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<p>I believe that most posters are using these interchangeably, which is the source of the wheel-spinning here. We’re not on your wavelength.</p>
<p>sosomenza, I think there is a semantic problem with what you are saying. If you are saying that the 44% figure shows a “bias” for private school students in the tautological sense that a disproportionate share are matriculating there based on total high school graduates, OK. We get it. But you also said that the figure indicates that Yale “favors” private school students. That means something different. It implies that Yale prefers private school students because they are private school students, and we have been trying to demonstrate to you that this is not necessarily the case. It is your own post that caused most of us to assume that you were using the common meaning of “bias” as in preference.</p>
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<p>Herein lies the entire problem. All I’ll say is that, if you’re the technical specialist, and everyone else does not understand your point even after repeated explanation, it’s not their communication issue, and hectoring them about how dumb/unsophisticated they are won’t resolve it.</p>
<p>It doesn’t much surprise me that many private high school students go on to private colleges. It really doesn’t surprise me that many of the most competitive private high school students go on to some of the most selective colleges.</p>
<p>I think one thing that causes the visceral reaction to the large number of private school students at these top colleges is that it just isn’t pleasant to realize that at many of the 30,000 high schools, even the most accomplished students–the valedictorians, the school leaders–don’t have a prayer of getting into those top schools, because they don’t have the scores.
Think of it this way–3.4 million kids graduate from high school each year. How many of them apply to these highly selective schools? This year, Yale had about 30,000 applicants. How many unique individuals applied to one or more of the Ivies plus other top universities and LACs?</p>
<p>It would be interesting to know what the average SAT score is for valedictorians.</p>
<p>Besides looking at academic potential, don’t the most selective prep schools recruit/select for geographic, economic, racial/ethnic diversity? Aren’t they just doing at the high school level pretty much what the elite colleges do in admissions decisions?</p>
<p>Alh- yes! I haven’t read this whole thread, but the big New England boarding schools do just that…they actively search out and find some of the most talented, diverse 14-16 year olds in the world, and give them big scholarships to come to their schools. When those students are able to prove themselves academically at an Exeter, Andover or Choate, they are a great catch for the colleges. Look at the roster of the Yale football team if you want to see where they recruit their athletes…</p>
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<p>I’ll bet most of the vals who do “have the scores” won’t get in, either, especially if they’re from some podunk school, or a poor-to-middling urban or suburban school, and aren’t URMs, recruited athletes, legacies, or have some other “hook.”</p>
<p>Just to put some flesh on this. Let’s suppose there are about 30,000 valedictorians annually. I know not every school has one, but some have more than one. In 2012, 1,643 valedictorians applied to Brown. That’s roughly 5% of the valedictorians. We don’t know what their SAT/ACT scores were, but I suspect most were within a plausible range for admission to Brown. Most people aren’t going to apply to a school that’s clearly out of their range, and this is indirectly confirmed by the top colleges themselves, which usually say about 80% of their applications are from people who on paper are qualified to attend. Some fraction of the 95% of valedictorians who didn’t apply to Brown made that decision because they thought they couldn’t get in; either their test scores weren’t high enough or their ECs weren’t stellar or there was some other deficiency that made Brown an unrealistic longshot. Others perhaps just didn’t like Brown. Many, especially in the Midwest, South, and West (with the possible exception of California), probably never even seriously considered it, because they were heading to their state flagship, or to Mom & Dad’s alma mater; or they were applying only to schools that give big merit awards; or because they wanted to stay closer to home; or because they never even heard of Brown (apart from those couple of postcards that came from Brown in their junior year, along with postcards from about 2,000 other schools), or they didn’t know it was an Ivy League School, or its being an Ivy League school meant nothing to them.</p>
<p>Of the 5% of valedictorians who did apply to Brown, Brown rejected 76%. Brown also rejected 85% of the salutatorians who applied, along with 87% of those who were in the top 10% of their HS class. From this I surmise that Brown probably rejected an awful lot of valedictorians who did have SAT/ACT scores that were within a plausible range for Brown.</p>
<p>I still say it’s an advantage to be a stellar student at a stellar school, rather than a stellar student at a not-so-notable school (unless you’re a URM or possibly a first-gen). It’s not necessarily that the stellar student at the stellar school is better qualified; she might be, or she might not be. But in a way it’s a safer bet that the stellar student at the stellar school is the kind of student who will do well at an elite college, because the admissions committee is confident that she has handled genuine academic rigor and overcome strong academic competition, while the academic standout at a mediocre HS could either be a genuine star in the making, or a flop at the next level. There are no guarantees with either applicant, of course, but stellar-stellar is a safer bet than stellar-mediocre.</p>
<p>I don’t think this is a public-private thing. I think these days the top students at New Trier, TJ, and Stuyvesant are going to get the same favorable consideration as the kids at the top private prep schools. But that’s very different from the kind of consideration the valedictorian at, say, Dixon High School in small-town northern Illinois, or Hibbing High School on northern Minnesota’s Iron Range, or Johnson High School on Saint Paul’s blue-collar east side are going to get. But before you even get to that question, there’s a question as to whether the valedictorian from Dixon or Hibbing or Johnson is even going to be in the Ivy League applicant pool, and the answer is, probably not, because in all likelihood no one has ever put to them the proposition that they could be plausible candidates for admission to such schools, or guided them on the path to assemble the full package of credentials that would make them the strongest candidates they are capable of being.</p>
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<p>I find it interesting that one of the criteria for admission is one has to be a confirmed Catholic through baptismal certificate. </p>
<p>That’s not only more restrictive than many Catholic Schools I know of…including some selective prep/boarding schools, but it also means a substantial number of highly academic achievers/gifted are excluded on religious grounds. </p>
<p>While that’s their right, it does mean it is less competitive than other private/day high schools or the NYC SHS as none of those institutions have restrictions on religious grounds. </p>
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<p>Like elite private colleges, they do allow for lower grades/stats for legacies, athletes, and the like. Probably much less now than they did during the '60s and before.</p>
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<p>This varies by time period and school concerned. For instance, it was well-known back in the early-mid-'90s and before that Princeton didn’t care for students from Stuy and other public magnets/public schools in general. It not only showed in the admission stats of students admitted to other HYPSMCC colleges for years, but also in the negative social experiences some older alums who went to Princeton recounted to us younger students. </p>
<p>This was confirmed in another thread by Jonri who mentioned that not too long after I graduated HS, Princeton had a new director of admissions who made it a point to reform Princeton’s admissions policies to admit more public magnet/public school kids.</p>
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Well, it’s probably true that most of these are still rejected (as are most of the people with hooks, for that matter)–but I think it’s the val with a really really high SAT from a Podunk school who has a better chance than a lot of others, because the selective schools do like to spread it around. I just don’t think many of the vals at the Podunk schools have top scores, at least in any one school in any given year.</p>
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<p>And I think you vastly overestimate the chances of an unhooked applicant getting in primarily on the strength of GPA, test scores, and class rank. Which surprises me, because if I’m not mistaken, in the past you have often emphasized that these applicants face extremely long odds.</p>
<p>People on this site often focus on stats over other parts of the app, but this isn’t consistent with the Brown CDS (Brown was mentioned as the example school for the val rejection rate a few posts up). The Brown CDS does not put test scores, GPA, class rank, or any stats in the “very important” category. However, they do put other non-stat criteria in “very important” such as personal/character qualities, talent/ability, and level of applicant’s interest. So it shouldn’t be at all surprising that the vast majority of top stat applicants get rejected.</p>
<p>That said, yes I do agree that it is more impressive to be at the top of one’s class in a highly selective HS (magnet school, certain prep schools) than being at the top of one’s class in a non-selective public school. However, I’d expect it’s more impressive for an applicant to get a 2200 SAT score at a charter HS school that has an average SAT of 1000 than at TJ where the average SAT is ~2200. The charter school app may have achieved one of the highest SAT scores in the history of his school. He manages to get a top score in spite of his background with fewer opportunities. In contrast, the TJ app just did average for his school. Hundreds of others in his senior class had superior scores. It doesn’t stand out to be as much of an impressive achievement as for the charter school app. LORs and GC comments may show a similar trend (one of the best students in their career vs just average among senior class).</p>
<p>Well, I think it may help if you come from a school that’s never sent anybody, as long as the scores are pretty high. I have to admit, that’s why I think I got into Yale myself, although it was a long time ago.</p>
<p>Data10, despite what Brown says, it mostly admits people with really high test scores. I suppose it may be a coincidence.</p>
<p>You don’t think adcoms get a special kick out of admitting the kid from the high school / part of the country that’s never sent a kid there before versus yet-another-kid-from-the-same-old-reliable schools? I do. Or maybe I’m just projecting my own values – but I would. I might feel that I’m making more of an eventual difference to that kid’s world, and “freshening” the experience of others by broadening the student body beyond affluent-suburbs-of-major-cities.</p>
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<p>While there are some with your values, there are plenty of others who view their role as keeping kids like that out for SES or other misguided reasons or would simultaneously share your values while being excessively nervous about whether that kid from high schools which never sent a kid to a given elite college could handle the academic/social climate.</p>
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The admit rate certainly shows a correlation with test scores, which it should . But the admissions also show many non-top-stat candidates being chosen over top-stat candidates, in many cases because they excel in the fields Brown marks as more important than test scores in the CDS. </p>
<p>For example, the table below shows Brown admit rate vs percentile on verbal SAT
98-99 (750-790) - 14.4%
95-98 (700-740) - 11.6%
89-94 (650-690) - 7.3%
79-87 (600-640) - 6.6%
65-77 (550-590) - 5.7%</p>
<p>I expect that they could have filled their entire class with top stat applicants that scored 99th percentile on each test and had a 4.0 UW GPA. However, they do not do this. Instead they have a decent admit rate for candidates with lower scores. The lower scores are not all persons with hooks. I scored a 500 on my verbal SAT and was accepted to Brown without hooks, along with colleges more selective than Brown. Many of my other stats, such as HS GPA and class rank, were also quite poor by CC standards.</p>
<p>Oh, good lord, cobrat. You would think that adcoms were made up of Thornton Chillington Wadsworth IV’s who are reviewing applicants with their pinkies in the air while simultaneously checking the social register and exclaiming, “Oh, dear, we can’t admit that kid from Oklahoma, he’s not our kind, dear.” The % of adcoms who fit anywhere near that description has got to be vanishingly small. This isn’t the days of old where it was about handshakes from the headmaster. This is your own hang-up about socioeconomic status that you’re projecting. There’s absolutely no reason to believe that the vast majority of elite adcoms don’t operate in good faith or don’t truly believe in the concept of a mix of all different types.</p>
<p>Data10, given the table you just posted, how do you think then you were admitted to Brown and other highly selective schools with a 500 verbal SAT and “without hooks”? A 500 does not even appear on that table.</p>
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<p>Yeah, like being a thousand yard rusher or being able to hit the jumper from the top of the key.</p>