I don’t think anyone will have concrete evidence when it comes to these things. I do agree “legacy” status isn’t going to help. All my friends who went to Harvard are keenly aware their past will not guarantee their kids’ future, unless there is a 10 million dollar check attached somewhere.
This info is from parents of unhooked students that I am currently coaching at those high schools. They all know how many students were admitted recently to these colleges, and how many of those admissions were legacy. And if they didn’t know, I would have the student to find out from their college counselor. It’s basic info required to guide students.
It’s still prevalent among the most selective colleges, including all of the Ivy League colleges. It’s foolish to ignore that. If and when that goes away, my advice will change.
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This is true from what we have seen this year. At least 3-4 Ivy early admits (more I think) from our school had parents who attended same school.
Hopefully you are tracking the legacies that give 8 figure+ donations separately. When legacy goes away, which I think it ultimately will, the kids from the high level donor families will be the ones still getting in.
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True. But I have no idea how to track that, and fortunately that’s a smaller number.
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I find our private secondary schools compete with the public and other privates in their area, so the private schools in the ‘best’ public districts offer a similar curriculum (and sports) as the public. We have a Jesuit high school (boys’ division and girls’ division, with about 1700 kids total). Pretty much everything is offered. There is a new catholic school offering a ‘classics’ curriculum with only about 200 kids, so much less is offered. Language? Latin (and it’s required), plus Greek for the last two years. In the same district, there is a country day school that offers most of the same things the public high school offers, but there may only be 10 kids in the top math class or language class.
So all the catholic high schools are not the same (at all), and the christian schools also vary. One was founded about 15 years ago mostly for sports (and produced Christian McCaffrey, one of the top golfers who has been winning lately, a few basketball girl stars who go to Stanford) but it is pretty good academically too.
To the OP…pick the school where your child will do his best. I’m sure they all send kids to college. When I moved when my kids were sophomores in hs, I thought they’d go to a private school but when that fell through I found a rental home in a suburban district that had a lacrosse team for my daughter and a theater program for the other one and it was fine. And it worked out for college for both too.
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Our sample of HYPSM admits specifically is too low for me to be confident how many are ALD (we don’t have C) kids.
In the next couple selectivity tiers, we have a lot more admits and I am confident they are mostly not hooked. More at the D3s than D1s will be athletes, but it is definitely not uncommon for, say, a Princeton legacy to not get admitted to Princeton but then get into Penn.
And from SCOIR it is obvious how much this is a numbers game. Our HYPSM admits are almost all either in a rare GPA/test box, or enough outside it that implies to me they were hooked (what I don’t know for sure is how many in the box were hooked). But the next tiers have a bigger box, and that alone allows a multiple of our kids to be accepted.
Are you willing and able to pay the higher price for School A for all 3 kids, if they all want to go there? If not, pick a cheaper option.
Not sure why you say that. It could be that a lot of Harvard faculty live in Lexington, but there are a lot of desirable communities that are more convenient to Cambridge than Lexington.
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I’ve got some friends with kids at elite privates in MA and their experience is the same. Unhooked kids aren’t getting in to the most “aspirational” schools, but legacies, kids of donors and recruited athletes are. The unhooked kids are seeing a lot of success at schools like Tufts, UChicago, NESCACs etc.
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Completely agree, especially with respect to children of faculty. Lexington, Newton North, and Brookline (all strong public schools in the Boston area) have a fair number of children of faculty who end up with ‘surprisingly’ good college placement results. Using any data from schools like this should be done with caution. Additionally, as mentioned above, these schools allow truly talented math students to take courses from the types of local colleges that many here aspire to (not ‘just’ Harvard Extension School, but Harvard College, etc…
Lexington High regularly churns out the highest number of NMSF in MA despite being a true public school - their student body is really accomplished (I don’t live there myself so no personal interest). It isn’t surprising that kids place well.
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Interesting observation. Could you define what you mean by “rare GPA/test box”?
Yes, this is not a one child decision. My initial question was meant to help me assess one factor of the school selection process (impact on college admissions). There are several more factors that we are considering, but that is the one I needed input from this forum to understand.
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Can’t answer for him, but at our school that means kids with 1580+ SAT/4 UW gpa - so the upper right hand of the scattergram. Of course, even then most kids don’t get in, but all those that do (minus a handful of athletes in the case of our school) come from that group.
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Doesn’t this beg the title question?
School quality is important - mostly so your kid gets a great education. In terms of elite college acceptances, it depends. In my friends’ experience, their unhooked kids (all top performers) were shut out at all the Ivy+ schools, although they did get into some great schools just a notch lower.
So for context, our school uses a 4.33 scale, and no one gets all A+s. The farther above a 4.0, the less common, and something like a 4.2X is very rare (as in not every class year will have one rare).
OK, so the HPSM admits are mostly between a 1530/4.204 (REA admit to Harvard), and a 1570/4.076 (also an EA admit to Harvard, and an RD admit to Stanford).
I note we have no Yale data (no idea why not), and there are a couple Princeton admits with 33 ACTs and a 4.036 and 4.13 respectively–feels to me like one or both could be hooked but I don’t know for sure. There are a couple more Princeton admits with a 1470/3.908 and 1480/3.847, both REA–I even more suspect those of being hooked but I don’t know.
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They don’t show data if enough kids haven’t applied. Our school doesn’t show anything for Penn although I’m sure there have been some.
Pretty tough to tease out unhooked from hooked in HS college result data. Any suggestions/clues on how to do that?