<p>Under its charter, Penn actually has a requirement to educate a certain number of people from Philadelphia. There are not so many places to find people who are qualified: 4-5 Quaker schools, a couple of elite Catholic schools, the two public academic magnets and the one “good” neighborhood high school, 4-5 other private schools. </p>
<p>So your snarkiness is a little ujustified, cc2. Believe me, if you are a Philadelphia kid who is in range for Penn, it is overwhelmingly likely that you are at one of maybe 15 schools. Of course those schools are going to send a lot of kids to Penn. And the top students at “non-target public schools” in the city are rarely good candidates for Penn. (This may change in the next few years, since a bunch of new, small theme high schools have been opening and have been siphoning some academically-oriented kids away from the magnet schools.)</p>
<p>Penn would love to take students from more schools in Philadelphia. In my daughter’s year, it accepted a kid from one of the “bad” neighborhood high schools. This was the greatest kid in the world – my daughter knew him and agreed – 4.0 unweighted, best student in the school in 20 years, leader of everything, completely charming, the newspapers wrote stories about him. His SATs were under 1100, and he needed extensive remedial academic work before he could start. Except for that kid and one or two athletes, every public school kid in Philadelphia in recent years who has gone to any Ivy or equivalent college, not just Penn, has come from one of three schools. (Two of which are the two largest high schools in the city, and represent a really meaningful percentage of kids who actually graduate from public high school.)</p>