I’ve read discussions about whether feeders are, in fact, more rigorous than rigorous public schools.
I find it hard to believe that the average kid at Trinity, Harvard Westlake, Castilleja, Chicago Lab, Brearley, St Johns, Hockaday, or any other “presitgious” feeder you care to mention is actually “better” than a kid from TJ, Stuvessant, Hunter, or parochial schools like Regis.
I don’t think the curriculum is better, the teacher are better, or the kids are brighter. If anything, head to head for raw intrinsics, I would bet on the Regis kid before I would bet on any private day student. (The top boarding schools are different. Their endowments do allow them to cherry pick kids)
But what day school feeders DO provide is a very well trained kid, who can handle the academic work… AND whose parents are most likely full pay. Not necessarily “hooked” legacy kids, but FULL PAY kids. I think this is a significant reason for the superior placement.
I suspect the primary reasons for the “superior placement” at “feeder HSs” are selective admissions such that student body has high concentration of kids that are more likely Ivy+ admits, self selection such that student body is composed of kids who are more likely to apply to Ivy+ colleges, and a higher rates of hooks.
There certain colleges that are exceptions and may directly favor kids from certain HSs. For example, some older stats from Harvard-Westlake are below. Chicago is an outlier and shows a very different pattern.
Hooked HW Applicants to Harvard (2017-2019) – 44% Admitted
Unhooked HW Applicants to Harvard (2017-2019) – 8% Admitted
Above 4.3 GPA – 6/62 Admitted
4.1 to 4.3 GPA – 2/20 Admitted
3.9 to 4.1 GPA – 0/7 Admitted
Under 3.9 GPA – 0/10 Admitted
Hooked HW Applicants to Pomona (2017-2019) – 47% Admitted
Unhooked HW Applicants to Pomona (2017-2019) – 0% Admitted
Above 4.3 GPA – 0/11 Admitted
4.1 to 4.3 GPA – 0/4 Admitted
3.9 to 4.1 GPA – 0/2 Admitted
Under 3.9 GPA – 0/6 Admitted
Hooked HW Applicants to Chicago (2017-2019) – 41% Admitted
Unhooked HW Applicants to Chicago (2017-2019) – 36% Admitted
Above 4.3 GPA – 13/35 Admitted
4.1 to 4.3 GPA – 12/25 Admitted
3.9 to 4.1 GPA – 3/16 Admitted
Under 3.9 GPA – 3/10 Admitted
No, I know boarding schools’ matriculation, and I would assume Dalton is similar. What I don’t know is the placement of rigorous public schools. Do you have a link for Stuyvesant, TJ, or similar?
In my neck of the woods, private schools do one thing exceptionally well vs. public HS’s… the counselors make sure the kids don’t “bunch” which I think is a core reason why the results of private vs. public look so impressive.
You have 12 seniors all of whom think Princeton is their first choice? terrific. The counselors at private HS’s know which ones will NOT be accepted- and those get steered to Penn, Northwestern, JHU, Duke (i.e. skootch less competitive). You have 10 seniors all gunning for Cornell? The private HS counselor is going to (gently, and then harder) move some of them to start feeling the love for the less competitive admits.
The counselors are NOT going to allow what I observe in the public HS’s near me- the entire top tranche of the class applying to the same four schools (and almost all of them getting shut out). Every year there’s a college which becomes “hot” out of nowhere- and the counselors can anticipate that.
The parochial schools? Even more so. You don’t see all the top kids applying to Georgetown and ND. The counselors have a long track record knowing who is getting in and who is not. The “nots” get dispersed to Holy Cross, Seton Hall, Providence, Stonehill, etc. I know legacy kids who were told in a very frank (but kind) way “this college isn’t happening for you”.
The public school counselors don’t have the bandwidth. And they don’t see it as their role to spread out the class. The kids apply, the chips fall.
So as you are looking at these uber impressive statistics, realize that one reason is that private school counselors have already pre-selected. The kid who is going to love Skidmore or Muhlenberg isn’t sending in an early App to Brown praying for a black swan event.
At the top of the class at either set of schools, I doubt there’s a difference. As you move toward the bottom of the class, the private school kids probably have a number of advantages. The 80% who were wealthy enough to attend without FA were also probably wealthy enough to pursue and excel in some EC, most of which require funding, so the knock-on effects of wealth may be the driver more than the fact they are FP.
The private school kids all had access to good college counselors who could direct them toward schools where they were likely to be attractive applicants.
Students who don’t need FA can probably afford to matriculate at schools without merit so amongst the less strong students, there’s a huge benefit to being able to pay. And yes, there are definitely schools where being FP is an edge. At the most well-endowed, not so much, but at many, it helps. In this case, though, I suspect merely checking the no FA needed box is enough – not the school itself. (Fwiw, I know quite a few kids who left the privates in NYC for Science, Stuy, etc. and fared extremely well in college admissions – as FP applicants.)
My kid attended a BS where about half the class got FA. There was a big difference in where kids applied (based on net cost, scholarships, etc) and in turn where they matriculated based on what families could afford. Put differently, kids may be choosing application strategies based on finances, so the results aren’t directly comparable.
I don’t know that the colleges see the privates as a marker for wealth and admit kids as a result. But kids whose families can be FP have an edge wherever they come from. Iow, not entirely comparable pools.
Feeder schools often have a high concentration of “hooked” students which helps to pad their matriculation numbers. Unhooked students at feeders don’t fare nearly as well. When it comes to college admissions, there is a two tiered system - one for the hooked kids (far more likely to be accepted) and one for everyone else.
This is certainly true to some extent but I think its exaggerated. Sure, there are some legacy placements. But nonlegacy students with strong records do very well. I say this from personal observation where I see kids who are essentially nonlegacy getting into the absolutely most selective schools.
This is not Stuy but it’s a reasonably proxy for my theory – ie, very strong school but largely non-affluent parent group. Extremely confirmatory to my hypothesis. https://www.regis.org/section/?id=121
This . When in my daughter’s technical magnet 25 kids applied to UMich, 24 were placed on waitlist…
We realized that it is significantly more difficult to get to top schools (not even Ivy) from public magnets. All kids are smart and all apply to same schools. And these magnets are small…So kids compete again each other in top 30 schools.
I see it at the “top” of the mega rejectives and in the middle and the bottom. The kids at our local public HS know 10 strong engineering schools. The kids at the privates who are interested in engineering can name 30. And the ones who will not get into MIT or Cal Tech can proudly tell you that Delaware is one of the top chem eng schools in the country. ( I don’t live in Delaware).
That’s what your money is getting you at a private school- counselors who thin the herd before the first application even gets submitted. And every kid gets into one of their top choices that way!
Exactly. And my DD had to explain to everyone why she chose GT over UMich. People just couldn’t imagine someone making such a decision.
She was like a broken record, but BME is better at GT and people would leave her alone. However, there was no way we could pay for UMich…
I agree with you that the kids who are top 5th% at good public schools, and top 25th% at highly selective magnet public schools (although that may change now that some have moved to acceptance formulas based on proxy for race, as opposed to achievement) have equal or superior qualifications when compared to kids who are top 25th% at the top prep schools - and this is borne out by similarity in standardized test scores. However, feeder prep schools are not necessarily a proxy for full pay. There are programs like A Better Chance that prepare and guide African American students into prep schools, usually on full fin aid. These kids then make up a substantial proportion of the AA kids at highly selective colleges, again on full fin aid. So while I would agree that overall, kids accepted from prep schools are probably full pay, it doesn’t necessarily hold for URMs. So more likely to be full pay, yes. As a proxy for full pay? Not quite, but closer.
Of course its not a perfect proxy. But across all of the private day school feeders, you will find 15-20% are on financial aid, at most. You’ll find fewer full pay students at Andover or Exeter, where the number is more like 50%, because of the massive endowments. Thus, if you’re on the admissions committee, the reality is if you’re looking at a Harvard Westlake kid and you know nothing about that kid, you have an 80% chance of drawing a full pay student. You also have pretty high confidence that this kid is going to be able to handle the academic load of a selective institution. Seems like an easy admit…
I looked at the Regis matriculation. It doesn’t seem very different from the boarding school lists I’ve seen, except that it skews more to Catholic universities, and also sends fewer kids to the University of Chicago.
That said, are the most selective schools really wanting more full pay kids? Those are the same schools – as a rule – with the highest endowments and most generous financial aid. What I didn’t see on the Regis lists were schools, like St. Lawrence, or Connecticut College, which are more need aware. But I don’t think those are the types of schools you are talking about.
Going to rely on Google here rather than do a manual count, but Google says Regis has ~120 kids/class. The matriculation page links the past 4 years of results. So that’s ~480 kids. My quick count was 82 to Ivy League schools + MIT + Stanford, so around 17%.
Compare that quickly to the Horace Mann School, a big feeder. Their website is for 3 years, with 537 graduates. Easy stats show info just for Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Yale – no Brown, Dartmouth, Stanford, MIT, meaning <10 graduates in the past 3 years. But even just looking at those 6 schools, you’ve got 124 admits of 537, or 23%. And if you assume 5 matriculations in the past 3 years at B/D/S/MIT, you’d be at 27% on a normalized basis.
HM massively outperforms Regis, even though the curriculum, caliber of students, etc is undoubtedly identical. Regis might even be stronger, for example, the Regis school profile reports 1470 SAT average, while Horace Mann’s SAT shows a mean math and verbal sum of 1440.
How many of the Regis students end up at Georgetown and Notre Dame (which for a family looking for a parochial school education for their kid represents the “Ivy League” both intellectually and sociologically)?
I know Regis grads who did not even apply to ivies. Top stats kids, but it wasn’t on their radar. It’s like the kids at Yeshiva high schools who apply to YU/Stern (male/female) and Touro if they are going to college. The tippy top of the YU classes are statistical matches for the kids at Dartmouth and Brown-- but they aren’t applying there.
. When in my daughter’s technical magnet 25 kids applied to UMich, 24 were placed on waitlist…