Hypothesis: feeder schools are a proxy for full pay

Parents Forum
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Agreed that this is how it works. Excellent public school kids often end up at high quality colleges (public or private) paying much less than what the Ivy+ schools that denied or waitlisted them would have charged. These outstanding public school students continue to excel in college, just as they did in high school. And if they go on to graduate school for PhDs or MDs, they excel there too.

But being a doctor is not the sort of outcome that the families who can afford to send their kids to feeders are generally aiming for.

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My two cents having seen this a bit from the inside is there really isn’t just one big thing that applies to all successful students, it is many different things, not all of which apply to each successful student. So on a school level, each thing can seem smallish compared to all other things combined. But on an individual level, one such thing might be a big thing for that individual, or maybe a couple. And it is really the accumulation of different combinations of things mattering to different individual cases that adds up to a very good overall placement record.

I think there is a latent definitional issue here. I like to call our mostly-day-a-little-boarding independent HS “feederish”. We definitely place way more kids into Ivy+ and top LACs and service academies and so on per capita than any other public I am aware of in our metro. But, there are plenty of just professor and lawyer and doctor and upper-mid-management and so on parents, who are fine with their kids just going on into similar careers. And a few true upper class families, but they are definitely just a fraction.

Of course I understand there are some day and boarding and indeed special public schools in other jurisdictions where maybe the true upper class families are a much higher percentage. But my point is our HS, despite being mostly just upper middle class families with upper middle class aspirations, is still placing kids into the most selective colleges at way higher than normal rates overall. So there is necessarily some way of doing that which does not depend on all the successful applicants coming from true upper class families.

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43

I expect a significant proportion of those 16 students who went to the Ivies are recruited athletes and/or legacies (same as hooked applicants are common coming from the private feeder schools).

Notably, the number of New Trier students attending Ivy league schools has decreased significantly over the last decade. Just in 2019, 32 students enrolled in the Ivy League, and again I would expect most of the students were hooked. (see p 10:
https://go.boarddocs.com/il/newtrier/Board.nsf/files/BJXSL5722E73/$file/6.%20C.%20Profile%20of%20the%20Class%20of%202019%20BOE%20Final%20(1).pdf)

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44

Yes, there are many ways to signal to these schools that you are the right type of person: certain expensive niche sports, having a certain last name, knowing someone who can put you on the Z-list, attending a feeder (or feederish school, as long as other indicators are present), participating in research that indicates insider knowledge/connections, an application with good packaging, legacy status. All of these can signal connections.

To be clear, all of the above are for students aiming for the “Highly Connected” institutional priority. This is separate from the other institutional priority buckets. But unhooked and unconnected applicants would be wise to understand about this bucket, understand why it exists, and understand that it is a big bucket. Because otherwise they get the idea that they were not “good enough” for these schools, when the reality is that they were not institutional priorities.

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A couple of years back Lexington HS sent about 25 kids to the Ivies/MIT. That’s out of a class of around 575. While that is great by public school standards (in contrast, our public HS in MA only sends 6-10 to the Ivies/MIT in a given year) it pales in contrast to what you see from feeder schools.

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Very interesting! Especially in light of the fact that the link above shows that the number has NOT decreased at the top (T30) private feeder schools.

ETA: Will be interesting to see all these numbers in 5 years.

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I’ve definitely noticed a decline in the number of kids going to T20s from our HS - in particular to Ivy+ schools. These days it is primarily kids with a hook - legacies, recruited athletes and the very occasional URM (very few at our school) - that are admitted. This year both the valedictorian and salutatorian were shut out - it will be the first time in more than a decade that our top two students will not be headed to an Ivy or MIT.

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So I definitely think there are different “buckets” our kids make use of besides just that one.

Like, some of our kids are actually recruited athletes at Ivies and NESCACs and UAAs and such, which I think is different from just signaling. Those coaches actually want to win, and these kids actually have to be really good at their sport such that they persuade those coaches they will help them win.

Other kids are, say, extremely accomplished in performing arts, like not just really good but nationally good, and I gather there is a sort of conservatory-type standard applied to people who apply to such schools planning to do such things, because they have performing arts programs that they similarly want to fill with people at that level of talent.

Finally, I think this is one of the more subtle but still important buckets, and that is the kids who are just really bankable academically, the sort of kids Admissions is very confident their professors will love having, in a wide variety of classes, and who will go on to get into top law schools and grad programs and so on.

That last thing is a sensitive subject because I think a lot of people feel like if a kid has taken all the most rigorous classes available to them and gotten perfect grades, plus has a high test score, surely they should be in that bankable category. And I don’t think that is always enough, I think it really depends on the school and courses available, and I think often these feederish/feeder high schools in fact are very good at producing applicants who are seen as more bankable in that sense than even a 4.0 UW/lots of APs/high-score kid from a “normal” UMC high school. They do that with courses that go well beyond the AP level, fostering student-teacher relationships that are much more involved than at much larger schools with higher student to teacher ratios, and grading schemes that provide a lot more discrimination.

Absolutely, and I think that is really true of all these categories. Like, I think it can quite literally be true a kid has done everything they can possibly do at their high school to demonstrate academic excellence, and they may still not end up bankable in that same sense. And they might well do just as good or better in college as those bankable kids, but the problem as these colleges see it is they don’t know that yet, they can’t easily tell the difference between the kids who will really thrive in their classes and those who will just do OK based on the evidence available to them from a lot of high schools.

So that isn’t about those kids necessarily having less intrinsic academic merit, they just have not had the same opportunities in high school to evidence their intrinsic merit. Which is not fair, but these colleges are not in the fairness business.

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49

Yes, the ability to contribute at the varsity level at these schools is highly valued (biggest hook of all probably, unless maybe Z list.) But even so, I still see it as a sort of signaling. You cannot become nationally ranked at these niche sports without money and connections. Even what appear to be exceptions often aren’t e.g. an alum will start a non-profit that coaches students from the Bronx in that alum’s niche sport. But those kids would no longer be an institutional priority were the non-profit team to go away, despite the intrinsic potential that still exists.

It will be interesting to see what happens as certain niche sports increasingly draw from abroad. I wonder if they will continue to be institutional priorities.

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But public schools have to serve everyone including kids who are struggling academically and behaviorally. I’d imagine that a chunk of their 575 graduates (20%? 30%?) might be on the college prep track not the honors/AP one, and that group would not have been admitted to most prep schools in the first place.

A lot of screening that goes on before kids are admitted to many of the most selective prep schools, particularly the high schools. Their entire class is made up of students who were in the top 85%+ of their 8th grade class. Obviously for K-12 private schools, the admissions happened when the kids were too young to be as heavily screened, but very weak students get counseled out of some of those schools for middle and high school (in fact, I know a handful of students that experienced exactly that at schools like Brearly) so most of the students that remain along with those who get added for 9th grade tend to be quite strong at many of those schools.

I recognize that the communities mentioned are very wealthy and high powered, and their public schools are excellent but I still don’t think that it makes sense to say only 25 out of 575 headed to the Ivies/MIT when among those 575 there are at least some kids who are taking basic courses and/or have significant learning or behavioral challenges. Prep schools have it easy. They can admit who they want, kick or counsel out who they want, and then teach them in classes with only 12-14 other students. It is not shocking their outcomes are strong even before all the other things that posters have mentioned in this thread (sports, legacies, other hooks, excellent college counseling, careful steering of the senior class from all applying to the same colleges)

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I am perhaps unsure what you mean by “signaling”.

For sure, raising a kid who is eventually recruited can cost the family an enormous amount of time and money. In some sports, there is more free or low-cost help available than in others, so in that sense what are sometimes called “niche” sports are often (not always) more of an out of pocket expense for the family. However, even then it is normally a huge time burden for the family, which often has economic consequences even if less cash is changing hands.

Then there is a lot of networking in many sports, but usually it is pretty sports-centric. Like, you might want to be on certain club teams where the coaches have more influence, but that is not because those coaches are rich and famous outside of the sport, it is because they are very well-connected inside the sport.

All this can play what I would call a causal role. Take two equally naturally-talented kids, one whose family is willing and able to spend a lot of time, often a lot of money, advancing the kid’s chances, one whose family is unwilling or unable to do that, and yes, the former has a better chance of being a player who ends up recruited.

Although usually they end up not recruited anyway, or not anywhere they want to go.
Which is part of why a lot of people question the likely ROI on spending so much time and money if the only real benefit is a chance of being recruited. It works out sometimes, but more often not.

But in any event, I would not call that signaling. I would call it using family resources, if available, to increase the chance of a certain outcome.

I know this has been true for the top collegiate squash teams for a very long time (that usually only a minority of their recruited players are domestic recruits), and it does not seem to have caused many of those colleges to eliminate squash recruiting.

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I understand that but Duke to Tulane?! Tulane accepts 3.6 on avg in the ED round.

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I chalked it up to some (a lot of) hyperbole. It’s a bad example. If that is actually happening either the student is delusional or the college counselor is not doing their job and doing the student a disservice.

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It would not be too surprising that there are some delusional 3.5 HS GPA students wishing for Duke and need to be counseled to consider Tulane or other more realistic colleges.

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I know of a couple cases from my kid’s HS cohort where a kid blatantly ignored the college counselors when choosing an ED/REA/SCEA college (both flat rejected).

What I don’t know is how often they succeeded in overcoming an initial inclination like that, but I would bet it happened quite a bit. It just seems like a good percentage of kids/parents enter the process with unrealistic notions of what some of these colleges require these days to be competitive.

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Our CCs were really effective in helping kids craft lists that would lead to success.

Yes, parents are often delusional. There are tons of kids with 4.0 GPA, but few are the real deal. Figuring out how to redirect them is an art form!

But in our experience, the CC was great at understanding the nuances of different schools. One may have a greater focus on grades, so the kid with decent grades and great test scores may be a hard sell. Another may be investing in a department and keen to have students who will be enthusiastic participants in that field. A school may be looking for kids who can be bridges between different groups on campus, or who have a passion for volunteering, or whatever. Making these matches serves both students and colleges well. The CCs have the relationships with the schools and listen well to present them with the students they want.

In post-grad surveys, the percentage of families that say they were admitted to their first choice school was exceptionally high, for the reason @blossom noted. This is matchmaking at its best.

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Same, I think the families and kids who actually listened to the guidance from our CCs tended to do well.

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The small quiet conspiracy theorist in me: While I am a true fan of finding fit for each student and love it when matchmaking works out, I do wonder how much influence the counselors’ conclusions of a student has in admissions odds. More specifically stated: How important is it for a student to connect with a counselor so that they really know them? What happens when a counselor misjudges a student? Does it affect a student’s chances if the counselor decides that “the kid is not a Harvard man”?

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I wouldn’t call it a conspiracy theory, those are good questions!

Our CC staff has a relatively low number of applicants each (I think it was around 30 this cycle). Once they are assigned they start meeting regularly with the student in the early phases, and eventually meet with the parents at least 2-3 times as well. Meanwhile, the counselors are also plugged into the school, they chat with advisors and teachers and coaches and such. They have the transcripts and any test scores, and can apparently also see the teacher recommendations.

And eventually this counselor is going to write a comparative report for inclusion in the application, giving a sense of how the applicant fit into the school both academically and non-academically. And my understanding is they try to be credible in those reports, meaning they can’t say each of their 30 students is the best student the school has ever seen, nor each the best student in their class, or so on. I gather this is increasingly rare, but apparently occasionally they do still also have phone calls and such with admissions officers, and again my understanding is those have to be credible conversations. All that is necessary because if they were not being credible, they couldn’t help anyone at all.

Now as I understand it, they take very seriously their responsibility to communicate with students and parents in a way which (gently) makes it clear to them whether the kid will get the sort of enthusiastic support that they will likely need to get into any particular college. I don’t think it is quite as crude as concluding so and so is not a Harvard man, it is more like so and so is not going to have the sort of transcript, test scores, recommendations, and counselor report that kids usually have if they get admitted to Harvard.

And by the way, we know from experience just because they give you the green light to apply somewhere doesn’t mean they can guarantee you will get admitted! It just means they think you are in the competitive range, but for the most selective colleges, plenty of kids in the competitive range will not get admitted. I do think they are pretty good at suggesting which softer reaches and targets might actually be better bets based on their experience. But I think they are mostly trying to make sure you have some of those, they are not going to say you should have no harder reaches at all–as long as you are still reasonably competitive.

Anyway, it is definitely a complex back and forth, at least at our HS.

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Wouldn’t a good college counselor at an elite prep school be making those judgements based not on the counselor’s personal opinion, but on what the counselor knows Harvard (or whatever other highly selective college) tends to look for in admission? Connections to colleges may not help get a specific student into a specific highly selective college, but can help the college counselors inform students which highly selective colleges are more likely to admit them.

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