<p>Last year, there was an article in the Exonian at the beginning of March. Since it is not available in any kind of electronic format (go figure!) we’ll just have to wait until revisits to ask, or have all the PEA people look for it.</p>
<p>I’m curious if they had to do the same thing this year as they did last; i.e. limit the number of FA candidates even if their app got the highest rating. I’m also curious what percentage of new students receive FA.</p>
<p>Newebs, Thacher has roughly 50 openings in 9th grade. I think you must have misheard someone.</p>
<p>Sorry to switch topics but I have a quick legacy question…
Before when it was mentioned that 40% and legacies, did you mean 40% of legacies are accepted or 40% of the student body are legacies…</p>
<p>Jumping in… I do not know the Andover legacy #'s. For St. Paul’s 17.1% of the student body has legacy ties. Acceptance rates were traditionally are a bit higher (I do not have the #'s with me). (see: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064213525-post9.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1064213525-post9.html</a>). But, people here are a bit too obsessed with this. People who love a school (like alums) tend to encourage their children to apply. Many legacies get rejected. Interestingly, SPS legacies tend to maintain higher grades than non-legacies. So do not assume they are not as strong candidates for admission.</p>
<p>okay, I just curious.I am a legacy at a HADES school, but my family isn’t pushing me or anything, I was just wondering if that helps at all</p>
<p>Definitely helps</p>
<p>For St. Andrew’s, preliminary apps were over 1200 and the number of openings is around 70 (these are the pieces of data most boarding schools use while calculating their stats, btw — as GemmaV said, few actually use the number of acceptance letters sent and the number of completed apps). I’ll try to get the complete data (for St. Andrew’s) soon!</p>
<p>I think to calculate the admit rate, ALL schools use the number of acceptance letters as the numerator, but few use the number of completed applications as denominator. In other words, if the number of completed application is the one that “should” be used for the calculation, most schools actually have a higher admit rate than what they publish.</p>
<p>Sorry to toot Andover’s horn, but they’re one of the schools whose published rate is the TRUE rate, e.g. the number of acceptances sent divided by the number of COMPLETED applications. :)</p>
<p>I do love my school and its transparency and freedom of information.</p>
<p>Is there a difference between “completed” applications and “final” applications?</p>
<p>I’m not sure what you mean by final applications. What I mean by completed applications is applications that are, well… complete. Everything mailed in and returned to the school.</p>
<p>I was asking because on the info I have from Exeter it says “Final Applications.” I assumed that meant completed since it then goes on to break it down by how many per grade. The stats for this year will probably be given at the revisit and I’ll be sure to ask for clarification.</p>
<p>Current Exonians, look for an article in your school paper about this season. I’m curious about how the FA thing turned out this year.</p>
<p>That must be what they mean by final applications. Not sure why they couldn’t just have called them complete… Whatever. Oh, so does anyone know Exeter’s admission statistics yet? I haven’t seen much transparency from them this year about this…</p>
<p>and the exonian is not made available on-line like the phillipian is either!</p>
<p>I’ll let you know if I learn anything at the revisit. They were pretty upfront about admitting FP applicants over higher rated FA applicants last year. I’m sure nearly every school (except Andover, of course 
) does this, but Exeter was the only school that I’ve seen admit it in print. </p>
<p>Istoleyournose, where have you gone?</p>
<p>Exeter just finished Spring Break, so they probably are doing their work, but istoleyournose hasn’t been on in awhile.</p>
<p>Back to topic the acceptence rate at Deerfield was 14%.</p>
<p>14% is THE number of the year - Andover, Deerfield, Groton and SPS all have an admit rate of 14%. What other school is 14%?</p>
<p>Ummmm…</p>
<p>Numbers are relative, although I suppose it makes people feel good that a school is “exclusive.”</p>
<p>If the relative number of seats in each class stay the same, and the applications go up, then the percent admit is goes down. Still taking the same number of kids - just looks good on paper.</p>
<p>There are a lot of reasons why the admit rate may be going lower:</p>
<ol>
<li>parents fleeing failing school districts</li>
<li>some schools reducing tuition to $0 for middle class families</li>
<li>discussion boards and the internet in general makes people aware of schools that they weren’t aware of before.</li>
</ol>
<p>For instance, when I was growing up no one in my neighborhood went to, let alone, heard of boarding schools. There weren’t a lot of options for researching them even if you were interested beyond the library.</p>
<p>Even my college is seeing its applications rise in a bad economy. Part of that is fueled by the fact that they introduced a policy of providing free tuition for families under $75,000. So where years ago we had 11,000 applications for 1,000 spots, now we have 16,000.</p>
<p>Before my daughter was accepted to boarding school I never heard of the HADES acronym. Discovering this board I recognized how little information is given about “other” schools - Taft, Governors, Dana Hall, etc. because the emphasis is getting into HADES or some subset of the top 10 schools on boarding school review. And yet - when I went to Mental Floss they had Governor’s profiled with PA and PEA.</p>
<p>So it doesn’t matter how selective a school is or is not if the majority of applicants doesn’t get in. And given how much misplaced angst there is re: HADES only mentality - does it mean that a school that takes 50% of the applicants is less selective? Or that it is lesser known and students are self-selecting? Because remember - all those HADES applicants who are rejected have to go somewhere and there isn’t enough space in HADES to hold every qualified applicant in the total pool.</p>
<p>I say that because some students express disappointment in their choices (then why did they apply in the first place) and parents stress about “lower tier” schools when even those schools are sending kids to MIT (my alma mater) and Harvard and Yale and . . .</p>
<p>Lower tier are those like the ones here in my city where parents pay a lot of money for private school only for me to read the matriculation list and it’s heavily weighted with community college.</p>
<p>It only matters if the school takes everyone who applies or can pay (then it’s something to worry about.) </p>
<p>Let me say as a college interviewer – It’s not the school, people — it’s the student and what he or she does with the education they get at BS. No more. No less.</p>
<p>
It’s so true. I wholeheartedly agree. In that sense, schools like Harvard and Yale are doing the right thing in picking the top students in each pool, regardless whether it’s a most rigorous boarding school or an inner city public high school. They just want the ones who can make the most out of the resources available to them and come out as a star. </p>
<p>That said, I know one major thing that drives families to look into boarding school options is that they are trying to find thier kids a peer group that are just as motivated, smart and ambitious as them. Selectivity to a certain extent determines what a peer group one will join. That will in turn affect what kind of class discussions you will sit in, what quality of school newspaper, and various clubs you will get involved, and the learning pace and teaching styles you will be experiencing. Coming from Exeter, you must know better… I am not saying schools of less selectivity is “worse”, especially when you take “fit” into consideration, but I think it does make a difference doesn’t it?</p>