There are many “hooks” beyond legacy - recruited athletes, kids of major donors, FGLI etc. Feeder schools typically have all of these in greater numbers than a typical high school. That isn’t to say that unhooked students won’t get into a T20 from these schools but it tends to be in much lesser numbers. My kids have had several friends attend top BS and none have gone to an Ivy - they’ve gone to very good schools, but not T20. Where these schools really excel is in making great fits between school and student - they send scores of kids to top LACs and T20-50 universities.
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Yep 
. The elites have great FA for kids that need it, but they have to offset that FA with kids that are full pay. A lot of the elite schools say they’re “need blind”. Admissions may not get financial data, but they’re not blind to the odds that a child who has address in an impoverished zip code and who is graduating from a Title 1 school will likely need financial aid. On the flip side they’re not blind to the likelihood that a child going to an expensive private school is likely (not always) to be full pay. The odds are good that that’s the case, and even better if a kid has applied ED.
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Is Regis parochial? That wasn’t my impression. Most Catholic high school associated with religious orders aren’t.
My kid’s final choices for high school came down to a private and a public magnet. Not ones you list, but similar in a different city.
He and I spent a lot of time looking at comparisons, including college placements. The public program has higher test scores, more kids getting big awards, etc . . . although not by a huge factor. The private school, in high school, is more “rejective”, but they also have the majority of their class moving up from their own elementary and middle school, and many of those kids came in when they were too young to really predict their academic trajectory. Whereas in the magnet all the kids were accepted based on 8th grade performance and test scores.
I think there are a variety of differences. I don’t know if it’s a simple as one school doing “better” than the other.
Generally, the private school has more placements at the Ivies, Chicago, etc . . . They also definitely have more kids getting athletically recruited to schools like the NESCAC’s. The magnet has more placement at STEM specific programs, or programs with a strong reputation in STEM such as MIT, Caltech, CMU, Berkeley. The public school kids are also much more likely to end up with full ride scholarships like Stamps to state flagships. It’s not clear to me that this reflects a difference in application rates to these schools, or in acceptances, or in yield.
I think there are a lot of reasons why kids at private schools might do better at certain private colleges. Full pay might be one reason. Sports is definitely one, private school kids are way more likely to have access to the kind of intense training that leads to recruitment. There are also more legacies, major donors, and parents whose power and privilege play a role coming from the private school.
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Not sure Regis is a good example, since it’s all boys and the highly selective schools want a mix of genders. It should have a lower admit to the highly selective colleges and that’s before one gets into any major interest.
I don’t understand this logic. I don’t see a difference in placements between the top single sex and coed private schools in my area.
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it’s optics. Harvard could admit the top 10 kids from Mann, say 5 males and 5 females. But it would be a bad look if they accept the 10 ten from Regis, as they are all male.
(Add in what others have suggested, some of those top 10 at Regis may prefer to ED at Notre Dame or Georgetown or Boston College, so H would then have to reach down to #11+…)
Except boys have a slight edge when it comes to admiasions, since there are fewer of them and so many colleges skew female.
I don’t think it’s bad optics to only accept boys from an all boys school.
How do the placements from the all boys private schools in NYC compare with those from the coed private schools?
The only all-boy “feeder” school in NYC is Collegiate, and their disclosures on college matriculations are not disaggregated. Each graduating class is ~50 boys. They disclose 5 year statistics, so n=250.
Of that approximate cohort, “more than 10” have attended: Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Penn, and Yale. Minimally, that means 80 kids went to those schools. Additionally, “more than 5” have attended: Bowdoin, Colgate, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Michigan, Northwestern, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Williams. Depending on how you want to count “ultra-selective”, let’s say that’s 20 additional kids.
Net net: at least 100/250 to ultra-selective schools, or 40%
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Our feederish mostly-day school does have financial aid, and for that matter not all the kids who are full pay for HS are going to be full pay for college.
But I agree that broadly speaking, mere correlations and not causations are going to explain at least a lot of the observed placement success. I personally think there are some other things that help, at least compared to the typical large upper-middle-class-area public, like the point above about steering kids away from bunching, course options and grading schemes that provide more distinctions at the top of the class, a large ratio of activity and leadership positions to students, and so on. But exactly how much all that really helps, and how much is just correlation with other stuff, would require carefully-controlled studies.
Still, I see a lot of kids basically have a well-balanced HS experience and still get into highly selective colleges that fit them really well, and it all feels . . . not easy exactly, but not so stressful and all-consuming. So that feels pretty valuable.
The kid at the top private school who is not getting into Harvard (the counselor knows this from experience- great, fantastic, incredible kid- but Harvard isn’t happening especially because the counselor has full transparency as to the other kids who are applying to Harvard from their school) who DOES get into Williams or Brown or Duke counts as a win-- because the counselor is frank with the kid and the parents “Harvard isn’t happening”. I’ve seen this play out at all levels of the food chain- kid is pining for Duke but the counselor pivots to Emory or Tulane; kid’s “ride or die” is Wellesley but the counselor does the full court press on why Mt. Holyoke is the best fit.
Parents are paying for the kid to get into their top choice. Which by the time the private school counselors have done their magic, might be Franklin and Marshall and not Amherst; GW and not Columbia. But once everyone is on board with the “new and less competitive” first choice, it’s all good.
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This explanation completely makes sense to me and I think is quite true. I dont, however, think it is a complete explanation, because the feeders still get extraordinary placement. Schools like Brearley in NYC have really incomparable placement that outperforms even top boarding schools like Exeter. My hypothesis was that the proxy for full-pay was the explanation.
Did you see Spence’s placement this year? Check out the Spence24seniors instagram page, it’s public. It blows probably every other private school in the US out of the water. This was actually a lackluster placement year for many of the other top NYC feeders schools that you mention, but Spence had a banner year.
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It doesn’t seem to me that the success of feeder schools has much, if anything, to do with “steering away from bunching.” Looking at Collegiate above: “more than 10” have attended Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Penn, and Yale over just a 5 year period. That’s more than 2 students to each of these schools on average per year! Out of a class of only 50!
This is in contrast to “the typical large upper-middle-class-area public[s]” which, at least around here, manage to send a kid to Harvard maybe twice a decade, out of a class of 900+. And yes, I know that average stats of large publics are lower than at Collegiate. But I would be glad to put the top 50 up against the 50 that graduate from Collegiate. Our local school has about 30-35 NMFs each year. It has both a full IB program and dozens of APs (and when they do attend, they do well, so the rigor is there.) And yet the outcomes, even among this top band, are nothing like coming from Collegiate- not within an order of magnitude. It’s not about “bunching.” We are from the middle of the country; our top students apply to top schools on both coasts as well as in the Midwest and in the South (Rice etc.)
So, to answer the original question: Are feeder schools a proxy for full pay? No they are not. Because full pay is a dime a dozen at these schools. No, feeder schools are a proxy for much higher levels of wealth and connections. Kids from these schools have the sort of pedigrees that elite schools want, because that is how class is perpetuated–by making further connections among the already well-connected.
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These numbers don’t seem huge to me- I’d love to see a comparison with New Trier, Newton North/South, Brookline High, Lexington High, the public high schools in Scarsdale, Atherton, Greenwich…
According to their website New Trier, enrollment 945, sent 16 to the Ivys last year. They had 19 NMFs.
I would imagine it’s also why there are so many posts from people shocked about great students not getting into the hot southern publics. Clemson, Auburn, UTK, USC, etc are unlikely to accept 4-10 kids from the same NJ or Chicago high school even though all of them might be qualified. And, unfortunately, since it seems random who is admitted they all apply to all of the schools, which just feeds the cycle.
Kids aiming for Duke ED arent pivoting to Tulane, at least not until RD. And if that was the case, they had a poor sense or where they were as a student.
No, they are pivoting BEFORE the application goes in because their parents are paying the prep school counselors to explain to the kid that Duke is a hard no… and a waste of an ED application. THAT’s the magic- pivot BEFORE the rejection. Every gets into their first choice when the counselors do this kind of gatekeeping!
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On the other end of the spectrum… I’d think you’d be surprised that there are plenty of FULL-PAY families with kids attending public high schools, not even high-performing public high schools but regular rural US high schools that end up getting into and graduating from top universities with 4.0’s… and in my S19’s case a top 1% MCAT.
The beauty of this is mom and dad have a deep retirement fund, a paid off house, and can pay for medical school with cash 
S19 was waitlisted at Harvard and Columbia but honesty going to Pitt was an absolute blessing. Would have paid 75K in 2020 when all Harvard sophomores went 100% online.
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