<p>I’ve seen those annecdotes on CC but certainly never heard anything remotely similar in the private hs where I’ve had kids for the past four years. The GC never imposed any sort of limits on any student as to where they could apply. I think plenty of wealthy connected parents wish she would do that – but no.</p>
<p>jonri …</p>
<p>thank you for the shot of reality. I have a gut feeling that most GCs do exactly what happened to the kids you mentioned … but most of the time they smile and put a nice face forward without telling us the reality of the situation. Frankly, I prefer to have the candid conversation and to now where we stand.</p>
<p>How refreshing!</p>
<p>but sometimes those connections can work wonders too. Friends kid was the token middle class scholarship student at one of the most prestigious day schools in NYC. She was waitlisted at WUSTL like so many other kids.
After one of her classmates turned down her acceptance, the school GC made contact with WUSTL to secure the spot for my friends kid.</p>
<p>My gut feeling is that alot of these private school GC’s have a ball park figure as to how many of their kids will be accepted by school X. I wouldn’t be surprised if these kids are “rated” and accepted in some type of order. Therefore the GC’s may try to steer kids to apply to certain schools and try to limit the amount of applications going to a particular college.<br>
for- the rest of us public school parents: it’s usually just a handful of kids that get into very selective colleges. One year we got about 10 kids into the Ivy’s out of 300 grads. That was a banner year.</p>
<p>
IMO Another argument in favor of the public school system. I think the colleges should do the “ratings” after a fair appraisal by the GC. Paying extra to give a single arbitrary GC that kind of power over my kid’s future? Uhhhh…NO.</p>
<p>Heck. The politics at public school are bad enough. daddy donor’s kid vs. my scholarship suzie? Uh-uh. Not gonna happen.</p>
<p>Many of our students believe there is a quote system that certain state schools have. While it may look that way to them, the truth is that if they have the grades, scores, ECs, essays and recommendations, there is a strong possibility that they will gain admission to those schools. The GC never imposes limits on our kids, my son said. He will give advice, but he never tells a kid that he cannot get into a particular school. He will, however, be honest about it if he thinks it is a real reach.</p>
<p>Jonri, I’m not that surprised by your story. When I was on the admissions committee for the architecture grad school at Columbia we got a number of recommendations from one school written by the same professor. He basically ranked the students. Even though I know teachers and GCs probably have their (perfectly legitimate) favorites, I found his directness rather off-putting. I didn’t want to know if you take three, take these three, if you take four take these four. </p>
<p>My sil felt her son (at a highly regarded private school in DC) got shortchanged by the school’s advising. He was a student with top scores, and excellent, but not tippy top grades and ECs. From my viewpoint he didn’t do so badly - yes he didn’t get into his first choice (MIT) - but they steered him to Rice where he’s thriving. </p>
<p>I do think many private schools have an edge when it comes to getting kids off waitlists.</p>
<p>I do not know if it’s a “quota” per se but the top old-line northeast prep schools have centuries-old associations with the top Ivies. The number of students being accepted from these schools is way out of whack with the numbers being admitted from other, comparable schools . If the number falls off in a given year, these prep school, and their influential co-Alums (sometimes co-trustees), are all over the Ivy demanding explanations, remedies etc. For other top HSs, in other parts of the country or new england for that matter, the acceptances come in far, far fewer numbers. College Admissions is familiar with these schools too (i.e., they are well aware of those schools that have been successful in placing applicants in the past) and they stack up the top applicants from each of these schools and compare them (not only to the overall pool) but also to one another. Given the paucity of “slots” available, applicants from these schools, are frequently helped or harmed by who else is applying from that particular HS, even to the point of admissions preferring the valedictorian to the salutatorian.</p>
<p>Well, sorry but our recent experience with our daughter totally contradicts these speculations regarding private hs GCs brokering berths for favored students at top schools. My daughter was on scholarship, not a “lifer” at the K-12 private school and very un-connected in terms of the old money families who fund the endowment and basically run the school. Nevertheless, the GC supported my D (who was ranked first in her class and had perfect test scores) in applying to eleven total schools, including HYPS. She simply could not have been more supportive. There was certainly some upset among some students and their parents over my daughter’s applications, some talk of her “blocking” their own applications. We even asked the GC about this last winter when D was wondering whether or not to just accept her EA acceptance and pull the plug on her other applications. She told my daughter that she owed it to herself to follow through with all her applications and weight all her options in the spring.</p>
<p>Maybe there are private high schools that play the game as described on this thread. But I can’t help but notice that most of the descriptions here about this sort of thing going on are from people whose kids attended public hs, not private. I think there is a tendency to imagine all sorts of advantages and networks that come with private school when your kids aren’t in private school. We found that the only real advantage - and it was a big one - was the very rigorous curriculum that admissions people seem to respect.</p>
<p>For s**ts and giggles:</p>
<p>Top 10 “feeder schools”, all of which are private, and the percentages of their graduating classes (2003) who attended either Harvard, Princeton, or Yale (thanks to Worth Magazine): </p>
<ol>
<li>Roxbury Latin School, West Roxbury, Mass.; 21.11 percent. </li>
<li>Brearley School, New York; 20.90 percent. </li>
<li>Collegiate School, New York; 20.00 percent. </li>
<li>Groton School, Groton, Mass.; 17.86 percent. </li>
<li>Dalton School, New York; 17.58 percent. </li>
<li>Spence School, New York; 17.16 percent. </li>
<li>Horace Mann School, the Bronx, N.Y.; 16.77 percent. </li>
<li>Winsor School, Boston; 16.74 percent. </li>
<li>Milton Academy, Milton, Mass.; 15.84 percent. </li>
<li>Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.; 15.68 percent.</li>
</ol>
<p>Mammal: IMHO you were right in not letting the wishes of other applicant’s parents’ influence where and how many applications your daughter made. However, after the EA acceptance it probably would have been kinder and certainly generous to withdraw five or so of her remaining 10 applications. I understand the need to shop around, particularly when financial aid is an issue, but keeping 10 apps alive after an EA acceptance (which no doubt was among her top choices) likely was not necessary.</p>
<p>I don’t think that the GC counts for much in the contest b/w the donor kid and the scholarship kid. A college accepting one more kid form school X, especially if both are strong candidates and attend a top day/prep school. Also, it’s not as if colleges are unfamiliar with or don’t count on at least a few development admits in each class. If donor kids folks have enough $, the family is already on the college’s radar, so the high GC won’t have to lift a finger on donor kid’s behalf.</p>
<p>Also, as the parent of day and prep school students, I never experienced what Apol describe w/ GC going to bat for only a certain number of applicant per school. First of all, many of the kids not only had strong numbers, they also had at least one hook: legacy (sometimes third gen on both sides), athlete, urm, development, etc. Second, everyone wanted to attend a top LAC/uni. This meant that the GC had to reign in student/family expectations since the entire grad class was not going to be admitted to just 4 lAC/unis.</p>
<p>I was. however, surprised to learn from friends w/ kids in public school, that teachers were permitted to limit the number of recs they wrote, so that if you were the 6th student (in a class of 35) to ask the AP Physics teacher for a letter, you were just out of luck.</p>
<p>mia305 - sorry, should have mentioned in my post that she withdrew all but four once the EA acceptace came through. The six schools where she withdrew seemed to go on processing her app despite email withdrawals and calls from the GC.</p>
<p>foolishpleasure - your experience sounds very consistant with ours. Many kids at our school were clearly qualified for admission to top schools . . . and ultimately were accepted. It would just be crazy for the GC to try to be a traffic cop overseeing all of them. I suppose at really elite boarding schools this might go on but not at our expensive small competitive and fairly old private school in the Southeast.</p>
<p>mammall has heard that before.</p>
<p>One of the features of the very strong private schools that we are discussing here is that they are fiercely independent, and not controlled by any single parent, no matter how rich or powerful. They are just more complex institutions than that. So, sure, the children of connected parents get a lot of care and feeding, but so do talented scholarship kids (and even well-regarded children of not-so-well-regarded parents). Is it always fair and perfect, with no ruffled feathers? Of course not. But it’s not craven or cynical, either.</p>
<p>As I said way upthread, at these schools, it’s part of the package deal that students implicitly accept upon enrollment. I think there’s no question that it provides the greatest good for the greatest number of students at any particular school. And I also think that the few students who arguably suffer some degree of individual harm from it suffer minimally. (E.g., Rice vs. MIT is not a tragedy.) Also, parents are not reliable judges of exactly how much their kids are harmed.</p>
<p>Anyway, if part of what attracted you to a school in the first place was its excellent college placement record, you really can’t whine about being subjected to the very system responsible for producing that record.</p>
<p>I would like to clarify that in the example I gave it was NOT a matter of scholarship vs. wealthy kid, or lifer vs. a newbie or anything like that. Money and parental power had NADA to do with it. (I know both families.) </p>
<p>I also suspect that the college adviser would not have been so blunt in anything in writing as to say take this student not that one–he just would have written an absolutely glowing rec for one kid and a really weak rec for the other. And I do think that there is this to be said for his approach–he was honest.</p>
<p>mammal- as your kid was # 1 in her class, of course the school is going to encourage her to apply everywhere. But if your d were #40, and the GC’s knew from past experience that they could only work “their magic” for the top 30 to 35 kids, they may have tried to persuade your d to expand her options of applying to H-Y-P and other uber elite and to send an application to Rice-Colgate or Vasser too.<br>
-and friends kid did go to one of the NYC day schools that was on the 10 big feeder schools that was posted earlier. The school never dissuaded her from applying to Dartmouth (which she did not get into), but it was made known that several of her classmates were legacy and probably had a better shot of getting in-</p>
<p>Actually, since most of these schools don’t rank their students, I generally assume that there is more than one student whose recommendations say that he or she is the strongest student in the class (but not to the same college, of course). At the school with which I am most familiar, the top students would be encouraged to apply SCEA or ED to the student’s first-choice college (financial aid usally not being an issue), so as to limit as much as possible the overlap with anyone else. They aren’t THAT controlling – they have had traffic jams at Yale and Brown in recent years – but there is some attempt to even things out.</p>
<p>At my kids’ public school, the STUDENTS did this, too, without any involvement of the GCs. There was a fairly explicit agreement among the top 15 or so students in my son’s class about where people were applying early, so that no college (other than Penn) got more than four early applications from top-ranked students. In the RD round, all bets were off, but only two or three strong students applied to more than three Ivy League colleges. I have heard plenty of stories about students doing that at other schools, public and private, too.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My son had no trouble withdrawing half dozen applications after his SCEA acceptance. A simple snail-mail letter to admissions was all it took.</p>
<p>I’ve noticed that private boarding schools/prep schools have been mentioned throughout this thread, but I was wondering about public high schools that are still extremely competitive for top colleges (think Stuyvesant peer). Would a graduating class with, on average, 80 students each applying to HYPS face similar quotas that would be set in place at a private high school like Roxbury Latin or Phillips? Out of an extremely qualified applicant pool from a public school, what kind of quotas would top colleges set for admission?</p>
<p>Pay attention: I think most people believe that colleges do not set quotas for any school. It was suggested, with some justification, that some private schools effectively impose their own semi-quota, by trying to limit the number of applications any college receives in any year, in the belief that doing so will maximize the chances of each applicant from the school. That does not mean that the schools think there is a quota, either. It probably means the schools believe that if the same 10 kids apply to the same 10 colleges, there is a risk that all 10 colleges will take the same two or three kids and reject the others. (And certainly it would be a rare school that limited its applications to Harvard or Yale so much that no one every got rejected.)</p>
<p>Thank you JHS … your post helped clarify it for me.</p>