<p>Micro differences in school culture can make a lot of difference. </p>
<p>As I often say, my kids attended two very different schools about 1.5 miles apart, one private and one public. Chicago was and remains very popular at the private school. My daughter’s 4th grade classroom (actually, a vertical 4-5) had 24 kids in it, and five of them wound up at the University of Chicago, along with two others from what would have been her graduating class there, along with two other kids from her ballet class across the street. </p>
<p>The public school had a number of kids who were academically and even demographically indistinguishable from the private school kids, but my children are the only Chicago students from there in the past decade. It’s not that my kids weren’t popular and respected – they were both – but the mindset of the good students at the public school was much more “Harvard or home” (“Harvard” meaning Harvard, Yale, or MIT, and “home” meaning Penn or Temple.) The few good students who didn’t have that attitude wound up picking Stanford, Cornell, or Brown, or a full ride at the Pitt honors program, over Chicago, although several of them were accepted. In my son’s class of 500+, only two people went farther away to college than he did, and one of them was only about 30 miles farther away, at Beloit. It takes more than some enthusiastic chats to make a dent in that culture.</p>