Multiple applicants from same high school

cptofthehouse · December 3, 2006, 8:50pm

I think that it depends on the particular highschool and colleges involved. Most colleges do not care if there are so many kids from one highschool. As you go up the selectivity chart, that is when you start seeing some issues. 
For selective flagship type colleges, there are, in a sense, fewer seats for a number of highschools because most such state schools reserve blocks of seats for certain regions of their state, often the less represented, disadvantaged parts, sometimes the inner cities. That is the case with my husband’s home state and it holds for med school spots and also with some of the private schools as well as the flagship state u. By having those reserved block, it does lessen the numbers available for the rest of the state. However, I saw stats on where kids came from and there was no overt rationing. The numbers looked as they should have, except for the disadvantaged areas that have "held " spots.

I have seen large numbers of kids accepted at ivies, Harvard, in particular, from the same school. Not as an annual phenomonon. I suspect, though I have never seen it discusssed, that highly selective colleges do take into account the track records of kids from schools where they get a lot of applicants. It does not help anyone to take alot of kids from a school where kids too often cannot handle the workout. Conversely, all factors equal, when you know the kids from a particular school have a very high likelihood of success, they will get an edge. THat is why certain private schools, namely the old prep schools of the northeast had such direct feeds to the ivies. Yes, there were many relationships, legacies, development cases, but it also helped that a kid coming from those schools was generally going to breeze through the college without too many problems.

But small private schools can get a “run” on a small college that could hurt kids. I don’t think there is a magic number, per se, but there is a point where you just have two many familiar kids at an LAC if you take that many from the same school, which belies a part of the diversity goal of such colleges.

I would not be worried if there is just one or two candidates from the same school as my child’s. From everything I have heard and read that describe the way selective schools work, they do not stack the same school candidates together and compare them. That, in fact, is done at the end of a process to ensure that a blatant inequity has not occurred, and sometimes a kid can be “pulled in” by the acceptance of another kid at his school. It is just too easy to blame the dual applications on the non acceptance of a kid. Without seeing the rest of the pool, you really cannot say what else is out there. It is too easy to jump to anecdotal examples within a limited framework. 
Where we used to live, our public school district, not anywhere nearly as highly rated as Taxguy’s school, I used to shake my head at the so many outstanding kids that were turned down by ivies, and how few kids with those stats could get denied. THen I moved to the NYC area, and see a whole different ball game. The kids that were accepted to ivies in the suburban midwestern highschool where we used to lived don’t hold a candle (too many times, not always, of course) to the applicants from this area. This is Intel country, and the kids have ECs here on the national and international levels. Many have done high level professional work in their ECs. THere are much many more accepted at selective schools from here, deservedly so, and there are kids being turned down that make the ones that were accepted from our old area look rather puny. It has changed my perspective. It is not just grades and SATs that are at issue, but the quality of the ECs, the advanced courses, and types of experiences these kids get. And though it is a matter of huge debate each year here, no definitive answer can be given as to whether it is an advantage to live in this school district where so many kids go to selective schools. No verbal consensus anyways, but the economics point to people believing that it is advantageous. I say this because of the sales figures and selectivity to get to live here. And the type of people who make this their first choice school district. Not to say it is advantageous for every child, but it is pretty clear that not only many highly educated, informed, willing to do research families are willing to pay top dollar to live here. And the percentage of kids applying to the top schools is waaay up there as well as the accepts. It appears that a small group of schools is targeted for apps each year by this highschool, and yet, the kids are successful more times than usual.

calmom · December 3, 2006, 11:53pm

Taxguy, I found the scattergram for your school intriguing. One thing I noticed is that your school seems to deluge some colleges (not necessarily Ivies) with apps, while many excellent colleges, particularly LAC’s, seem to be almost ignored. I mean, only 21 apps to Amherst; only 1 to Smith; only 5 to Pomona; 3 to Harvey Mudd; 81 apps to Columbia, but only 10 to Barnard.

My daughter’s much smaller high school has a better “rate” of success, but far fewer applications. As far as I know only 2 applied to U. of Chicago this year, and both got in; there was 1 kid who applied to Yale, Harvard & Columbia as well as Swartmore and got into all of them (Asian student, by the way)-- I know of one other who applied to Columbia and was rejected, but I doubt that there were many others applying to the Ivies – it is very possible that there were no other applicants to Harvard & Yale. My d. applied to Brown and was rejected, which was certainly not unexpected - but I don’t know of any other applicants from her school. Just about every year that I can remember we have had 1 kid go off to an Ivy - either Harvard or Yale – a few to top east coast LACs, most of the rest to west coast colleges.

It seems to me that it is self-defeating for a single high school to have 40 or 60 or 90 kids applying to the same college (except for in-state publics of course). Your school had 120 apply to Boston U, for example – most of whom were accepted – but I still have to question what BU is supposed to do with all those Wootton apps. Somewhere along the line they have to tease out the applicants who are likely to attend from those who are using the school as a safety – the scattergram suggests that they have done exactly that, accepting many kids with lower GPAs & test scores over higher stat kids that they rejected.

It seems to me that the ideal thing for a highly competitive high school to do would be for the guidance counselor to become more proactive in guiding applications, looking at both individual preference and likelihood of admission to steer kids toward a more optimal set of schools. How many of the 53 who applied to Harvard are represented among the 81 who applied to Yale? Is it a coincidence that Columbia also has 81 apps, or are all the same kids applying to both Yale & Columbia?

If Harvard is going to accept 2 from Wooton, they are going to accept 2 no matter whether 10 apply or 50 apply. Sure, one year they may accept 4, and another year only 1 – but it is unlikely to fluctuate wildly from year to year. It’s pretty obvious from the scattergram that Harvard took the two who had the combination of the best rank and test scores… so it pretty much was a waste of an application fee for those with SATs under 1500 and/or GPAs under 4.5.

I can also see that no one with an SAT under 1400 got into Columbia, but Barnard accepted a girl with a high GPA but SAT around 1250. I can see that many with higher GPAs and SATs in the 1300-1400 range were rejected from Columbia. How many of those were women who would have had better chances at Barnard? (I know that the Columbia students and parents hate us Barnard folks for saying it, but it really IS the same place and the same name at the top of the degree – half of my daughter’s first semester courseload is at Columbia).

The point is: parents can bemoan the unfairness of it all they want, but to an outsider, it just looks like too darn many kids are applying to all the same schools. The GC ought to be able to know which kids have the best chances at various schools. I know that no kid wants to hear that they don’t have a chance because their GPA isn’t as amazing as the class val’s… but it looks pretty clear to me what is going on. If Wootton were the only school sending kid to Harvard, maybe more kids could compete - but obviously Harvard wants to leave spaces open for the kids from the other 5000 or so high schools who regularly apply every year – except for a few select feeder schools, they probably will take only 1 or 2 from any given high school, whether 2 or 200 apply.

carolyn · December 4, 2006, 12:06am

Calmom, As usual, you make an excellent point. The question, of course, is how much sway guidance counselors have in getting kids to apply to alternatives. Once a mass of kids/parents in a community decide that only certain schools are acceptable, it can be nearly impossible to sell alternatives, no matter how wonderful they are. I think this applies on a larger, regional scale as well – everyone starts running towards the same handful of schools, not stopping to think strategically about other, just as good, alternatives. Unfortunately, I think most guidance counselors are pretty powerless to stop that kind of mass hysteria and get students/parents to think more strategically. The only ones who can decide to step outside of the rush are students and parents themselves.

epiphany · December 4, 2006, 12:27am

“It is just too easy to blame the dual applications on the non acceptance of a kid. Without seeing the rest of the pool, you really cannot say what else is out there. It is too easy to jump to anecdotal examples within a limited framework.”

(You meant “blame the non-acceptance on dual applications.”) Yes, and that’s the point some of us were trying to make with regard to Jian Li, & with regard to arguments those who knew him were making on his behalf. The contest wasn’t “just” between him and a female at his school; rather, P may have valued both, but saw that the female had something positive not true of applicants NOT from that school. A person does not necessarily get waitlisted, or even rejected, because of deficiencies, but because competitors in the wider field may have atributes more desirable. Mathematically speaking, it may amount to the same result/equation, but it’s nevertheless an important distinction – & particularly in relation to a “complaint” being raised that assumes a negative, vs. the insufficiency of a positive.

I’ve spoken elsewhere in a previous application year about the advantage of regular e.c. competitive engagement: you don’t “lose” to your opponent so much as he/she “wins.” And it doesn’t matter what you do as a stand-alone; you are forever in a comparative contest. That is why perfect scores are not “enough.” Someone else will have perfect scores + something you don’t have, or near-perfect scores & something you don’t even know he or she has.

taxguy · December 4, 2006, 12:31am

Sly_vt notes, “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%”

Response: Sly, don’t look at the percentage that got accepted. Look at how high they needed for both GPA and SATs, especially for MIT, Yale, Brown and Princeton and top LACS. We definetely needed more than most other schools.
One thing I noticed is that your school seems to deluge some colleges (not necessarily Ivies) with apps, while many excellent colleges, particularly LAC’s, seem to be almost ignored. I mean, only 21 apps to Amherst; only 1 to Smith; only 5 to Pomona; 3 to Harvey Mudd; 81 apps to Columbia, but only 10 to Barnard. "

Calmom also noted, “The point is: parents can bemoan the unfairness of it all they want, but to an outsider, it just looks like too darn many kids are applying to all the same schools”

Response: This is why having many more applications from the same high school is detrimental, which is the theme of this thread. I certainly understand why you would feel that the guidance counselors are not doing their job. However, it probably isn’t their job to discourange kids who are really top notch and have higher SATs and GPAs than what would normally be required from applying to top schools. Moreover, it would be political suicide to suggest that these kids should apply to lessor tier schools because they are coming from a top, competitive high school.

Epiphany notes,"I’ve spoken elsewhere in a previous application year about the advantage of regular e.c. competitive engagement: you don’t “lose” to your opponent so much as he/she “wins.”

Response: I don’t think this is true. Despite having fabulous SATs compared to other schools, top notch ECs and GPAs, and top notch ranking of our high school, not to mention successes in college, our high school kids don’t get into the top schools as much as found in other lessor high schools year after year. Just compare the two naviance sites that I cited above.

epiphany · December 4, 2006, 12:48am

taxguy, I’d have to know a lot more about the school in question, as well as the students in the school, to respond intelligently to what you just said, but for now, I don’t necessarily think that my point can be dismissed entirely. I say that because I know of schools in my area with attributes such as you describe, & they also do not have a tremendous Ivy-admit, etc. success rate. Nor do I know what kind of relationship with colleges your school has, nor how proactive the GC is, etc. There are an awful lot of factors that go into a strong acceptance history, than “great SAT’s,” “great e.c.'s,” and “top ranking.”

For example, my D’s school has a fab reputation, but has not had a fab history of seeking to make relationships with top schools, getting info out to students about those schools, etc. It just happens that there are always between a few & a couple of dozen outstanding, Ivy-level graduates each year, most of whom get guidance from well-read parents, but almost never from the school itself. That’s the only reason that somewhere between 2 and 6 get sent to Ivies/MIT/S each yr, from a small class.

Motherdear · December 4, 2006, 1:05am

Taxguy,

Do all the schools in Montgomery County use Naviance? How is it linked to your school’s website?

calmom · December 4, 2006, 1:42am

Taxguy, colleges look at GPAs and SATs in the context of the school that they come from. It wouldn’t be fair for kids from my daughter’s public high school to have the same SAT or GPA as kids from Wootton – her high school didn’t offer the same advantages – the highest math at her school is trigonometry, there are no AP sciences and woefully equipped labs, so even the regular science classes are weak. But there is no reason to assume that the valedictorian at her high school has any less potential to do well than the val at Wootton.

If SATs were applied to compare students from different types of high schools and different communities, the Ivies would quickly revert to simply being schools for the elite and privileged, as only the children of affluent parents would even have access to the education required to put them in a competitive position.

If the GPAs were compared across the board, then students at some of the more rigorous schools would be at a disadvantage, simply because their schools are tougher.

So while there may be across-the-board comparison of students from similar schools, each student is going to be evaluated in the context of the educational environment they are coming from.

epiphany · December 4, 2006, 1:55am

taxguy, I spoke too soon. I had to return to page one & click on the link before I realized it was Wooton. I do know about your school’s reputation, & they’ve been cited in the WSJ. But I think this is an example of “too many” extremely qualified applicants applying to the same school(s). I think that where there’s a greater spread of achievement level, the acceptance rate is better because of the clarity of standing out. It’s almost as if the alternative for a H or P (to picking one or two per year) would be to pick all or most of the qualified applicants, which as you know they couldn’t justify or have room for. We have a public near us that’s similar: very difficult to differentiate the stars from the almost-stars.

I’m glad your D is happy at her non-RISD school, that it worked out.

sly_vt · December 4, 2006, 9:10am

Taxguy: Why shouldn’t I focus on the percent that was accepted? I’m not convinced that your HS is so superior to others in the country that its students’ grades and SAT scores should be weighted heavier than other HS in the country, or that its kids should be accepted at a much higher rate than kids nationwide. And, you are focusing on SATs and GPAs – perhaps I am thinking too much of the Jian Li thread, but there is a lot more to college acceptances than these statistics. And, if GPAs are inflated at your school (I don’t know this, I said ‘if’) and the if the colleges know this, then yes, kids from your school would need higher GPAs to get accepted.

I did the same type of analysis as Calmom did, and came up with the exact same conclusion (but was too lazy to write it up). Too many kids applying to the same top schools. There seem to be 10+ kids applying to the elites each year. It’s unrealistic to expect that more than 10% of those kids will get in – no matter how high their grades and SATs are. 20 years ago, the situation was very very different. But in today’s environment – there is a reason these schools are considered highly selective. So again, looking at the acceptance rates for all but a few places, I think Wooten does very well.

I went to a very large HS (800 in my graduating class), and we had multiple applicants to many schools. So I can guess what it is like at Wooten and other large high schools. I’m sure it’s very frustrating when 10-20 other kids fall in love with your dream school, and you are ranked lower than most of them. The reality of college admissions today is that a student in that situation has to realize that a highly selective college is unlikely to accept a dozen kids from one school, and so find other schools to apply to.

My daughter’s school is the opposite – it is very, very small. And yet, unbelievably, sometimes a lot of kids apply to one school. I know one year 7 kids out of 100 applied to Brown. I knew that only one would get in, if that. And sure enough, only one did – the valedictorian. It is very very rare at our HS for more than one kid to be accepted to a highly selective college (we had 3 get into BC last year, and the GC almost fainted). And so, going back to the OP – I was very relieved that for a lot of the schools my daughter is applying to, she is the only one from her school to do so. And both this year and last year, some kids were very conscious of this; I actually heard one of her friends say she wasn’t going to look at school x for ED because that was where Janey was applying. And my daughter is not applying to a school that is the ED choice of one of her best friends.

MarathonMan88 · December 4, 2006, 9:32am

I wonder if part of the reason that it appears harder for students from large feeder schools that send lots of apps to the same colleges to gain admittance is not that there are too many from the same school, but rather, that, being from the same school, they’ll line up on on so many other measures as well. They likely won’t have geography going for them; they probably send relatively few URM; they may even have similar ECs (if for example the school is noted for its music or Science Olympiad or whatever).

In other words, in a world of category admissions, a lot of them wind up in the same category of the applicant pool, and it’s a category where the competition is stiffer. It’s cold comfort for the students, but maybe it’s not entirely a funciton of the HS that they attended.

mathmom · December 4, 2006, 9:42am

Sometimes I think it can depend on whichever admissions officer does the initial read. There was some story like that in The Gatekeepers. It was quite clear that different admissions officers liked different things, and also that some committees reflected those individual biases more than others.

taxguy · December 4, 2006, 9:48am

Motherdear notes,“Do all the schools in Montgomery County use Naviance? How is it linked to your school’s website?”

Response: I can’t speak for all Montgomery County school ,but I don’t think that all of them have Naviance yet.

Sly_Vt notes,“I did the same type of analysis as Calmom did, and came up with the exact same conclusion (but was too lazy to write it up). Too many kids applying to the same top schools.”

Sly_Vt also notes,“if GPAs are inflated at your school (I don’t know this, I said ‘if’) and the if the colleges know this, then yes, kids from your school would need higher GPAs to get accepted.”

Response: I don’t think that Wootton has grade inflation. They just have too many motivated smart kids. Don’t forget, our school is 40% Asian and most of the rest are from successful parents. These kids work interminably. Our school culture is to work very hard and to have musical ECs. They are among the most driven kids around. The only problem with our school is our horrible football team. You know our team is bad when the fans root for the marching band!

I do agree with your premise that there are too many kids applying to the top schools. This supports my thesis,which is the theme of this thread, that large numbers of applications from the same high school to the same top schools hurts admission.

In our school, it goes even further. If you check out our admission statistics from our Naviance site for MIT, Yale, Princeton and Harvard, Amhearst, Williams and even Haverford, we have had abysmally low admission rates when compared to other schools. Even to get into Brown, our students generally needed at least 1500 on the SATs,which is also higher than that found at other schools noted in my naviance posts.

We had two twins who were valedictorians, had 1480 on their SATS (800 math and 680 verbal), had strong musical ECs. They applied to 13 schools each, most of which were the top ivys and LACS. They got into Emory and Tufts- Period! One finally got into Weslyan off the wait list. If you check out the other Naviance sites, had they gone to lesser tiered schools, these twins probably would have had better success.

For the record, both twins are doing better than 3.6 at their respective schools ( Tufts and Weslyan) and one is expecting a 4.0.

Did these other schools have less applicants to the same top schools? I don’t have the answer to that question.

mathmom · December 4, 2006, 9:50am

10 plus students applying from a class of 600 doesn’t see unreasonable to me - that’s just 2% of the class. The top 2% of the class should think they have a shot at the top schools.

cangel · December 4, 2006, 9:55am

Taxguy, do you have any feeling for how many kids are cross-admits? Did the 2 kids getting into Harvard get into Yale and Penn and Dartmouth as well? I did not look at that many scattergrams, but I thought the students did well, EXCEPT, at Harvard and Yale.
How much does athletics impact this? I’m sure the highly ranked schools have limited recruiting budgets, and if they can go to certain schools and get impact players who also have 3.9 GPAs and 1520 SATs, they will go back to those schools year after year. I think this may be part of the continuing clout of the NE prep schools. The Dartmouth lacrosse coach can get in the car and drive down to St Paul, and watch a game, size up the players. If there is a player s/he likes, he knows that student is attending a very rigorous prep program, etc., a known quantity. He can’t drive to Rockville. Also, do they develop relationships with areas and coaches, just because they have met one another? My D is at a very far away selective college. There are 2 other students in her year from our area - an unheard of number (as if you had 30 admitted to Harvard in one year) - the 2 young men were recruited for sports. I have no idea how the coach found them, other than he had to have known someone who knew someone who came down here to look, or a parent sent in a tape, etc. But, you know what, after the 3 of them matriculated, the school now sends a regular rep to make a fall visit - which did not happen at all when D was in high school.

cangel · December 4, 2006, 9:57am

Taxguy, we cross-posted, you may have answered part of my question - get some of those tuba players onto the football field ;).

calmom · December 4, 2006, 9:59am

Mathmom, you might remember from The Gatekeepers that there was one admissions officer assigned to a geographic region, so he generally was the first reader for all schools within his region. You might also remember that he developed close personal relationships with the g.c.'s at feeder school, and the g.c.'s made sure to push their favorites very early in the process.

One element that may be overlooked is the degree of control a high school g.c. may have in the process – it seems to me to be a relatively easy task for a g.c. to telegraph to an ad com which students are the g.c.'s picks for a given college, and which are most likely to attend if admitted.

calmom · December 4, 2006, 10:05am

Not at schools that typically don’t admit students who rank below the top 5 in their class. (I mean top 5 students, not top 5%). Look how admissions likelihood correlates to rank at Brown:
<a href=“Undergraduate Admission | Brown University”>Undergraduate Admission | Brown University;

I’m sure top 2% from a big school would be fine if the students weren’t all competing against one another – but among several similar applicants (similar interests, similar EC’s, etc.), in the absence of another hook, the ad com is almost always going to go for the higher ranked.

mathmom · December 4, 2006, 10:16am

Calmom, Ack and my son is number 7! Don’t say that!

I do remember that Wesleyan did admissions geographically, but other schools had different systems. As I recall Cornell had two professors, not an admissions committee per se. I know for Columbia’s architecture grad school it was completely random who read what. We just pulled the top application off the pile and every application got read by two professors and one student. I don’t think that’s probably typical for HYP undergrad, but I do know that we would have no way of knowing how many kids were accepted from one school unless someone went and cleaned up after us. (They may well have - I can’t remember.)

calmom · December 4, 2006, 10:20am

Well, its not impossible – if your son is applying to Brown, that still gives him at least a 14% chance of admission. It’s just that if the class val applies, statistically the val will have almost twice the likelihood of admission. Of course it’s a fallacy to look at only one variable, but that’s pretty much all we can do with single-variable tables.

I’d think that grad school admissions would be very different than undergrad admissions – the entire process is quite different. For one thing, you don’t have to worry about whether any of the architecture students can throw a ball or play the tuba, and presumeably they all want to study architecture rather than, say, french literature.

It seems to me that most of the colleges that my kids had admissions officers assigned by region. Whether those regional officers were also assigned to give the first read of the applications, I don’t know. But since it is helpful to know something about the high school when reading the app, it woud make sense in terms of efficiency to have the same people reading apps from the same high schools.

Multiple applicants from same high school

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