Oh, and, at least for my kids’ schools the difference in ratio from year to year can clearly be traced to faculty kids and which kids got kicked out/left during the year.
Ah, now I get it. The OP is assuming BS populations reflect the general student population and that adjusting ratios would be drawing from this randomness. @Calliemomofgirls post #38 is correct. Boarding school communities are cherry-picked, non-random, and highly crafted. Some of these schools could entirely replace an incoming class from their deep waitlists without any change to any bucket metric. So, no, adjusting the gender ratio would have no affect on the academic standards at any of the schools discussed here. These schools are magnets for high academic achievers of both sexes, plenty to choose from regardless of how a school wants to tinker with the gender ratio.
The OP assumes many facts not in evidence. For example, that there are many more boys applying to boarding school? There may be, but I could find no source saying so. If someone can provide a source that would be great. Also, I’m not convinced as to the sex ratios at the schools are accurate.
OP, again I would urge you to consider asking about whatever the boarding school issue is on your mind instead of deciding you know what’s going on, without having the facts.
I think OP is doing some boarding school research paper, the threads started here by him/her are just not what a prospective parent would worry about. There is zero school that has 50-50 ratio in every grade every year, not public schools, not catholic, not private day schools and not surprisingly also not boarding schools. There is only so much control you have over your yield, there are quite a few years you don’t go to the waitlist so you have what you have. Our school seems to be 50-50 overall but it definitely varies depending on grade. Ours is actually somewhat girl-heavy, the grade above has more boys.
Er, this is why I didn’t want to get into this. You are welcome for my taking the time, any time, to do it: I had made an assumption that doing so would get us nowhere and, of course, my assumption was correct.
Does it really need to get personal, folks? I would never presume to ask for shows of proof as to who you are or are not (as if that really mattered) but I would respond to the content of what you say. Those are pretty good words to live by. It looks like I am being accused of lying about being a parent? Let’s play nicely in the sandbox. If you are all indeed parents, you should have learned how to do that long ago.
As for the content:
It has nothing to do with randomness. It is the opposite of randomness. Yes, I’m assuming there are way more boy than girl applicants — not in the general population, but the coed boarding school population. I am not assuming anything about the general population. Several of you have made the assumption that female boarding school applicants are higher; that’s an assumption. I’m good with that. There are assumptions we have to make to even have this discussion. I am not asking for data on that. Why? It is not freely available and that assumption “makes sense.”
So, let’s use our sense.
You can assume that the ratios I have provided indicate there are way more male applicants because enrollment in 27/29 is higher for boys. Or you can assume that tells you nothing — and that applicants are equal in gender proportion. Are you all so insecure as to fail to make the obvious assumption here, without a school data set in your hands? Go out on an intellectual limb.
You can assume that schools with a gender imbalance worse than 53:47 think that’s swell. You can assume that they don’t. Either way, we are all making assumptions.
You can assume that Loomis — easily a top 50 school — is fine with its 56:43 or you can assume it is not. You can assume that, even though they are in actual possession of data sets (and we are not) that they are incompetent in failing to rectify this (since it is so “easy”), or you can assume they can’t. Again, we are all making assumptions here.
As for admission standards, I was merely using scores as a proxy for everything. Yes, these admissions standards are holistic. We all know this. By the school’s own definition of admissions standards, holistically speaking, taking a pool of what would be their admits and replacing them with a pool of their rejects, however small, lowers their admission standards as the school defines them.
No, I reject the notion that top schools can replace their entire class without lowering their holistic admission standards, as the school defines it. I think we can give admissions officers more credit than that. (Another assumption. But I have seen many glorifying their wisdom elsewhere, so at least be consistent.)
Here’s my “research paper” quote. Study it and refute it if you like; but not by straw mans, and not by failing to take the effort to understand it:
“Whenever there is a gender imbalance which then needs to be corrected, in circumstances wherein one gender is only slightly ‘better’ than the other, on average for that population (the coed boarding school population), rectifying that imbalance by replacing nth number of students from one gender with another (regardless of whether it is the gender with higher average admissions criteria) will result in a lowering of admissions standards; this will or will not be readily discernible depending on the extent of the pre-existing gender imbalance.”
And, finally, what’s this about assuming schools actually can or do get 50/50 for each individual grade? I have already said more than once that they don’t: at least read the thread, guys, if you want to comment. A student body is smoothed out over 4 years; that’s fourth grade math — and that I simply refuse to “explain.”
Most of the people here are actually not idiots as your tone repeatedly implies. The problem is that your logic is flawed:
“rectifying that imbalance by replacing nth number of students from one gender with another (regardless of whether it is the gender with higher average admissions criteria) will result in a lowering of admissions standards;”
No.
”Several of you have made the assumption that female boarding school applicants are higher; that’s an assumption.”
No, have gotten this impression by speaking to AOs at multiple boarding schools. Have been told over and over again the day student girls are often the most outstanding group. Thus if a school wanted to increase the # of girls, at every school that has day students, could they not simply admit one or two extra day girls?
Once again I ask, have you confirmed any of your assumptions by speaking to AOs at any boarding schools? Your assumptions are frankly less valid than the posters on this board who have had 2,3,4 kids go through BSs.
They would not be pulling from the reject pool; they would be pulling from the waitlist pool which includes fully admissible, equally-qualified students being held in reserve for whatever profile holes a school needs to fill in its incoming class. The small numbers required to tinker with gender ratios at these elite schools would not consume all of the high academic achievers of both sexes in their reserve pools. No need for lowered admissions standards unless a school was purposely aiming to do so.
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The level of snark on some responses will require too much time to edit. Closing thread.