I cannot tell you how incredibly boring it is that three-quarters of the discussions on CC wind up referring to Boston Latin, Cambridge Rindge & Latin, Stuyvesant, and TJ, in the perennial “everyone is supposed to know and care about this handful of high schools and ascribe major importance to them.” Hello. There are 30,000 hs in this country. These are 4 of them. They’re just not important to anyone outside their own attendees.
Ok, sorry for boring you. I didn’t go to any of those schools, I’m just pointing out that it’s pretty admirable that Harvard still takes that many kids from Boston Latin when it’s demographics have changed so much from the school of Winthrops, Cabots and Pennypackers to the school of Nguyens, Salvuccis, Toussaints, and Perezes. And I was reacting to someone’s earlier post that a white upper middle class suburban magnet in Virginia is any way comparable to an inner city, diverse, lower income school. Yes, all these schools are feeders to Harvard and the Ivies, but some do it in more admirable ways than others.
Quite low for TJ means nothing. It certainly doesn’t mean near the bottom of the class. I do know that it was almost a given that less than a 4.3 at TJ would not get get accepted at UVA.
Nope. But the class had a website where students posted their stats and acceptances. So the students, including mine DID know.
Self-reported data is not generally reliable…
These are four that are interesting. The other 29996, well, sometimes. Doesn’t mean we’re obsessed. There happen to be some mighty bright and achieving kids at those four.
My godsons, btw, were top scorers, top gpa, and didn’t get into UVA. One of the losses in the shadow of TJ. They’ve been happy at their great colleges and for one, the grad school offers are pouring in. Good for him, he’s a sweet kid and an academic knockout. But UVA seems to take an assortment of kids from throughout the state, another pressure on the rest of the N VA hs.
“But UVa seems to take an assortment of kids from throughout the state, another pressure on the rest of of N Va hs.” As well they should, as it is a public school. My non N Va UVa kid from another part of the state had SAT’s comparable to the average TJ kid. Not all the smart or accomplished kids are at TJ or living in Northern Virginia ether. That kind of thinking gets old as well.
Maybe about as reliable as any story from people about their kid’s stats and where they got in 
For strictly Ivy, that’s correct, but you need to throw some Stanford, MIT and a few others in there.
First of all: I highly doubt your kid went back and looked at all the stats for the hundreds of kids accepted that year.
Anyway, in researching this subject I found a few things. First of all: the acceptance rate of TJ kids is going down over the last 2 years (and pretty dramatically).
This kid was the class of 2011 which had a very high acceptance rate. I said "in the last couple of years because I didn’t want to give someone enough info to possibly figure out who it was if a former student happened to remember someone with a history similar to what I was describing. That class had a 75% acceptance rate among TJ applicants.
I also found on TJ’s website that the GPA range after the 8th semester is 3.291 to 4.558/ Now that “only” 168 were accepted to UVA I wouldn’t bet a lot of money that your 4.3 figure is wrong as a minimum GPA. My guess, however, is that a few years ago when over 200 were accepted that GPAs a lot lower than 4.3 were accepted since that is nearly 40% of the class and the 60th percentile GPA was almost certainly WAY below a 4.3
BTW- I know for a fact that this kid had a GPA in the mid (or upper) 3s.
Also, this is a very important point! UVA says it doesn’t care much about GPA’s. That would make a 2380 kid even more likely to have been admitted.
[quote]
Parents and their high school students are fascinated by the grade point average and what it means in college admissions, but the truth is that a number of colleges and universities are not all that interested.
Admissions officers at some of the nation’s most selective colleges, who are now sending acceptance letters for their fall freshman classes, say they barely look at an applicant’s GPA.
“It’s meaningless,” says Greg Roberts, admissions dean at the University of Virginia, ranked as the top public university in this year’s 150 Best Value Colleges, published by The Princeton Review and based on academics and affordability.
“It’s artificial,” says Jim Bock, admissions dean at Swarthmore College, the top private college in The Princeton Review’s Best Value rankings. So unimportant is the GPA that Swarthmore doesn’t bother calculating it for guidebook publishers.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/27/college-grade-point-averages/1947415/
So, the bottom line is that I am pretty sure about him getting into UVA with a 3 point something GPA, and absolutely positive he got into other top schools (and attends one).
OTOH, I can see why you might have thought what you did given the data the last couple of years.
^^^the last 2 sentences are mine and should be outside of the quote
Not saying the state shouldn’t, sevmom. But 168 from TJ (out of what, 460 seniors?) does impact other NVa hs. My godsons had top scores, etc, and didn’t get in. Just a handful did, with a senior class roughly the same size. I realize there can be a much higher concentration of high schools in NVa and sure there’s a need to spread the UVa wealth, so to say. But TJ has a distinct impact. And as I said, both boys did well at their colleges.
@TV4caster These schools probably are still looking at grades, rigor., just not obsessing over minor differences in GPA. @looking_forward my kid’s school seems to average about getting 10 kids a year into UVa, out of a 300 + class. I had no clue about TJ until my kid joked about meeting all these kids from TJ, that they were everywhere, "over a hundred of them " ! And to put things in perspective, there are over 3000 first years every year and at least 2000 of those are instate kids so even with 100 or so TJ kids, there are plenty of spaces for kids from schools all across the state, including other schools in Northern Virginia. As well as the additional kids from other states and countries.
Having a top public in-state option definitely decreases the number of kids who go on to attend elite OOS privates. As an example, let’s compare MI with OH, two industrial Midwestern states with very similar populations and characteristics. Both sit between Northwestern and UPenn with MI slightly closer to NU and OH slightly closer to UPenn. However, MI has UMich while OH does not.
For the class of 2018, OH sent 44 kids to UPenn while MI sent 18 kids: http://www.admissions.upenn.edu/apply/incoming-class-profile
In the total Northwestern student body, there are 350+ OH kids and between 200-349 MI kids:
http://enrollment.northwestern.edu/profiles/2014.html
If you look at more complete quotes within UVA published materials, they tell a very different story. For example, In UVA’s CDS, they mark academic GPA as “very important” and more important than test scores. The first criteria UVA marks as important on the admissions section of their website is “Excellent performance in a rigorous secondary-school program.” They state, “the transcript: it is and always will be the most important part of the application.” If you look at scatterplots of UVA’s admissions decisions, there is a notable correlation with GPA, although they do reject quite a few high stat applicants and clearly focus on more than just GPA and test scores.
I expect the 2-word quote in the article you linked was taken out of context and the full explanation is something like the following, which appears on their FAQ:
"Students are more than the sum of two numbers, no matter how important those two numbers may be. A cumulative GPA, for example, only reveals so much; it says little about the difficulty of a student’s course load, or whether a student’s grades have improved over time, or the level of grade inflation (or deflation) in a student’s school. "
“dozens per year to Ivies from my public school, and 120 (I think it was) to Michigan”
Possible if it’s one of the handful of big publics in a well-off suburb in MI (and they’re counting Northwestern and UChicago as “Ivies” . . . and by “dozens”, they mean always over a dozen and sometimes over 2 dozen. And it probably is literally a handful; likely less than 5 of those high schools in MI.
Getting in to UMich if you’re a top MI applicant isn’t terribly difficult; they have roughly a 50% admit rate for in-state kids.
Actually, I take that back; there could be around 2 dozen to just the Ivies for a big public in a well-off suburb in MI, but there likely aren’t more than 1-2 of those schools in MI.
@Wje9164be, if you throw in private Ivy-equivalents (I’d definitely count Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Northwestern, UChicago, and Duke), it’s actually over 20K slots. Closer to 25K. Count Rice and Georgetown as well, and that’s over 25K slots.
And that’s still not counting JHU, CMU, Vandy, and WashU (or Cal, UMich, UVa, ND, Tufts, and all the LACs at that level).
@gravitas2 & @foobar1, if you compare the top kids at TJ with the top kids at Boston Latin, I think that you’ll find the TJ kids to have more competitive profiles. But BLS sends a ton of kids to Harvard because Harvard has a hometown bias (you can call it a “good neighbor” policy) which a number of elite privates have.
@ElMimino, URM and those from disadvantaged backgrounds do generally get a boost in elite college admissions.
Compmom mentioned the phenomenon.of even counselors not being aware that privates with good financial aid can be cheaper than in-state publics. I was at a presentation by Van derbilt. admissions folks in suburban Detroit last year.Lots of informed, upscale folks in attendance, and ther e was a Tsunami of disbelief when they showed a slide of financial aid options. It is ( LITERALLY) incomprehensible to most locals that a private could be cheaper than U of Mich. Powerpoint slides, brochures, speakers…I think most people were unswayed by any of them. Likewise locals think its bizarre and insane to investigate out of state publics that have amazing automatic merit aid that makes them cheaper than Mich State. Nobody can believe somebody would rather go to Alabama or Nebraska over an in-state option , even if the out of state schools are cheaper by thousands of dollars per yr.