Just over half of Ivy league admitted students come from public high schools. From what I can tell that includes Publics like Stuyvesant in NYC and Jefferson in No Va which are not open enrollment. Even among “regular” Publics I theorize that a sizable majority of those kids attended a magnet elementary or middle school, or were in specialized gifted programs.
For those of you with kids in open enrollment public high schools, do you have many kids (or just a very few) who get into Ivy League schools without attending a magnet school or at least coming up through the gifted pipeline?
On another thread I mentioned how virtually nobody from my kids school gets accepted to those tippy-top schools (or even applies). I find this to be the norm. How about you?
Here is another example of what I am talking about
That article was from 2007. The better financial initiatives for middle class families didn’t start until 2008. With schools like UVa, Wm & M and VT as good public options, many Virginia instate families before 2008 (and even now) are happy to have their kids attend public schools . More of the kids and families that go to a place like TJ probably have more interest in schools like Harvard, Yale, etc. than the average public school kid to begin with. That may be one of the reasons they leave their home schools to begin with (as do many private school families). My kids went to a normal public school (not a magnet-it was the school for our neighborhood) but it did have a gifted program… There have been occasional acceptances to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, that I can think of. Many more top students still go to UVa, Wm & M, or Virginia Tech though.
Of course it’s the norm that 99% of kids don’t go to Ivy league schools from run of the mill high schools. It’s because at least 98% of students don’t have aspirations to Ivy league schools. Even Ivy-caliber students don’t necessarily WANT an Ivy so they don’t apply to them.
." I found one aspect of the statistics shocking. Very few students from this top-ranked Fairfax County high school had applied to A-list colleges (Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Penn, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, etc.), and just about no one had been accepted."
Keyword: Few applied. Don’t mistake “relatively few people apply” for “the students who apply are at a disadvantage.”
Colleges KNOW the vast, vast majority of hs students trot off to whatever public high school they live in. The whole idea of going to private school, magnet school, boarding school just isn’t on the radar screen for most people (the exception potentially being Catholic / parochial schools for those who are).
What you describe isn’t at all my experience. Plenty of “regular” public hs school kids get into these schools.
At my children’s HS in north Florida (considered one of the best districts in the state, but mostly middle class families in a typical suburb) most go to Florida schools. In their class I know one did go to MIT, one to the Naval Academy, and a handful to the LACs in the northeast. Most of the top of the class went to UF, FSU or UCF.
My nephew went to a high school near Tampa. He was accepted to Brown, Cornell, NYU and several other schools in the north east. He went to UF.
In this area, more kids are likely to have a ‘dream school’ of Duke or UNC or even Ole Miss, than to dream of Yale or Dartmouth. They want to go where they know. They want the big sports schools.
In our family, a couple of branches of which have super-achieving kids, the only kiddo to make it to the Ivy League was a recruited athlete who went to a “regular” high school. Another has had 3 interviews at Ivy medical schools – and she did half of her undergraduate education at a California community college! There are many paths to the elite schools.
I wouldn’t assume being part of an overrepresented group at the college, such as private HS applicants, gives you a big leg up over similarly qualified applicants from less represented groups. For example, the percentage of Asian students at Stanford is ~5x the percentage in the United States population. That’s quite an overrepresented group. However, this does not mean that Stanford favors admitting Asian students over similarly qualified URMs. Instead it means that highly qualified Asian students are overrepresented in the applicant pool. Similarly, I’d expect highly qualified private school applicants are overrepresented in the applicant pool since students attending private HSs are more likely to favor private colleges, and students attending basic public HSs are more likely to favor public colleges. So even if colleges did not consider the name of the HS, one would expect a large portion of HYPSM admits to be private high school applicants. A better stat would be comparing acceptance rate among similarly qualified applicants from different HSs or different types of HSs.
The question is not “are there a lot of applicants to these elite schools.” The question is “when they do apply, are they at a disadvantage.” Don’t confuse the lack of applicants with being at a disadvantage.
I’ve told the story before about the kid w/ the highest GPA in our school’s history and a perfect SAT getting turned down to the Ivies despite being an All American athlete, tons of leadership positions, and a great personality. I am not sure who gets in to them if he didn’t.
I don’t know if there are data to back it up, but often, kids at magnet schools feel that they are the ones at a disadvantage.
Because the magnet curricula are more difficult, their grades are lower.
Because the magnets are full of very smart kids, their class ranks are lower.
Because there are lots of other outstanding students, their teacher recommendations are less enthusiastic. (The same kid who would be ranked as “one of the best students I’ve seen in my career” at a regular high school would be ordinary at a magnet.)
Even test scores may take a hit because magnet curricula are not necessarily a good match for what’s on standardized tests. (This is particularly true of IB courses, which aren’t always good preparation for SAT Subject Tests.)
Also, magnet kids are competing with each other. Colleges don’t have quotas for specific high schools, exactly, but as a Columbia admissions officer said at an information session my daughter and I attended, “we’re not going to take a hundred people from Stuyvesant.” (Half the room groaned.)
My daughter attended a magnet (not Stuyvesant). She was satisfied with her college admissions results but many of her classmates were not. They felt that they would have done better if they had attended their neighborhood high schools, where they would have been shining stars, instead of the magnet, where they were ordinary members of the pack. (On the other hand, the magnet students were spectacularly well prepared for college, but that’s another story.)
“'ve told the story before about the kid w/ the highest GPA in our school’s history and a perfect SAT getting turned down to the Ivies despite being an All American athlete, tons of leadership positions, and a great personality. I am not sure who gets in to them if he didn’t.”
Other students who have similar profiles, of course. Just not all of them. Sub-10% acceptance rate is pretty clear.
Yes. Last year, my DD’s public, non magnet high school sent students to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Penn, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Wash U, Johns Hopkins, Swat. (And acceptances included Duke, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT.) Middle to upper middle class community. Some kids were hooked (legacy, sports)–but many were not.
@Pizzagirl I guess it depends on how you define “similar profiles”. There were only 360 perfect scores in 2012. Of those, how many were All-American athletes? Probably a handful at most. The GPA thing is probably a bit of a moot point since 19 APs is really not that different from 16 APs.
Our local public HS seems to send a few kids to Ivies and Stanford, U of C, etc most years. A fair number also go to elite LACs that are very difficult admits such as Williams and Bowdoin and other very selective Us. S’s class (about 200 kids) was, I think, the most successful in admissions in recent memory, and had kids attend Yale, Harvard, U Penn, Dartmouth, Brown, and Cornell, plus Bowdoin, Williams, Colby, Smith, Tufts, JHU, Emory, et al. Some of the kids who went those schools also got into places like the U of C, Princeton, and MIT, but a kid can only attend one school at a time.
Some, but not all, of these kids were in the G/T program from elementary school onward, but it was a pullout program, not special GT classes. Streaming was verboten until jr high.
We are located in Maine, and there isn’t a public magnet school alternative, unless your kid wants to go live on the Canadian border to attend a STEM magnet. (It was placed there,in a town of pop 2100, 300 miles north of Portland, the state’s population center, on a former airforce base in deference to the economic loss caused by the base closing.) The state university is also not wildly attractive to a lot of high-stats kids–it’s no UVa or U Mich or Cal–so they are perhaps more likely to look at the Ivies and LACs and so forth.
I will never, ever understand the fetish some have with “Ivies” (which, ironically, some people think of as a megalithic block despite extreme diversity).
I think my sons experience is typical for a good public high school kid. He currently attends an ivy league school. He went to a public high scholl in the suburbs north of Chicago (a good school but not a magnet school). Our communiy is well off but there are kids from across the SES spectrum. Our high scholl usually sends between 4 and 8 kids a year to the ivys (out of a class of 650-700) as well as several others that go to Northwestern, Chicago and other top universities. All of the ivy kids take the most challenging academic schedule. This means that all of their academic classes are honors, AP or advanced in some other way. Thety usually have close to all As for their 4 years and are at ther top of their classs. For example in my son’s class 5 kids matricuated to the ivys (and several others got in but chose not to go because they went to comparable schools like Stanford, Chicago or top LACs). We do not have ranks but from other information we gleaned, all of the ivy kids were in the top 2% of the class and had ACTs in the 33-36 range.
@Glennu those numbers match the kinds of figures I had in my mind. I would love to see some statistics about an average public high school in the country (eg not upper-middle class, not magnet, etc).
To be honest, I think it’s actually a little easier for a very smart kid in a very public high school to get into top colleges.
For example, I go to a large (~3200 people) and very public high school in the Midwest. Out of a class of usually around 800 or 900, one or two might get into the “top universities” (meaning Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Caltech) and maybe one more might get into the next tier (Duke, etc.). Of the people that get into these universities, a very large majority have another factor that is giving them somewhat of a boost (athletic scholarship or minority). Generally, one non-minority non-athlete person gets into the top universities every few years. The other 99.999% don’t.
However. Although we have significantly less resources (for example, we don’t have a dedicated college or scholarship counselor), if a student truly does well and searches out as many opportunities as they can, they will have a boost by being from our school. This is because colleges do realize where we’re coming from… we’re not Stuyvesant, we’re a Midwestern public school. So it’s a little easier to stand out.
@TV4caster - Our local open-enrollment public schools have many students accepted to top colleges each year. The HS my daughter attended sends 10-15 a year to HYPSM from a class of about 500. Other than the occasional legacy, few of these kids had any hooks (no recruited athletes or URMs).
This is an area with a highly educated populace, thus there is plenty of bright high achievers. There are no magnet schools in this area, and no tradition of sending children to private schools, so most of the high-achieving students are attending regular public schools, either doing the IB diploma or taking a full schedule of AP classes.
I realize this situation is not the norm - it’s clear that these kids have been challenged academically and that certainly improves their odds when they apply to selective colleges.
