<p>The article explains that the data came from the colleges. This is why Stanford and Columbia were excluded, because they wouldn’t provide the data.</p>
<p>Of course, larger schools might have more students attending the colleges on the list. I think the point of the article is % of students from each HS going to the selective college. </p>
<p>And, no, not all of the schools on the list are reserved for the powerful and wealthy. I can speak for one of the school , GFS (Phila), where 20% of the student body is URM…and many, many students are on aid - and aid is abundant for anything needed, not just tuition- heck, if you can’t pay for the prom, no problem, just ask!. The school sits in the middle of a neighborhood that is riddled with crime and poverty (for all of you who are afraid of Penn’s neighborhood, you ain’t seen nothing!)…and they’ve done some amazing things with the community…including opening the campus to the neighborhood (library, gyms, campus, all OPEN to anyone who wants to make use). The students are “edgy” and tough…not coddled brats worried about where to park their Beamers. And then the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) offered the school money to move away from the city and into a sprawling suburban campus, they said “no thanks, we’ll stick it out”…while other local privates pulled up roots and left town quicker than you can say “Ivy”. And when the local gangs started to beat up on the GFS kids recently (hospitalizing one this year)…the school reached out to the community for help, in an embrace, not a “us vs. you”…and the community responded. The mothers/siblings of the perpetrators turned their OWN kids into the police (and that’s saying A LOT for poverty stricken single moms of black sons who are out brutalizing others). And peace was restored…and kids are safe.</p>
<p>But, the article wasn’t about that…it was about how many of these kids go on to a few selective schools. </p>
<p>So, maybe a good article for this school would have been “Schools that teach more than SAT prep, don’t have AP/IB, refuse to rank, won’t calcualte GPA, hold ethics as top priority and work really, really hard to develop charachter in students…and STILL send this many kids to top selective school…but don’t ask us about it because we’d rather discuss other things - and, oh, have you noticed that we’re pretty darn inexpensive?”</p>
<p>Sorry - not to run a commercial. But, dismiss the list all you want. You can’t dismiss the value of a tremendous opportunity…and when it happens to show up on a WSJ list, all the better.</p>