<p>Cangel notes,“do you have any feeling for how many kids are cross-admits”</p>
<p>Cangel also notes,“How much does athletics impact this?”</p>
<p>Response: I can’t answer the question about cross-admits. As for the athletics, you may have hit upon a good point. For some reason, kids with athletic ECs tend to have a better shot at the top colleges. Our kids don’t normally have a lot of athletic ECs.</p>
<p>In this thread, an Oberlin admission’s officer noted,“One of the applicants is among 12 from the same high school and the committee pauses to compare his academic record with those of his peers.”</p>
<p>Response: Thus, if a school gets a number of applicants from the same school, admission’s officers seem to compare them. They can’t help it.</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s any question that the best possible situation is to be the only (or the only qualified) applicant from a high school that’s familiar to the admissions committee and where there’s some sort of relationship. Unfortunately, not everyone can swing that.</p>
<p>The next best is probably to be one of the top five applicants from a school like Exeter, Harvard-Westlake, or Stuyvesant, and to be applying to one of the schools that regularly has double-digit numbers of kids from those places accepted and attending. That seems to work OK, too.</p>
<p>In many cases, I don’t think it works against kids if, say, there is a recruited athlete in their class. While I have seen situations where the athlete is the only kid accepted, say, to Princeton, I have also seen situations where a school that usually only gets 0-2 acceptances at Princeton gets three in the year where one of them is a recruited athlete.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that Harvard and other top schools ration the number of kids they accept from a given school. I see too much variance in the schools I know from year to year. </p>
<p>The use of class rank and the importance of difficulty of classload automatically put kids into comparison with their classmates, even those who do not apply to the same college. When you get down to the last handful of kids that a college is examining to accept or not, I think they are all compared directly with each other. So in the end, having kids from the same school can have a detrimental effect on your app, but I don’t think it is an “always” statement. Kids who are well in the accept range are readily accepted without regard to their peers. It’s when they have to get down to splitting hairs that everything gets examined. And yet going to a school that traditionally gets a lot of kids into the ivies and other selective school can “up” the chances of a kid’s getting into such school. You have the rep of the school and the relationship of the counselors and precedent on your side. You have more competion as a detriment. It is really hard to know which way to go is better until the actual moment of judgemnent. Makes it impossible to stratagize accuratedly to enhace your kids’ chances for high level school acceptanaces.<br>
From what I have seen in many small schools, it is not a problem when just one or two kids apply to the same school. Just seen too many accepted in that scenario. I know that our school, it does not bother the college counselors one minute. However, a rush of applicants to the same tiny LAC would result in some kids who would have been accepted, get rejected. I think a GC or parent should directly address the admissions offices of selective schools about this, addressing he regional adcom who will be looking at the apps. If he can look you in the face and say it makes no difference, when he looks at the apps, he may remember the statement. It has been my experience that these adcoms do not tell direct lies as a rule, but some of their answers that are for a general scenario can be misleading for a specific case.<br>
By the way, I have directly asked some adcoms, and college counselors of several competitive high schools, and they do not consider it an iota of a problem to have several </p>
<p>This issue has been bugging me since I found out that 24 kids (including my son and two of his best friends) applied early to Yale, another 29 applied early to Penn. I think this is ridiculous – even though our school does have a good relationship with both schools (13 and 15 accepted last year, respectively), it cannot help you to be in such a large pool of applicants. Five of the 24 have already received nods for athletics, so now maybe another 5 have a shot at EA. So who “wins” – the girl with the 2390 SAT, the boy who’s editor in chief of an award winning newspaper (and a science award winner), the girl who’s the talented singer-songwriter of a band, or, I hope, my son who’s state president of a national student-run organization? Personally, I think the college counselors should have gotten together, poured over those 24 (and the 29 to Penn) and maybe urged some to reconsider their decisions to give everyone a better chance.</p>
<p>taxguy, just something to maybe keep in perspective, if it applies. The scattergram you linked shows Wootton results for 4 yrs, I believe? Was that not the start of the Boomlet deluge of excellence onto colleges, and the beginning of a shift in priorities by admissions committees – away from the historical preference of E.Coast high schools, toward a wider geography? I guess I’d be more inclined to agree that results are bad relative to the product of Wootton if I could see a longer history, or if you know of it. High schools in the East with formerly excellent patterns began to suffer major at the least 3 yrs. ago, according to CC’ers, with “massacres” in the ED and RD rounds. That also resulted in some strategy shifts by students to select second-tier ED schools to assure a spot.</p>
<p>TaxGuy,
What’s your sense of whether Wootton students are not only competing for spots among themselves, but also against all the other high schools and progrrams in MoCo? Can I PM you?</p>
<p>Burn This, it ain’t gonna work. The counselors at our highschool go through this each year, and the kids won’t budge. The feeling is why should they not have the chance which is still pretty good compared to the general population applying? And they have a point. By withdrawing their apps, they are bringing down their chances to zilch, MAYBE upping the chances of those who won’t budge. So they let the colleges make the decisions. If your school is one with that many kids accepted each year, there will be some communications with the counselors under the radar screen. What would your reaction have been if the counselor asked your kid to withdraw his app, while acknowledging that the app standing alone has a chance of acceptance, but it hurts the group as a whole, and it is there opinion that he is one of the weaker ones in this group?</p>
<p>Epiphany notes,“The scattergram you linked shows Wootton results for 4 yrs, I believe? Was that not the start of the Boomlet deluge of excellence onto colleges, and the beginning of a shift in priorities by admissions committees – away from the historical preference of E.Coast high schools, toward a wider geography?”</p>
<p>Response: I can’t answer your question since the Naviance site , which shows the graph,doesn’t show who was accepted by year. You do raise an interesting issue.</p>
<p>Counting down notes,“What’s your sense of whether Wootton students are not only competing for spots among themselves, but also against all the other high schools and progrrams in MoCo”</p>
<p>Response: I would guess, and this is a guess, that they are also competing against others from MoCo. Yes, you can PM me.</p>
<p>“What would your reaction have been if the counselor asked your kid to withdraw his app, while acknowledging that the app standing alone has a chance of acceptance, but it hurts the group as a whole, and it is there opinion that he is one of the weaker ones in this group?”</p>
<p>I wish they’d asked my son to apply to Harvard (or Princeton) instead of Yale! My son’s major EC is in an area Harvard has shown interest in (the other four people with the same EC experience over the past two years all ended up there). I don’t know how to judge him since our school doesn’t give out class rank (he was one of only about ten invited to a Morehead Scholarship meeting), but I think his is higher than the others who applied and his SAT is below that one girl (the 2390) but at or above everyone else in this group.</p>
<p>Actually his first choice is MIT - our school doesn’t have a scattergram for MIT because not enough kids have applied in the past, but I know 2/5 were accepted with comparable grades and scores. I know of one other (a girl who does research) who is applying EA this year. I think she probably has an edge over my kid, but I think there’s a decent chance they’ll accept both of them. I’m hoping that the other top six kids aren’t looking so hard at Tech schools. Scuttlebutt is that Brown is hard to get into from our school - but they accepted 20% of our applicants. I think Taxguy is right that it’s not really an advantage in the admissions game to go to a large public magnet high school. I think there still is an advantage to going to the traditional New England Prep schools.</p>
<p>They should have let everyone know of the bottleneck situation, in my opinion, parents as well as kids, and then be open to discussion on an individual basis.</p>
<p>One observation I had about the Wootton scattergrams (Wootton has always had a reputation as a superb school, even did when my husband went to a neighboring high school) is that there were relatively fewer students with HIGHER SATs and GPAs than those who were ultimately accepted actually rejected by Yale, Harvard, etc. And the SATs/GPAs of those accepted are pretty much on par with the means of all students within ethnic groups accepted to these Ivies overall. Whether or not this high “bar” is the same across high schools, I don’t know. So, much is made of the “competition” between large numbers of applications from the same high school, but the truth is that not all the applications are competitive.</p>
<p>My D graduated from a very small private high school with mean SAT ~1350 on the old scale, class size usually 60 to 70 students. Generally, about 10 to 15% go to Ivies…almost uniformly, these are the kids with at least 1500 on the SAT or the equivalent on the ACT, have super high GPA with at the very least 5 AP classes (note there is NO weighting of GPA at her school), and are leaders and/or have special athletic or artistic ECs. The classes in which fewer of the kids meet these standards have fewer accepted. In my D’s class, 4 applied to Yale and 3 were accepted (the 4th was NOT in the top 20% of the class), 3 applied to Harvard (2 cross-applications with Yale) and all 3 were accepted, 3 applied to Princeton (one cross-application with Harvard, none with Yale) and all 3 were accepted. Interestingly, none of the 3 went to Harvard ultimately. The previous year, there was only one accepted to Harvard and one to Yale, none to Princeton from > 6 applications to each. That year 10 applied to Penn and 3 were accepted. The 10 applicants were not equivalent in terms of SAT/GPA/ECs. One of the 3 that were accepted to Penn applied to all 8 Ivies, had 1600 SAT, 36 ACT, near 4.0 GPA, no real ECs and was rejected by ALL Ivies except Penn, and rejected by MIT and Stanford. Perfect scores and perfect grades are obviously not enough for these schools.</p>
<p>The problem with the blanket statement that too many applications from the same school diminishes every applicant’s chances of acceptance is that the applications are not equal. The real question, I think, is what % of students with the same SAT/GPA/EC qualities gets accepted (or rejected)? The fact that a kid with a 1400 SAT, 3.8 GPA, and average ECs gets rejected when another kid from his/her school with 1550 SAT, 4.2 GPA, and star acting credits gets accepted does NOT mean that there was a quota for students from that high school.</p>
<p>Quiltguru, I think your situation is very different. If you check into the acceptance statistics of top colleges and the percentage of kids from private schools attending ivys, you would see that there is a much greater percentage of kids from private schools in top colleges. I mentioned this on a thread about a year or so ago.</p>
<p>The reason was pointed out by a former trustee of Yale. Although msny schools are “need blind” when it comes to admission, kids from private high schools are normally from wealthy parents. Thus, by taking a higher percentage of kids from private schools, top colleges know that there will be very few kids that will qualify for need-based schorships. It is a “catch-22.” If kids don’t qualify for need based aid, the schools can “proudly” say that they have need-blind admission, while quietly selecting many kids who probably won’t need the aid. </p>
<p>Now you know why your Daughter’s high school has a much higher admission rate than those kids from our high school. Welcome to the world of Holistic Admission.</p>
<p>Actually, taxguy, I think the reason her high school has a higher admission rate is that the average SAT and GPA of applicants is much higher than the average SAT and GPA of applicants from Wootton. Those students who were accepted from Wootton had nearly identical SAT and GPA to those who were accepted from her school. In terms of parental income, I suspect the average income of parents of Wootton high school students (Montgomery Co…we used to live there) is MUCH higher that the average income of parents of her private high school and I know adcoms know that. Looking at Wootton’s scattergram, all students accepted to Yale except one had SAT approx 1550 and weighted GPA 4.66. Only 2 students with statistics higher than that were outright rejected and one was waitlisted. A 50% acceptance rate for equivalent students is pretty darn good.</p>
<p>Quiltguru, unlike your school, I would bet that we didn’t have 10-15% of kids with 1500+ SATs and strong GPAs get into IVYs.</p>
<p>You have noted that 4 applied to Yale and 3 were accepted. We don’t have anyway near that number of total acceptances to Yale from a much larger population of top kids. I can assure you that we had more than 3 kids with SATs of 1500+. In fact, we probably had 30+ kids that met that criteria each year; yet, we have had few acceptances, if any, each year.</p>
<p>As I mentioned in a prior post above, we had two twins with perfect 4.0 GPA who took mostly honors and AP classes. They had the same SATs too: 800 math, 680 verbal and over 700 in the writing,although I don’t know how much over 700. They applied to 13 schools each and only got initially accepted to Tufts and Emory. Not one ivy took them.</p>
<p>Check out MIT in our naviance site. We get a lot of tremendous math-science kids each year applying to MIT. We are lucky if we get one kid every two years into MIT despite having some of the best science and math kids in the state. In fact, our kids win or place in national physics and chemistry competitions almost every year.</p>
<p>For Yale, we have had two kids get admitted (not counting waitlist) over the last 4 years despite a huge number of kids with 1500+ SATs. This is not two kids per year, but two kids over the last four years. Check out our Naviance site.</p>
<p>For Harvard, we just recently got 2 kids accepted. Over the previous three years, we had no kids accepted to Harvard. None, Zilch!</p>
<p>Tell me Quiltguru, did your daughter’s high school have the same results?</p>
<p>I know that when I attended a small New England prep school in the early 80s that contacts had a big influence on admissions. Our college admissions counselor sat us down individually and told us where he could get us in, which was obviously based more on who he knew where than on any concept of fit or stats. I have to believe the network of contacts between prep schools and elite colleges hasn’t faded away on one generation.</p>
<p>Taxguy, I think you may misunderstand. Looking at the scattergram for Yale, it is a little hard to count the data points, but I think I see 10-12 students with SAT/GPA combinations at or above the level of the average of accepted and waitlisted/deferred students. Three of these students were accepted and one waitlisted/deferred, that’s about 25%. Now we don’t know if there were a large number of additional students that had the same combo of GPA and SATs that did NOT apply to Yale, and therefore we do not know what their outcome would be. The data seems to say that students with both a high GPA and SAT have a roughly 25% admit rate to Yale, much higher than all comers, and that students from Wootten with high grades and lower SATs are admitted at rates similar to or perhaps less than the overall pool. Also, high SATs and lower GPAs don’t help.
What may be frustrating, Taxguy, is that kids with lower GPAs and >1500 SATs from other schools get admitted at seemingly higher rates than Wootten students. I’m not implying that there is grade inflation at Wootten, but that applicants genuinely are rated based on the courses available to them, and that weightings may be stripped off. In other words, they know that because of weighting and course availability at Wootten, a 4.0 is not a stratospheric GPA, but a 4.6 is. At my D’s school, a 4.6 was numerically impossible.</p>
<p>Cangel, first we haven’t gotten any kids into Yale since 2003! None, Zilch. This alone is startling.</p>
<p>Secondly, take a look at all the kids that had a weighted average of 4.4 or better ( which translates to a 3.9+ unweighted) and SATs of 1500 or above. It is far fewer than the 25% figure that you noted for acceptance.</p>
<p>Third, take a look at MIT, Brown and Harvard too.</p>
<p>Honestly, I don’t know what the reason are for kids from Wootton having to have higher SATs and GPAs than kids from other schools. Maybe there is a bit of grade inflation. I would suggest the following reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>Very few of our kids get good athletic ECs, which seems to be an important factor for ivy admission.</li>
<li>Wootton may not have good contacts with the top school. Wootton tends to be a bit elitist. They have a bit of a “Fields of Dreams” mentality.Their attitude is “if we educate our kids well enough, they will find us.”</li>
<li>Wootton does not have many URMs in the traditional sense. 40% is Asian and most of the rest are from wealthy households.</li>
<li>Far too many kids with superlative SATs and GPA apply to the same top schools from Wootton,which I really think is a disadvantage to everyone.</li>
<li>Wootton is a public school. I think that if it were a private school, they would have higher acceptance rates with top colleges, in my humble opinion.</li>
</ol>
<p>Depends on the high school. Some people claim that there can be only one or two kids from each school, but if you go to a top private, you realize this certainly isnt the case.</p>
<p>Taxguy, I see 4 admits to Yale, including one with a 1450 SAT who I left out of my 25%, because I was looking at the average admittee and those with similar combinations of SAT/GPA, plus 4 who were waitlisted or deferred, but not admitted. What am I missing???</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with many of your conclusions, I think it may well be harder for a student from a highly competitive public magnet to stand out from “his crowd”, many of whom will be his own classmates, but I’m not sure the Naviance data entirely support that either.</p>