Btw, ever look at TJ’s school Profile? Class of 2014 was 400+ kids, look at the second page to see where they got accepted. http://www.tjhsst.edu/abouttj/schoolprofile/docs/2014-15TJHSST%20Profile.pdf You can also see the “Post-AP” courses they offer.
This article from the Harvard Crimson on Harvard feeder schools names 7 high schools.
One of these schools is a public non-magnet high school (Lexington).
“In total, one out of every 20 Harvard freshmen attended one of the seven high schools most represented in the class of 2017—Boston Latin, Phillips Academy in Andover, Stuyvesant High School, Noble and Greenough School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Trinity School in New York City, and Lexington High School”
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/13/making-harvard-feeder-schools/
^^It appears Thomas Jefferson does a much better job of getting their students into Stanford than Boston Latin. TJ had 10 accepted to Stanford in 2014 and Boston Latin had only 2 accepted out of 38 in 4 years (2011-2014).
http://www.bls.org/ourpages/auto/2013/5/24/55204166/BLS%20College%20Decisions%202011%20-%202014.pdf
A brilliant student sabotaged by a bad LoR? Since students typically ask those teachers who they believe will advocate for them, I doubt this is common, but suppose it does happen. You won’t see it at most private schools, however…pricy tuition does come with a few perks, and a stellar LoR from teachers and G/Cs is part of the package.
“In total, one out of every 20 Harvard freshmen attended one of the seven high schools most represented in the class of 2017—Boston Latin, Phillips Academy in Andover, Stuyvesant High School, Noble and Greenough School, Phillips Exeter Academy, Trinity School in New York City, and Lexington High School”
Every time anyone on CC provides what’s called a horizontal – what % of people ACCEPTED to College X came from High School Y, or what % of people who get jobs at Goldman Sachs or Apple or whoever came from College Z … it is completely and utterly meaningless and useless information unless you know the distribution of the APPLICANT pool. This is Data Analysis 101.
It’s about as meaningless as saying (for example) 25% of Stanford students come from California (I just made that up, I don’t know if that is true). Pointless - because the interpretation of that changes dramatically if I know that only 10% of Stanford applicants are from California, or 50% of Stanford applicants are from California. The relevant comparison would be the 10/25 or 50/25. But, it doesn’t stop people on CC from thinking that the horizontal is meaningful without the corresponding horizontal of the applicant pool. Argh.
And that’s about 100 kids.
One of our best friend’s kids went to TJ. They were near the bottom of their TJ class but had a 2380 SAT (I imagine a lot of the lower ranked kids also have awesome SATs). The finally tally was wait-listed at Mich; accepted everywhere else, including UVA, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, and a few other top schools I forget.
“The HS had more applications to Cornell than to the other 7 ivies combined. I suppose this relates to students from upstate NY favoring the upstate NY ivy.”
One additional factor is that NYS kids can get lower NYS tuition at certain of the Cornell schools. For NYS kids, Cornell is, in part, the “in-state” Ivy.
102 kindly provided more context. 1 out of every 4 students that applied to Harvard College from Boston Latin was accepted there from the classes of 2011 to 2014. That's compared to the typical acceptance rate of 1 out of 20.
My son graduated from Metro High School, a Saint Louis City Magnet School. The student body is drawn from the city of STL, and there are a few students from the county that surrounds the city. With a graduating class of around 70, there are usually a handful of students who are admitted to HYPMS. They seem to ‘punch above their weight class’.
“1 out of every 4 students that applied to Harvard College from Boston Latin was accepted there from the classes of 2011 to 2014. That’s compared to the typical acceptance rate of 1 out of 20.”
Hmm. What do we think the legacy pool is like at Boston Latin compared to Average Public High School in another state.
Actually surprisingly small. Boston Latin has a lot of first generation college kids. It really pulls from lower to middle income Bostonians, as opposed to TJ which is almost all upper middle class whites and asians (because Virginia does not mandate affirmative action in their magnet schools). Lexington High School and Cambridge Rindge & Latin probably have significantly higher legacy numbers than Boston Latin. Boston Latin is alot more like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science in their demographics.
Harvard is quite up front about favoring local kids. In the interview at http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2009/02/24/5_questions_for_harvards_admissions_dean/?page=full , the Dean of Admissions states:
“We have always had a policy of admitting a Boston or Cambridge student over others when the credentials are approximately equal.”
Boston Latin also has a unique historical relationship with Harvard, dating back to both schools’ inceptions in the early 1600s. I believe it is a legitimate feeder for Harvard where students may gain a notable admissions advantage, even though I am somewhat skeptical of elite private school students gaining a notable admissions advantage over similarly qualified students in general.
Elite private schools have a lot of recruited athletes and legacies.
When was this? Not recently unless that student also had an admissions “hook”.
Just to be clear, Boston Latin is a public school, albeit a test-in school. It’s also majority non-white.
Within the past couple of years and they had no hook at all
^ I have a child who graduated from that school recently and no one “near the bottom” of the class was accepted to UVA.
And you know every one of the 250 (or whatever high # it was) kids that were accepted? I forget their GPA but I distinctly remember one of our best friends telling us that it was quite low for TJ. I took “quite low” to mean “near the bottom of the class”. I am also trying to remember the list of acceptances from memory and am pretty darn sure UVA was among them, but I know there was a big list of top schools (and that he is at a top school right now).
That does seem interesting that UVa would accept a TJ kid whose GPA was “quite low.” Perhaps it wasn’t really “near the bottom of the class,” but just not as high as would be expected given his high SAT’s. An instate kid we know from our area (not from TJ) had high SAT’s but a GPA that did not match up and, to the dismay of his parents, could not get into UVa but Johns Hopkins was happy to have him at probably full pay as the dad was a physician. A very high SAT, lower GPA kid in Virginia ending up at a private doesn’t surprise me. In general, UVa seems to like to see the whole package (SAT’s , GPA, EC’s, recommendations all very good).