"How drastically will [not being in a feeder school] reduce my chances of getting in somewhere like Georgetown or U Chicago?"

Applying to College
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i agree with the sentiment and have made a variety of similar posts. I believe the larger number of matriculates to selective private colleges from selective private high schools are primarily driven by the 3 factors listed below. Once these factors are controlled for, I expect the differences in admit rates for similarly qualified applicants will generally be small enough to the point where it is not clear that the HS name offers any advantage on average. Instead some kids will have better results in the selective private HS with a high concentration of top students and others will have better results at the non-selective public HS without a high concentration of top students. It depends on a variety of factors, such as whether the student excels in the particular HS and takes advantages of the available opportunities/resources.

  1. There is a high concentration of well qualified students, using relating to the high school being highly selective.
  2. There is often a high rate of hooked students.
  3. Kids attending selective, private high schools are far more likely to be interested in and to apply to selective private colleges.

That said, University of Chicago and Georgetown are both anomalies from typical Ivy+ type colleges and may show a strong preference for certain private prep type high schools. I suspect the original poster was aware of this and did not just randomly happen to list these 2 colleges. Some example stats from another thread are quoted below for Harvard-Westlake high school, which is a highly selective HS from which applicants tend to have high stats.

Admit Rates for Unhooked 3.6 to 3.8 GPA Kids at Harvard-Westlake
Chicago – 17/36 = 47% accepted
Georgetown 10/24 = 42% accepted
MIT – <1 per year (too small sample)
Yale – <1 per year (too small sample)
Harvard – <1 per year (too small sample)
Stanford – <1 per year (too small sample)
Princeton – 0 acceptances

The full admit rate by GPA for students without distinction (not ALDC hooked) is below.

Chicago
3.8 to 4.0 GPA – 8/37 = 22% Admit Rate
3.6 to 3.8 GPA – 17/36 = 47% Admit Rate
3.4 to 3.6 GPA – 2/15 = 13% Admit Rate

Georgetown
3.8 to 4.0 GPA – 21/27 – 77% Admit Rate
3.6 to 3.8 GPA – 10/24 = 42% Admit Rate
3.4 to 3.6 GPA – 1/9 = 11% Admit Rate

Of course Chicago and Georgetown both also admit plenty of kids from public schools as well. I haven’t seen specific numbers published, but I’d expect the majority of admits attended public high schools. One certainly does not have to attend a “feeder school” to be admitted.

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