Our suburban public high school offers both IB and AP. Parents are told that one is not better than the other for admissions. Students are encouraged to choose whichever suits them better personally. My S22 did do the IB diploma, and it was the best fit for him. I agree it was like a “school within a school” which was nice because his graduating classes was over 800 students, but there were only about 60 IB dipcans. One interesting thing was that almost all the IB students were girls, with only a handful of boys. This was in contrast to the AP track which was 50/50. That was just fine with my kid. He does feel very well prepared for college.