there are also public charter schools with an average combined SAT of under 1000 (a 3-4th percentile score). In 2012, the college board reported an average of a 190 point difference between combined SAT scores of students from public schools and students from independent private schools (1477 vs 1667).</p>
<p>If there are 30,000 schools, which ones should the adcoms from Yale visit? At my high school, at least when I was there, they’d be talking to, at most, one or two kids out of 300 that might be able to plausibly apply to Yale, and who might be interested in going there. Should we be surprised if they don’t use their time this way? Perhaps this would be a better use for alumni than the current system of interviews that probably don’t really matter much.</p>
<p>This is also why many colleges go to college fairs or put on presentations for students in a given city that are open to all. Sometimes, colleges group together and give joint presentations. This is in part, I think, to get a larger number of students. </p>
<p>A LONG time ago, I was the first person in the history of my high school to apply to the college I ended up attending. If anything, it helped me get in.</p>