<p>So it occurred to me that there was some ambiguity in my and berryberry’s answer. In this area, I knew several Quaker schools are NAIS members despite being, well, Quaker, and even being affiliated with a particular Meeting (i.e., non unlike parochial schools).</p>
<p>I checked the NAIS website. The relevant criteria for NAIS membership seem to be (a) not being subject to public control, (b) having an independent board of directors that sets policy, (c) being nonprofit, and (d) being college-preparatory (even if only an elementary school). (There are other criteria too, not relevant to this discussion.) Looking at the membership list for the area I know best, there are lots of Catholic and Quaker schools included, as well as a smattering of other religious affiliations. No parochial schools, though, and interestingly the city’s highest-prestige Catholic private school is not a member (why?, I don’t know). </p>
<p>The independent board of directors criterion I’m sure is a source of constant discussion. I am very familiar with the governance of at least one Quaker school with full NAIS membership, and concluding that it has an “independent board of directors” would not be a simple thing. Similarly, there are Catholic schools affiliated with particular religious orders, and one might well wonder just how independent their boards are, or how much authority they have.</p>
<p>But who cares? Obviously “independent school” is a term of art that has embedded within it some social, um, traditions (not to call them prejudices). Quakers are fine. Classy monastic orders are fine. Parish-based Catholic schools, charter schools, and for-profits need not apply (except for a lesser category of affiliation that is wide open).</p>
<p>Anyway, “independent schools” should probably mean NAIS members and schools that would be eligible for NAIS membership and haven’t joined for no obvious reason.</p>
<p>But I’ll bet they’re better prepared than many of the admits from many publics. D2, private h.s. educated, reports that she was exponentially better prepared for her rigorous (current) public U than her current classmates who graduated from public high schools and are struggling to keep up with University-level expectations. Similar anecdotal info from some on this thread and plentifully elsewhere.</p>
<p>This is an excellent thread with great in depth and insightful comments from very knowledgeable parents and professionals. Thanks to these fine posts, I’ve learned a lot. Here are some fine points I captured on why private schools are doing better than their public counterpart in terms of placing a higher percentage of their graduation class into elite colleges. </p>
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<p>It is tough to measure the impact of “parental involvement” on kids. For sure it has a big impact, but how much? Is it so big that it overrides all other factors? I agree with the following quote from DeirdreTours.</p>
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<p>As discussed upthread, the advantage of private school is negligible for the top tier public students in terms of elite college placement. Therefore, the value provided by private schools to top tier students is in something else – something ivyalum articulated very well upthread.</p>
<p>I’d like to add my own observation. Private school graduates enjoy a smoother private school-to-private college transition than their public counterpart. In addition these kids were nurtured and coached to seek individual assistance from teaching and counseling staff, and therefore are more familiar and comfortable with doing the same at colleges than their public counterpart.</p>
<p>"This is much more useful data, but I’d argue that this still isn’t fully controlling for wealth. Many parents in the district may well have moved to the district for access to its highly ranked public schools. The family budget could afford the big mortgage, but not the big mortgage plus private school tuition. Families that live in the community and which can also afford to send their child to private school are generally going to be wealthier. "</p>
<p>While I can’t say it is 100% controlling for wealth, I do believe based on my knowledge of the district and those parents who do and do not send their child to the Public or Independnet school, these stats are controlling for wealth in at least 95% of the cases.</p>
<p>Remember, this is a very affluent area and I know many families (including a few names folks here would recognize) that have substantial wealth and their children attend the Public school. In this particular case, I really do believe these additional numbers are as good an apples to apples comparison as you will get.</p>
<p>Anyway, this has been a good discussion - thanks</p>
<p>First of all, kids going to selective high schools, private or public are already preselected. I know that the average SAT of those highschools are in the range of those of highly selective colleges. So it is not surprising at all that these kids are more likely to be going to the more selective colleges. </p>
<p>You also have a major force in the parents of those kids who go to such schools. Parents are a big factor in where kids go to college. Those parents who take the trouble to research high schools, go through the rigorous admissions process of such schools, pay the costs and go through the commuting issues of going out of locale are far more likely to be looking at colleges of the same profile. </p>
<p>Whether a specific child is going to be better off in terms of admissions to a highly competitive college if that child is in that border line area where it is really iffy one way or the other, is not something that we can predict. I have seen kids who did terribly at private schools return to their less rigorous public school and gain entrance to colleges that are beyond that of their former peers at the private school in terms of selectivity. I have a kid who falls into that category. He was below average at the rigorous private and very much above average in other high school setting. </p>
<p>You also have to take into account that there are many parents in some of these schools that fall into celebrity, development, alumnus, special contacts categories that may not advertise the situation. I learned of a number of them well after my kids finished high school. Though I did know of the some of the big name folks, there were many families who were influential in academia and other areas that were not so high profile that their names were immediately recognizable and they kept a low profile. </p>
<p>On the other hand, the college counselors and some of the teachers and other staff were well acquainted with folks in the admissions offices at a number of colleges. The stats in terms of acceptance at certain schools did reflect this familiarity. But, you know, one of my kids at a less high profile school, had one of its alum heading an admissions office of a highly selective school, and, yes, in that case, during those years, the kids at that high school did get the benefit of that connection. The head of the school would personally drive the hours down to that college and discuss the borderline apps and the waitlisted kids. Connections do matter, and there tend to be more of them in the higher profile high schools and prep schools.</p>
<p>Berryberry–“Self Selection” means to place oneself into the specified group. As used in this thread, “self selection” means the parents selecting to send their offspring to the private school.</p>
<p>You seem to misunderstand some basic analytical concepts. The very first concept in analysis is that to make meaningful discoveries about the significance of a variable (like private school education on elite college admits) you must isolate for that variable—meaning, one compares groups that are a similar as possible EXCEPT for the isolated variable. That the students in both or your sample schools reside in the same county DOES NOT make the economically equivalent. Just a wild guess here, but differences in disposable income MAY be one of the main reasons that parents in your community CHOOSE public or private.</p>
<p>The correlation between family wealth and academic achievement is strong and incredibly well documented. Please note that correlation isn’t the same as causation. The point is that both groups being talked about—private school students and the academically successful are much wealthier, as a group, than the general population and the public school population.</p>
<p>Next point, I very clearly stated that many public school parents care about their children’s education. Here is the group difference: ALL private school parents have demonstrated at least some level of care by the simple act of placing their children in private schools. BUT- the public school population includes, by default ALL children whose parents did not actively CHOOSE private school. This group includes parents who care deeply but also parents who do not.</p>
<p>You are absolutely right that I don’t have better data to share–But my lack of it doesn’t make yours any more valid. The data you have presented basically equivalent to this:</p>
<p>Here is a large random group (general population) of people.
Let’s sort out the tall ones and send them to basketball school.
Oh, look, basketball school must be amazingly effective: twice as many basketball school graduates go on to the MBA!</p>
<p>Now, when you show me the results of Basketball school, I can’t tell why your graduates are successful: Is it because the school teaches amazing basketball skills or is it because you started off with the tall people?</p>
<p>Similar to the point Mom2and made, consider that out of a random group of 100 highly-selective college students, 20 to 40 came from one of these private schools and only a few came from undistinguished public HSs. But you can assume that all of these students were at or near the top of their HS classes. Might it be possible that it’s more likely for a single talented student to get to the top of the undistinguished public than the elite private?</p>
<p>berryberry, I am interested in your reaction, because mine is pretty much the opposite, and we may be looking at very similar populations. What I know comes from (a) looking at a very small set of kids who moved one way or the other between good private schools and good public schools in the city, including families where siblings were in different schools, (b) looking generally at my kids’ classmates in their public and private schools, and (c) comparing results of friends’ children in Lower Merion School District, some of whom go to the famous suburban publics there, and some of whom go to high-quality private schools, and where I know a lot about the families finances. So – all anecdotal, and not statistically valid, but not a negligible data base.</p>
<p>Anyway, on that basis I am pretty convinced that the same kids – in terms of wealth, family background, and culture – pretty much go to the same colleges, regardless of which type of high school they attended, with two caveats. First, minority kids on scholarship at the private schools, if they are decent students, attend fancier colleges than the equivalent students at public school. Second, a kid with some significant “flaw” – for instance, very smart, but trouble in some classes – is likely to do much better coming from the private school. But as among comparable students, a lot of the difference in college opportunities and choices relates to family culture and family wealth.</p>
<p>in my experience, a truly top student who can hold his/her own and graduate at the top of the class in a rigorous, well known prep school will do better most of the time in getting into the very top colleges. When a college is accepting a number of these connected kids with stats lower than such kids from these top schools, they are more likely to accept the unconnected excellent student as well. If that kid is the valedictorian of your average public high school, if he/she does not have a truly stellar profile including top test scores, he is not likely to get into HPY. Not to say he will be shut out of the top schools, it’s just that the likelihood of getting into the very top schools is lowered, in my opinion, from what I have seen. And if he is not val or sal, forget it, most of the time. </p>
<p>At our prep school, I have seen kids in the second quintile grade wise get into school like Brown, UPenn, Cornell. That ranking would eliminate them if it were from some school that did not have their reputation for rigor known by the admissions offices of the colleges.</p>
<p>JHS - I would also add that for kids who tend to only rise to the level of his/her peers, average private schools would bring more out of them than run of the mill public schools (or even good public schools if the concentration of good students does not reach critical mass). This “rise to the level of peers” effect may just be enough to help the affected borderline kids to write good enough essays and score high enough on their SAT’s and AP’s to break into the higher tier colleges than they would have otherwise.</p>
<p>I agree, PaperChaserPop. The public schools I have been talking about have well more than a critical mass of good students, though. And personality can make a difference. My son, at the private school, where overt competition was a huge social no-no, was content to think of himself as a pretty smart guy whose main job was to smooth the feathers of his more highly strung friends. At the public school, where everything was a competition, and ranking was everything, it turned out that he loved to compete if given permission to do that. It wasn’t an unmitigated good – at some point, he started getting anxious about losing status if he stumbled. But he probably had higher performance in an overt-competition setting than he would have had in a covert-competition setting.</p>
<p>cpt, I repeat: At the good public schools around here, the “truly top students” get accepted at truly top colleges. It’s true that those colleges won’t reach down as far in the class as they do at the private schools, but in part that’s because when they reach down farther they won’t find a fourth generation legacy or a nationally ranked squash player.</p>
<p>Around here, we have a number of the top public high schools in the country, and they do indeed have an impressive list of kids accepted to the top colleges. A kid who makes that top cluster will indeed have a good shot at being accepted to a top college, and when we are talking about top schools, it really doesn’t matter if they are public or private. There are kids I see at my kids’ private school who make the cut at some of the private colleges without being that fourth generation legacy or legacy at all, nor are they nationally ranked anythings. However, because some of those are picked for admissions that are below them statistically, they are accepted as well. This is a phenomonon that was explicitly expressed by our college counselors. There are kids accepted to Brown, for example, that are further down in rank that would not be accepted from many high schools. BUt because a number of kids are accepted there at and at like colleges from this prep school, an unattached kid does have more of a chance in that particular category. I have seen this happen enough times in the 10 years of being involved in college admissions in that environment to know that it is a fact of life. </p>
<p>However, the stats of kids being accepted to top colleges from these prep schools are indeed inflated by the connections factor that many kids do have , in addition to the heavy advantage of involved parents and preselection, which are the main reasons that those kids end up at many selective colleges.</p>
<p>Wow–what a great discussion. I have just a few observations. A well-designed research project on this topic would be a terrific sociology or higher education dissertation. It is so obvious that I am surprised it hasn’t been done before. You might be able to get funding from NAIS.</p>
<p>Yes, the term “independent” school is a kind of snotty code word. In that world, Quakers (who are maybe the best) and Jesuits definitely qualify.</p>
<p>Agreed. a private school can be a real problem for someone with learning issues. Depends on the child and the school. Nothing is worse than a bad private school. Even a bad public school will be better because it will have certified specialists. At a private school, you might end up paying more for such services.</p>
<p>Even if kids from independent schools do have an admissions advantage, it is nothing like it used to be. Fifty years ago, the head of the school would line the kids up and say “OK, you’re kind of outdoorsy, so you’ll go to Dartmouth, and you six can go to Princeton because you’re from old Philadelphia families, and you can go to Harvard because thhat’s what boys from your family always do…” It wasn’t exactly like that, of course, but there weren’t even college counselors then and students didn’t know their own SAT scores. I have read old letters of recommendations from decades ago and they are fascinating–they pretty much just says things like "These are the candidates from x prep school and we endorse them for admission to Yale (or wherever). And they all got in! The prep school–HYP conduit used to be a given.</p>
<p>It really depends on your area. My graduating class at my top Pennsylvania public high school sends 20+ kids a year to Penn with numerous others to top schools like JHU, Cornell, Brown, Columbia, NYU, WashU, Northwestern, Emory, etc. My school has the same proportion of students to top schools as my brother’s top Pennsylvania private school.</p>
<p>Again, it depends on the strength of the public schools in whatever area is in question.</p>
<p>Penn really likes the feeder HS, it seems. My public HS is pretty small, graduating class <250, half of whom go in-state; but we can still count on getting ~5 kids accepted to Penn every year. The other Ivies are not nearly as kind, though we usually get in at least 1/year to each.</p>
<p>Based on typical college destinations I’ve seen at some schools, my impression is that attending a top public school in an affluent district may be more advantageous than attending a random private school. To get the same advantage from a private school, you may need to enroll as a boarder hundreds of miles from home. It’s money and social class that confer the advantage, not the public vs. private model per se. Any parent who wants such an advantage has to weigh the cost of buying into an expensive public school district against the cost of private schooling. Very roughly, the difference in house prices between an average school district and a highly competitive one in my region is about double the cost of sending one child to a good boarding school 3 hours away for 4 years. </p>
<p>So it comes down to how many kids you have. 1 or 2? Live in an average school district and send your child to a top private school (possibly as a boarder). More than 2? Buy a house in the best public school district.</p>
<p>This is one consequence of financing public education through local property taxes in this country.</p>
<p>Here is an interesting article on the increased competition facing students at elite private high schools in NYC.</p>
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<p>Our personal experience is that the vaunted advantages of private high schools in admission to elite colleges is largely a myth. In our area (Fairfield County , CT), if you have the stats to be admitted to an elite college you are better off at one of the highly selective high schools in the area. In our town, many parents have the means to send their kids to boarding school but hardly anybody does. We have seen a recent inflow of professionals and executives moving out of NYC to settle in the area, to give their kids a better shot at admission to top colleges. There is simply no benefit and in many cases serious disadvantages to private high schools, especially for unhooked students: limited applications, definite preferential support for legacies and developmental admits. A very smart unhooked student has a much bigger opportunity to stand out in a competitive public HS than at most prep schools where pedigree still rules. </p>
<p>I have a nephew who graduated a few years ago from Collegiate in NYC. The school would not even let him apply to any other Ivies except for Brown, where he was a guaranteed legacy admit, so as not to compete for spots with his classmates. Some of his unhooked classmates with solid stats received virtually no support from their counselors in applying to the most selective colleges and ended up at schools such as Tulane and BU. They would most likely have fared better at one of our local public high schools. That year, Collegiate did not get a single non legacy, celebrity or developmental admit into HYP. While our HS has it share of legacy admits, unhooked admits to HYP outnumber legacy admits 3 to 1.</p>
<h1>58: I agree completely. The article referenced is a must read for anyone who is interested in this thread.</h1>
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<p>It is true, the privates had a huge advantage. Not any more. The hottest schools are the top public schools and the magnet schools. It appears they have more credibility. Private school counselors are scrambling to manage (i.e, lower expectations).</p>
<p>Your methodology is exactly what our family did – weighed private school costs vs buying in a better district.</p>
<p>For us, private school was the way to go. But in my obsessive search I discovered not all privates are alike.</p>
<p>I constantly reasses if private is best fit for each child. I can say our public school GC cannot walk parents/students thru the college app process nearly as well as our private school.</p>