^ UIUC’s strengths (pretty much all the STEM fields, among others) also matches up well with the interests of many of the students at IMSA.
@Johnny523, we raised our daughter in rural Washington state, and somehow by osmosis she laser-focused on Ivies before all other schools. Only a few of her friends applied to one. My husband and I are from the Northeast and wanted her to attend a small LAC. Oh well.
@Sue22 :
: IMSA only requires 2 years of a language
: and 3 of English which I would imagine
: would hurt their applicants at many non-
: tech. schools.
IMSA is only a sophomore/junior/senior school. Kids go to their local school for freshman year – or, in some cases, go directly from 8th to 10th grade at IMSA. So add a year on to those requirements in most cases.
Because we’re talking about Chicagoland schools: As a data point that doesn’t necessarily prove anything, here are 10-year averages in private college acceptances from a highly ranked, very large, open-enrollment suburban Chicago public school. The ranking is the overall rank among all colleges, public or private.
- DePaul (31.0 enrolled/year)
- Northwestern (19.1)
- Loyola (18.8)
- Bradley (11.8)
- Marquette (11.0)
- WashU (7.1)
- Tulane (6.2)
- UChicago (5.7)
- NYU and USC (5.4)
- Notre Dame (5.2)
- Miami Fl. (4.8)
- Vandy (4.5) ...
- Cornell (2.4)
- Penn (2.3)
- Harvard (2.0)
- MIT and Yale (1.7)
- Stanford (1.5)
- Columbia (1.2)
- Dartmouth and CalTech (0.9)
- Brown and Princeton (0.8)
UIUC is number 1 overall with north of 150 per class.
For comparison, highlights from an average-good suburban Chicago school, about half the size of one above:
- Northwestern (3.2 enrolled/year)
- Notre Dame (1.5)
- WashU and UChicago (1.0)
All the Ivies combined: 0.9
Top school is the local CC, with over 150/year. Number 2 is UIUC with 38.5.
@circuitrider Come on. Lol.
There’s a big one. And even more of a full on university than little old Dartmouth.
Think Tip O’Neill John Kerry Amy Poehler Leonard Nimoy Sen ed markey Juliane Malveaux Dartmouth provost Caroline dever Fidelity’s Peter Lynch Denise Morrison ceo of Campbell’s soup. Secretary of energy Ernest moniz. Luke russert Chris O’Donnell from csi Broadway Star Patricia noonan. Phil Schiller number two guy at apple and recent 150mm gift to school for the Schiller integrated sciences building and new engineering school. The ceo and Founder of direct tv the recent head of aarp Julie chin
Or Luke kiechuly Matt Ryan.
Ok Doug flutie?
Lol.
Ah, that makes sense. Still, IMSA only requires students to complete one year of a language at level II or higher.
Harvard, for one, recommends 4 years of a language, so if all a student did was the minimum it would put them 2 years behind the recommendation.
It makes sense, in that IMSA is unabashedly focused on math and science. Then again, that same factor would explain why IMSA kids aren’t getting into places like Wesleyan-there’s no indication they have any interest in applying. As heavily math and science kids they’re applying to places like IIT, Michigan Tech, and Georgia Tech. (I wonder what it was like to be that lone IMSA kid who’s attending Bard. LOL) The colleges they are attending also seem to be heavily focused in the Midwest-Grinnell is the lone LAC with more than a small handful of acceptances.
@privatebanker - Ah, Boston College!
So not sure why picking on imsa is fun but let’s take Northside College Prep then. Up to the last 2 years was the number school in Illinois for like 15 years running. It’s a selective enrollment school like Walter Payton which you have to score like a 99.6 to get in and be considered. It’s the cities cream of the crop kids that come from literally all over the city. Very nicely integrated school. They take the most classes of any CPS school /school in the state also I think. They have to take like 4 years of everything. https://www.northsideprep.org/m/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=237302&type=d. Many exceed this also.
Their avg Act was 31.3 when my son left.
Avg schedule in junior and senior year for this all honors school was 7 classes with like music added and a lot of those AP. My sons senior year was 6 AP classes plus multivariate Calc and cello in orchestra.
Yep like everyone gets accepted at a very high rate to UIUC, UIC, IIT (mostly free tuition for a lot of then), Northwestern and UChicago, DePaul. But few to the Ivies. The last few years we did get some to MIT (both chess tournament kids… Yeh chess?) and a few sprinkles here and there to the Ivys.
Lots of these kids compete at various things at regional and national levels also.
But most would need merit. A lot of the kids to get full rides through various outside scholarships. Name a national scholarship we normally have someone get one of those. The school really goes out of their way to try to pair merit to the families. They will suggest a lower ranked school to get higher merit. Families are mostly working class and need the help (we all need the help regardless what you do) few like us from private school coming here vs something like Payton that has a much higher family ratio coming from private middle school and wealth.
Again, a good reason for kids to be staying in state instead of applying to the Ivies, which don’t give merit.
I wasn’t trying to pick on any particular school. Just pointing out that there are factors that don’t involve specialized relationships.
Another (admittedly unfair) factor is that prep schools tend to be strong in sports that not a lot of public schools offer but that Ivies field varsity teams in-sports like fencing, crew, squash and lacrosse. The latter is becoming more popular in public schools so it’s evening the field a little for at least that one sport but it’s still a sport most popular in the NE.
If you look at the crew rosters for Ivy League schools you’ll see almost all kids from private schools, with a smattering of kids from high-income towns like Weston, MA.
Noble and Greenough, a Boston area day school that graduates around 110 kids each year, has 11 kids rowing for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, or Brown. The women’s hockey roster at Harvard alone boasts 3 Nobles women out of the 25 kids on the roster and Yale’s women’s team has another 2. Nobles ecruits are also playing Ivy League soccer, baseball, basketball, football, field hockey and other sports.
According to the school’s college profile more than half of all graduates score above a 1400 on the SAT and the median ACT is a 33, so these kids are no academic slouches, but as we know high test scores and grades alone won’t get you into an Ivy. What does is the combination of academics and recruitability.
Great point. My step-niece went to a private prep school and got a field hockey scholarship to JHU.
@whidbeyite2002 I’m not saying there isn’t interest in the Ivies from around the country, but it’s much less of an obsession than it is in the northeast. I have a friend in Hawaii and his son is going to Harvard (he also was accepted to a couple of other Ivies). There’s a lot more understanding/acceptance by the top tier students that there are plenty of good schools besides the Ivies, Stanford, MIT and such.
What’s interesting about the Northeast is that private colleges dominate the landscape, whereas if you don’t get into UChicago or NU, UIUC and UMich are still very good schools. Can’t go to Stanford or CalTech, UCLA and UCB await. Don’t get into a great NE LAC or Ivy, hmmmmmmmm…some solid but not fantastic public options.
@PetraMC Regarding the Harvard survey - that’s not an official thing from Harvard. The student newspaper (the Havard Crimson) puts it out - so they ask the questions they think our interesting. Some of what they ask about “Have you ever cheated” for example, is not a question Harvard asks on the application. Anyway, that’s why there’s so many questions about stuff beyond the actual legacy that Havard actually cares about.
IRC a Crimson survey from another year showed that Harvard’s legacies had higher SATs than the average student, but not higher than the Asian students.
once again, the focus on SAT is misplaced.
@CU123 brings up a good point. For instance Maine’s flagship is ranked 40 points lower than UC Merced by US News. Rhode Island’s is 20ish spots behind Merced. UC Riverside beats Vermont’s and New Hampdhire’s by double digits. Massachusetts has 10 universities that outrank U Mass Amherst and MA LAC’s take the top 3 USN spots with schools in VT and NH tying for 5th.
@cu123 The SAT is a silly test, like all achievement tests, and doesn’t mean much. It’s sole purpose is to compare students from different academic backgrounds, so although it is certainly flawed, it has some value in that context or the colleges wouldn’t require it. As a result, no need to point out its inadequacy every time someone uses it for a comparison, just like the schools do.
@mathmom, Legacies usually have higher than average test scores, but so does pretty much every single other group except one: Athletes. The question is, where do legacies fall if athletes are removed from the group? What I have heard is that Legacies have virtually identical stats to their equivalent non-legacy groups. The preference comes in when a Legacy is accepted and 10 non-legacies with equally as good applications are turned down. These schools all have many, qualified students for each slot and can easily decide to choose Legacies or some other category without “diluting the class”.
@CU123 and @Sue22 That’s exactly my point. In the NE the focus has always been on the private schools - historically that’s where the upper class sent their kids. The publics have always been for “the masses.” The result is the state schools don’t attract same level of applicants that state schools in the rest of the country attract.
State schools certainly attract the elite in Texas ( all those oil millionaires) and California (SV kids) and the Midwest. Never caught on in the Northeast.
One of the differences is that in many states the flagship is the among the oldest colleges, whereas in New England the NESCACs and Ivies are are almost all older than the flagships so they had a head start.