<p>In the interest of promoting diversity on many different levels, how much of a disadvantage do students face in the application process and awarding of scholarships when available? Do colleges typcially have “cutoffs” for the number of students accepted from each high school? Any personal experiences with this? THANKS! **************</p>
<p>BlueJay, I can only share the experience that I have seen. Thus, what I will say is my opinion and should be taken as such.</p>
<p>Getting multiple applcations from the same high school is generally detrimental to everyone. Colleges compare the GPA, SATs and work submitted, if any, to decide whom they will accept. Many top college and art programs try not to take too many from the same school. ( a top magnet school might be an exception).</p>
<p>Thus, if your credentials and/portfolio ( if one is required for the major) stands out way above the other applicants, you may have a better shot for admission. However, if your credentials and/or portfolio is not the top of the pack from the same high school, this has been shown to hurt kids in admissions and thus hurt in merit scholarships.</p>
<p>I should note that need based scholarships are based on the FASFA and not on your competition per se.</p>
<p>Just personal experience here, but I agree with taxguy except that I would go even further and say that magnets are not exceptions.</p>
<p>However, I don’t believe that having multiple applicants from the same high school is a problem at state universities (the University of Virginia, for example, routinely enrolls more than 100 students a year who come from the Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology, an elite magnet school in Northern Virginia). I think this is mostly a private colleges issue (although it might apply to out-of-state applicants to state colleges as well).</p>
<p>When you look at trends – whether from Naviance school sites or whether from college facebooks – you’ll see that proportionality is a factor, the high school’s relationship with the college in question another factor. Thus, a large & excellent school (public or private) will tend to have less tight “races” among seniors than a tiny school, which may have ver few admits to upper-level schools. However, reputation/history with the college factors in. I’ve seen smallish private high schools do better with some LAC’s in the same region than the same size high schools in a different region. (Because the former are feeders & have a long history with the LAC.)</p>
<p>I know that next year, my D’s high school will experience attrition in acceptances due merely to the number applying to identical colleges (upper level) vs. the small size of the school/sr. class.</p>
<p>The above all refers to privates. I agree that the State schools are a different matter, & cutoffs or ceilings are not in effect. You qualify or you don’t, vs. the whole State, not your high school.</p>
<p>If you want, you can PM me & I can give you some specific examples to answer your question, but right now you don’t have your PM enabled.</p>
<p>Our high school has been known to have 60-70 applicants to Brown, for example. Perhaps 5-8 are admitted (perhaps). I can’t imagine that having that many applicants from one HS benefits anyone.</p>
<p>Outside of high schools that have special relationship/history with a college, I think having more highly qualified applicants from a single HS works to the disadvantage of the students. My basis: beside looking at the numbers which favors the “lesser” high school , adcom works on one school at a time. After he/she admits 1,2…is he/she going to hold off? Maybe at the point she will drop the admits and regroup all the potentials together and compare them against each other. That’s the only fair way to do it. The first method has her stops taking applications after the #admits hits some mental threshold. That’s definitely not fair. The second method makes the potentials candidates work against each other. That’s competition. There is another way of course which is to intermingle all students in her geographic region together and let the applicants fall where they may. But I don’t think many adcoms work that way, because they generally read a HS’s profile,avg scores,AP offerings,athletic and other programs offered…etc,then dig into that school’s pile. To have everyone in one giant pile means she is not judging a student against the environment he/she operated in. That’s not good either. So this is why I don’t think that’s how it’s done. CC’ers who are adcom can correct me.</p>
<p>Finally, I have seen in many smaller,less rigorous HS there are a few distinquished students who had planned well and executed their path well, ie, student body presidents…in an environment that has few competitions and they are the known leaders in that school, year after year. These are the ones who were admitted to the Yales of the world. In the highly acclaimed high school full of achievers, that are still only so many officer seats but a large# of highly-qualified students are vying for them. The outcome is by no mean guaranteed.</p>
<p>I know I’ve been bemoaning the fact that a far more qualified friend is applying to my top school, with no interest in going there. But, then I reconsidered and thought that perhaps it’s less of what school you go to and more of what geographic area you’re from.</p>
<p>Bluejay, I can give a specfic example that occured from our high school.</p>
<p>We had two kids who applied to Rhode Island School of Design. My daughter was one and one other. Both kids also attended a special class for almost two years with a reknown art teacher who specialized in portfolio preparation, which made matters worse. </p>
<p>We saw both portfolios on display. They were very, very similar in both quality, quantity and especially in the subject matter that was shown. In fact, they were so strikingly similar that it was a bit unnerving.
The private art teacher felt that they were very equal in all areas as a demonstration in artistic ability. I can honestly say that we couldn’t see much difference in the portfolios. You would think that they were done by the same people.
However, the other girl had a much high GPA than my that of my daughter. </p>
<p>The bottom line was the the other girl got into RISD and my daughter got waitlisted even though she had better SATs than the average RISD kid.</p>
<p>My daughter probably got lucky since I don’t think she would have been as happy at RISD as in the school that she is now, but we also strongly believe that my daughter would have had a much better chance of admission had there not ben two applicants from the same school with the same art teeacher and substantially the same portfolio.</p>
<p>It can cut the other way as well! </p>
<p>It is undeniable that colleges and high schools develop relationships based on the trends of prior years. There are times when a single successful applicant returns to his HS to spread the news and the adcoms pay more attention to candidates of that particular HS. This may make a school a HOT school among students. In such cases, it looks as the relationship benefits every party. </p>
<p>IMHO, there is no clear answer since many elements might cloud the issue. For instance, questions about the ranking of the HS might play a role. Schools like that Robinson in Virginia that play silly games (40+ valedictorians) are hardly helping anyone. Yet, aren’t every one of the 40 valedictorians believing they should apply to the uber-elite schools?</p>
<p>I think there are many factors that can cut both ways here, as xiggi says, including some colleges which clearly do limit the number of acceptances per HS, and some examples where you can’t explain what happened.</p>
<p>I’ve mentioned this before, but the small private HS my kids went to was brand new; my older S was only in the 4th graduating class, so they hadn’t had much, if any, time to establish relationships with colleges. However, in his graduating class, MIT and Stanford each accepted 13 students – 10% of the class. (Being in Silicon Valley, roughly a quarter of the class applied to Stanford; I don’t know how many applied to MIT but it was probably a similar number.) The school doesn’t rank, so they weren’t playing the “40 vals” game, but I take this incident as proof that college practices vary, and that at least in some circumstances they aren’t setting quotas per HS.</p>
<p>(Can’t comment on the scholarships issue, though, sorry.)</p>
<p>Robinson Secondary is part of Fairfax County Public Schools, the 13th largest school district in the country. Robinson is by far the largest school in the county graduating over 700 kids per year. FCPS doesn’t do class rank. It also has relatively high cut-offs for the letter grade changes (ie C range to B range, B range to A range). It gives no weight to honors classes and .5 to AP/IB classes only if the AP/IB exam is taken. It’s not as easy to get above a 4.0 as one would think. All of FCPS high schools and secondary schools have the same valedictorian designation for any graduating senior who has earned a 4.0+ GPA. It makes sense to me that anyone with that kind of grade-point may be applying to at least one top school even as a reach.</p>
<p>Instead of accepting a more interesting student with a lower stat profile over an unexciting applicant with higher stats, a private U may choose to waitlist and then later deny both of them to avoid pubic relations problems. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes a student with somewhat better stats may waste app money and apply to a school he/she is not really interested in attending in order to muddy the waters for more interesting students with lower stats. Sounds awful, but happened at a public high school I’m familiar with.</p>
<p>Xiggi notes,“It is undeniable that colleges and high schools develop relationships based on the trends of prior years. There are times when a single successful applicant returns to his HS to spread the news and the adcoms pay more attention to candidates of that particular HS”</p>
<p>Response: Our High School has been rated by US News as usually being in the top 51 nationwide. Two years ago,we were rated number 17. I can tell you that we have had a lot of kids do VERY well in college from the feedback that we have received. Every year, we have kids who do very well in national science and writing competitions. We also have a fair number of national merit scholars and, our school contains two internal maget programs that have won academic awards. However, despite being highly rated and despite having many kids who are very successful in their colleges, we have one of the worst admission rates for top colleges:</p>
<p>Check out:<a href=“https://connection.naviance.com/fc/signin.php?hsid=wootton[/url]”>https://connection.naviance.com/fc/signin.php?hsid=wootton</a></p>
<p>Enter as a guest and go to “college look up” or “acceptance history.” Other than for Cornell, Michigan, Tufts and Emory, we haven’t had a lot of luck with top colleges or IVY schools. Maybe because our student body is 40% Asian and made up of kids from successful parents, which might be held against us; however, it is undeniably harder to get into top schools from our high school than from a lot of lower tier schools.</p>
<p>Just so you can read the stats, grades are given one extra point if they were incurred in an honors or AP course. Thus, an “A” in an honors or AP course= 5points. Read over our admission record and compare it to other schools such as:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.collegeconfidential.com/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?5/77924[/url]”>http://www.collegeconfidential.com/cgi-bin/discus/show.cgi?5/77924</a></p>
<p>In particular check out our admission record for Harvard, Yale, Brown , Amhearst and Williams and especially MIT.</p>
<p>Taxguy, I can understand your frustration - especially since you’ve got a lot of high SAT scorers being rejected. That’s less true at our school - we’ve got more of a spread and many fewer top scorers. Also the 100 pt. grade system makes our applicants look more different from each other than they really are. Interestingly our Stanford/Harvard acceptence rates are just about exactly the reverse of yours. Two questions - how big is your school and what’s the average SAT? Ours has about 3000 students and 1080 average SAT score.</p>
<p>Our school district is the largest in our state. We have 18 large publics (with #19 opening in Fall 2007). There are also 6-8 large privates and who knows how many smaller ones. We have been told that when trying to gain admission to our flagship state u, it is to our disadvantage to be from this district. The district produces many great students but there are so many that Flagship U can’t take them all or half of the freshman class would be from our district. There are students here who get rejected who would more than likely be accepted if they were from a small high school in a rural part of the state.</p>
<p>Mathmom, we have a total of around 2400 kids, which average around 600 per class. Our average math and CR SAT scores last year were around 1232 with an additional 600+ + in the writing section.</p>
<p>taxguy: I just looked at your site, and would argue that with a few exceptions, your kids did great. At Brown, for example, 12 accepted out of 70 is an acceptance rate of 17% – a little higher than the national rate. Other examples of higher-than-national acceptance rates are Swarthmore (26%), Middlebury (37%), Stanford (14%), WashU (32%), Amherst (30%). And yes, the tippy top elites are low but – if 10 percent of your Harvard applicants had been accepted, that’s just 3 more kids there, and if 13% of the MIT applicants had been accepted, that would be 4 more kids. </p>
<p>As for the OP: Yes, I definitely think it is a disadvantage when a lot of kids from one school apply to the same college (assuming private and highly selective, of course). The only exception would be the top prep schools, and maybe some magnets. I think the more kids can spread around their aps, the better it is for each individual student.</p>
<p>I really do not see this as a big deal, at least for the ultra selective colleges where the average SAT score for the average non-hooked admit(think non-athlete, non-minority, non-celebrity, typical middle/upper middle class student) is pushing 2250. In a typical public/local private high school there will usually be only 2 or 3 students which stand a reasonable chance of admission and even they may be applying to a different slate of colleges.</p>
<p>I know at our public hs the year our son graduated 2 students were admitted by Princeton. One other that I personal knew applied ED and was waitlisted with an SAT score that was probably in the sub-1500 range. He is now attending Cornell seemed to be a much better match based on his hs record.</p>
<p>If you go down to the highly selective colleges such as Cornell, Penn, JHU, et al, there are many more of colleges in this category and while there will be more students in a typical hs which have a reasonably chance for admission, it will be even less likely that their slate of college applications will have significant overlap.</p>
<p>bluejay, I bumped up Papa Chicken’s AMAZING thread about the number of admits from high decile high schools. See ** Top 20 Matriculation** thread.
The answer is yes, for high schools that routinely send students to top universities there is an established quota. Harvard is not going to suddenly accept 15 kids from a school which historically sends 3.
I assume adcoms use a point mark down system; ie the more qualified candidates your school produces the higher the mark down on your GPA and SAT scores.</p>
<p>Okay, not too different in size, but a larger portion of high scorers. I have thought that our bright kids have a bit of an advantage in being part of a somewhat less stellar whole. Your numbers suggest this may well be true. BTW we have a 25% acceptance rate at Harvard whereas all our other acceptence rates are much more in line with the typical Ivy acceptence rates. I have no idea why.</p>