<p>There’s no doubt in my mind that my kids would get a superior education at a prep school; however, one thing that worries me is how their prep school transcript could actually hurt their chances of admission to some colleges. It’s my impression that many of the very large state universities simply apply a quantitative formula that crunches GPA, class rank, and SAT score. Essentially, if they crunch your numbers and you don’t meet some predetermined minimum, they don’t look any further.</p>
<p>Take a student who would have been in the top 5% of his class in a mediocre suburban public high school, with, say, a 3.8 GPA in the toughest curriculum they offer, including multiple AP classes. At a competitive prep school the same student might be in the 50% percentile of his class, and have a 2.8 GPA (or whatever the 50th percentile GPA might be – perhaps it’s lower…), and may not have been eligible for the AP classes at said prep school ( or they don’t do AP). That low class rank and GPA will really hurt, unless someone is taking into account where the student went to school.</p>
<p>Obviously, middle of the class at Exeter isn’t too shabby. But does anyone account for that? Even if the kids go to lesser tier, less well-known prep schools, (say, for example, Fountain Valley School of Colorado, which happens to be geographically convenient to us…), even there, the class rank and GPA are bound to take a significant hit, relative to what they might have been at the mediocre suburban public high school. Is this accounted for?</p>
<p>Will prep school impair the ability of a student to gain admission to his competitive enormous state university?</p>
<p>(In our case, “competitive enormous state university” means the University of Texas at Austin, and perhaps y’all can comment on admission to UT Austin, coming from prep schools, but I think this is a relevant question for other competitive state universities as well, e.g. Berkeley, UCLA…)</p>