@usualhopeful, look at how National Merit Scholars are distributed. And most people aren’t prepping for the PSAT junior year.
So, if we accept the estimate that roughly 1,100 of the nation’s 30,000 high schools send a kid to Harvard every year (and presumably similar in scope for other elite schools), can you remind me again why people “don’t understand” why Harvard still sends mailings because “after all, everyone around here knows what Harvard is”?
And can you remind me again why people blithely say “use Naviance to figure out what your chances are,” when they seem not to realize 28,900 schools, there isn’t going to BE any database of enough-kids-applying-to-elite-schools?
I observe that many people on CC, which probably overskews to those 1,100 schools, have a let-them-eat-cake attitude and assume that everyone in the country comes from that same milieu. It’s ironic that people who are so affluent can also be so naive at the same time.
Harvard is only one of the tippy top colleges and arguably the most selective. It’s not a stretch to think that there are more high schools that send 1/3 of their graduating classes to say the top 5. Granted, most of those schools have selective admission themselves, which helps explain the “concentrated talent”.
You mean Top 50?
I think it’s a stretch to say that schools outside of those 1100 are sending ⅓ of their kids to the Top 50, unless you’re including tiny magnet and charter schools where ⅓ is not big.
I still think mailings could get much more selective. My school (in the NE, so that might change the prestigious school familiarity thing a bit) we do need frequently send a single student to Harvard, although it did happen just a couple years ago. But that’s because most years, we don’t produce a single student who is qualified for Harvard.
I do think there are less well-known schools - especially schools that are just slightly less prestigious, meet need, and are in different regions of the country - which are great options that students might not know about. But the Stanford mailings? Not necessary.
Also worth mentioning - Harvard seems to only send mailing to students with NMF-level PSATs or something like that in this region, though Stanford and Chicago and all the others don’t have the same high threshold.
@panpacific, I’ve actually looked in to this (including looking at the matriculation lists of the most renown prep schools and magnets), and I don’t believe you can find a single HS in this country (that graduates more than 100 a class) that sends 1/3 of its class to the top 5.
Feel free to prove me wrong.
Even 1/3 of a class to Ivies/equivalents (and I’m including 30 schools in that category) is tough to do these days and something that only a handful of the most elite HS’s in this country consistently pull off.
@PurpleTitan You are right. I misspoke.
@PurpleTitan What schools are in your list of 30 ivys and equivalents?
@citivas: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1893105-ivy-equivalents-ranking-based-on-alumni-outcomes-take-2-1-p1.html
Citivas, why the specificity? Everyone kind of already knows what the “equivalent” schools are - it’s the usual suspects, the other top research universities and top LACs. One could argue that this particular one is in or out, but we all know what the general gist would be.
@pizzagirl, you may be making some strawman arguments, though perhaps based on what you have read previously in other topics and not here. Who said Harvard didn’t needed to market to anyone, for example? What I saw was why is does Harvard need to market so much to the kids who are in those privileged schools, and quite broadly, not just to those (per another commenters point) to those with PSAT scores in the National Merit league, instead of targeting schools or students who might not be exposed to them? As for Naviance, I don’t think it was mentioned here. I usually see it mentioned in specific “chance me” topics, which are specific to the OP’s and not broadly speaking to all students of all 30,000 schools. If the OP’s are at a schools that do have Naviance and do have enough data points, why not mention and use it? Do people really post that every student at every school should be using it even when most schools don’t have it or they don’t have enough comparable data for certain schools? And are there really people posting that the elite colleges “owe” their precious HS’s slots or complaining that the yield practices are unfair to them? I didn’t see that, though perhaps I missed it.
A point about mailings. I have two kids. One was a NMF, the other may be, we will know in September. Both had ACT and SAT results well within the range of accepted students at Harvard and everywhere else. Their respective high schools are single sex private schools that pass for “hoity-toity” in this part of fly over country. To date, we have not received a single piece of non athletic, non solicited mail from any Ivy school other than Columbia and Penn. We get a ton from UChicago, Duke and Northwestern though.
While I understand that the plural of anecdote is not data, this does suggest to me that if other schools in other parts of the country are getting regular mailings from Harvard there is some level of geographical discretion in where to send the promitional materials going on in Cambridge.
@pizzagirl Really? Curiosity, of course. Thirty is such a specific number. And every list is different due to varied methodology, which was the original point of this topic before it meandered off topic. Why would you find it an odd question?
Can you explain this math to me? I don’t get it. You roughly take 35 classes to get a degree at a semester school like Harvard. So you would have to be in roughly 16 classes or so with 50+ students to make the above statement true. How do you go from 10% of the classes at Harvard are over 50+ students to the above statement? Given the number of classes in junior and senior years in all the departments of a large university like Harvard, it seems highly unlikely that the total number of freshman/sophomore class sections will dwarf the total number of upper division classes. Since the lower division classes are the ones that are more likely to be larger classes, unless they just overwhelm the upper division classes in numbers, I don’t see how you can get the 50% number?
I would have thought that even if you assume 40% of the lower division classes are large classes and 20% of upper division classes are large classes, that would bring the total number of 50+ size classes to maybe 10 classes. That would still be only around 25% of the classes that a typical student takes. My feeling is that the number is realistically probably 15%
@VeryLuckyParent, you don’t need the same number of large classes to have students spend half their time in large classes.
Here’s a stylized example: Say that there is a school with a set curriculum where everyone in an entering class of 100 takes the same 20 classes the first 2 years.
The last 2 years, they take 20 classes which have 10 students each.
There would be 20 classes with 100 students and 200 classes with 10 students, so only roughly 9% of classes have >50 students, but everyone would have spent half their time in a large class.
In any case, the key differentiator to me isn’t so much the class size but the class format. Seminars, lectures, and other formats (case study, flipped classroom) are very different from each other. Some can only be a certain size, but, depending on the prof, a lecture with 10 may not feel all that different from a lecture with 300.
I think this is the math concept bclintonk is getting to:
Suppose there are 10 classes at College A (and just to make the math easy assume each kid only takes 1 class).
Classes 1-9 have 10 kids apiece.
Class 10 has 90 kids.
10% of all CLASSES offered are 50+ (Class 10), but 50% of all STUDENTS are in a 50+ class (all the students in class 10).
It’s important to distinguish between number of classes and number of students.
@PurpleTitan The reason so many of the people nominated for the National Academy of Science/Engineering are from research universities is that (published) original research is the only requirement for nomination.
Don’t universities like Harvard, Princeton and MIT have a lot of sections for lower division classes and cap the class sizes for each section? I know Chicago does this. Even for a class like Math 15100 which almost all freshman would take, the class size is capped at under 30 at Chicago. I would assume that Chicago’s peers do the same.
@VeryLuckyParent - Apparently Chicago is doing a better job than its peers about class size, with only 6% larger than 50 students, vs 14% at MIT and 11% at Princeton.
Again, a low % of classes being 50+ (or whatever you consider large) does not mean that a low % of STUDENTS are in large classes.
I think the point was that any single student was enrolled in classes with over 50 students for roughly half of their classes. You are raising a different issue.