<p>I want to piggyback on what blossom just said, recalling the rather general phrase used earlier, “feeder to the Ivies.” Realistic “ceilings” are important in that respect.</p>
<p>It’s a problem when one bunches together “acceptances to elite schools, plural (or Ivies, plural)” from one class, and conclude that “lots of other people are getting in but so-and-so has been illogically excluded,” etc. The Ivies aren’t getting together and deciding that collectively they will divvy up the pie in a particular way. Rather, Yale is going in there and retrieving its maximum “quota”; separately, Princeton is; separately, Brown is; separately, Stanford is. So the permutations and combinations of who is applying to which specific institutions, with what objective application criteria, what subjective criteria, what categorical criteria (personal origins, donor/legacy status, etc.), what comparative criteria (journalism or yearbook vs. a different category of e.c.; track vs. basketball vs. crew) can result in outcomes that look very skewed. If the top 3 students all apply to Princeton & Yale, but none of them happen to apply to Harvard, yet students ranked 6th and 10th who are URM’s and/or outstanding athletes, do apply to H & Columbia (& get in), and student #11 is a full-pay and potential donor at Brown which has become Enrollment Management, and gets accepted to B, it’s going to look as if some weird kind of prioriites are involved, when really the U’s are being minimalists about it all. Each is comparing who is applying only to its institution, and is comparing on all the above measures of institutional priorities, including academics, race, geography, income (+ and -), activities, stated field of study, etc. The students most at risk for rejection are those where many (particulary equal to them or just above them) are applying to the same college and are not from a Hooked category. If you’re student #5, but not applying to Harvard, it’s meaningless to say that student #11 was accepted to Harvard ‘unfairly,’ “because” you (in a higher position) were not accepted to Princeton or Yale. The three U’s have nothing to do with each other in such a “comparison.”</p>
<p>Finally (and again, this is not pertinent to ProudMom’s S because I’m not familiar with what the stats were on the students),
Very often in competitive college prep schools, the differences in rankings are minuscule. #6 and #5 could be virtually interchangeable (with one having a teeny tiny lower gpa, the other having an equivalent higher test score than the other), etc. In my older D’s senior class, the Val had to be figured to 3 decimal points. It was ridiculous how close the first 5 students were, and similarly for the next 5 down. A heavy dose of cream was all bunched up at the top in rather unbalanced fashion.</p>
<p>I took a look at this spring’s Pomona results on CC. Stunning waitlists and even probably some stunning rejections. One student offered the realistic insight, having been w/listed, that she had a reduced chance being a white female from CA. (Seriously.) All the LAC’s have reached out geographically, in addition to all the Ivies.</p>
<p>And there were also some Pomona rejections, IIRC, that were acceptances to Yale & elsewhere. One of the posters (I forget his results!) was one of 10 Vals at his school. (Yes, could be grade inflation, but also could be just really good students in a heavily competitive micro-environment.)</p>