<p>If you are truly thinking pre-med, I’d recommend that you consider attending an undergraduate college where you will be in the top part of the class. You will have a higher GPA and possibly better recommendations when it is time to go to med school. </p>
<p>My son had everything and didn’t get in in iviies , it hurt but all happens for reason ! Believe in god. He has bigger and better plans </p>
<p>“All these threads make me wonder, is my school really out of the norm? I got to a public school of 400~ kids in a class and this year we had 10 MIT admits, 12 Cal Techs, 6 Yales, 3 Harvard, 5 Stanford, and 2 Princeton, albiet with overlaps. Everyone on CC emphasizes how difficult admission to Berkeley is yet we had ~40 admits this year. Before I came on CC I had the impression these schools everyone freaks out over are challenging but not that impossible to get into.”</p>
<p>Yes. Think about this for just one minute. Just to pick on Harvard, your school got 3 Harvard admits.</p>
<p>There are 30,000 high schools in the country. And I’ll leave aside home schoolers and international students for right now.</p>
<p>Do you really, seriously, honestly think the "average’ high school has 3 kids in Harvard? That Harvard admits 90,000 students a year?</p>
<p>Of course your hs is an exception. The vast majority of hs in this country never even have any kid who applies to schools of this caliber, much less have multiple acceptances. </p>
<p>The schools that send applicants to these top colleges are clustered and known, and the colleges go back to the same wells each year. </p>
<p>When we lived in DC area and my kids went to school there, the three private schools around us sent 33% of all kids to the Ivys, and if you included MIT, Stanford and top 3 LACs, the number jumped to 40+%. The top public schools were not too far behind with 25%.</p>
<p>Here is a 3 year-old article, but I bet the numbers are still the same and even more of these kids are applying. </p>
<p><a href=“Top high schools find admissions success - The Brown Daily Herald”>Top high schools find admissions success - The Brown Daily Herald;
<p>Yes. It’s a real shame, isn’t it? I can say that if I were an adcom, personally, I’d be the kind who would turn down yet-another-kid-from-Scarsdale to admit the kid from a high school where no one at the college ever came from. </p>
<p>She’s not black or Hispanic. There are kids with <30 ACT score who got into ivies because of the color of their skin.They didn’t even have athletics. </p>
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<p>It could be viewed as a shame, but that really depends on what you think your job is an adcom, or, more specifically, what one thinks is the fundamental purpose of colleges. </p>
<p>If you think colleges are more social institutions than educational institutions, then your approach makes sense. </p>
<p>However, if one thinks they are more educational institutions than social institutions, then the elite colleges will go to where they know they can depend on getting the best students to maintain their pedigree as the tops. This is exactly what they are doing.</p>
<p>Obviously, colleges are both educational and social institutions, but the top schools really are going to take but so much risk in accepting students who may not make it through successfully. In contrast, the known cohorts from the high schools they know produce the best future college graduates are safer to accept re less risky of not doing as well.</p>
<p>There is the business side as well. The top schools are in the top SES areas with the top earners. which means a steady supply of guaranteed future donors. It would be risky to take but so much less affluent or demographically unknown applicants because of the risk of donors donating fewer dollars per capita. </p>
<p>Oh, I think private colleges have every right to decide how they want to assemble their classes - if they want to rack and stack SAT’s, or move to a full-pay only structure, or not pursue geographical or ethnic or other diversity, hey, that’s fine with me. I’m just talking about what I, myself, would most likely do - even if subconsciously. </p>
<p>As someone who had few ties to my own high school, and whose kids don’t have ties to their high school, the continued “you are a reflection of your high school” or more accurately “the actions of other kids who you have nothing more in common other than your parents live in the same area reflect on you” is a bit annoying to me.</p>
<p>I understand the annoyance.</p>
<p>I’m always a little perplexed when people rant about test scores in the admission process. I’ve been at countless info sessions where the school clearly states that it is only part of the process. I’ve encountered students of all ethnicities who have been admitted to top schools with what some would consider below par testing and I’ve always assumed that other parts of their applications more than compensated for having a test score that may be below the mean. I keep hearing the word holistic. Do we think they’re lying? There are so many great stories out there of academic success I would hate to whittle it down to just testing. By the way it is evident that at the elite schools everyone is graduating at a high level regardless of ethnicity, 90 plus percent in the Ivy League according to the chronicle of higher education. </p>
<p>Colleges keep going back to the same high schools because those schools have a track record of producing students with strong scholastic excellence and achievement. For example, In New York City 29,000 eighth graders yearly sit for a test for admission to specialized public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science – and only the absolute top scorers are admitted, which is why statistically those high schools have an acceptance rate lower than HYPS and M. Ditto with schools like Thomas Jefferson High School, Boston Latin, etc. Colleges keep going back to the same schools because student-for-student those institutions are packed with more intellectual fire-power per square inch than the average high school, which is why Stuyvesant and Bronx Science produce more Intel Finalists, National Merit Finalists and Semifinalists than any other high school in the country. That’s why more half the kids graduate from those high schools and go on to the ivies and other top colleges – not because colleges ‘like’ those schools better.</p>
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Personally, I doubt if the first two reasons make the difference very often. They are very subjective, and the colleges can’t really tell how to evaluate them, especially the recommendations. I think the third explanation is closer to the mark: there are really a lot of students with good grades and scores and extracurriculars that are mostly in the high school, or in the local community. While the most selective schools take some kids like this, there are just too many of them, when you consider that there are also quite a few students with the grades and scores and significant national achievements, or various hooks. There doesn’t have to be anything “wrong” with a student’s application in order for this to be the result. Plus, if you really want to go to an Ivy League school (or schools at that level of selectivity), don’t apply to just two of them.</p>