<p>[Moderator’s Note: A discussion of a more general subject, based on a news report about a different college, brought up an issue about Harvard that may be of interest to this forum. The posts devoted to the Harvard-related issue have been moved to this new thread from the earlier thread.] </p>
<p><a href=“sakky:”>quote</a> </p>
<p>But notice what Harvard and MIT aren’t doing: admitting less qualified applicants from Boston and Cambridge. Heck, if anything, they are probably biased against admitting local applicants, under the - you guessed it - rubric of geographic diversity.
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<p>The opposite is true, at least for Harvard. They are open about the fact that they give some admissions preference to people from Cambridge [inflated admission rate from Rindge & Latin school down the street], Boston [inflated admission rate from Boston Latin school and other public schools in Boston], and New England, in that order. They specifically state that they view themselves very much as a New England institution in addition to being (first and foremost) a national university, and are interested in training leaders for the surrounding area as well as the nation.</p>
<p>I actually don’t find this to be true in the least. The confounding factor seems to be that many of the students in Boston and Cambridge are among the most qualified in the world, as befits that region’s status as the most highly educated in the country, with many of the students being children of Harvard and MIT faculty members, and many of the public schools being of excellent quality. Boston Latin is an especial case in point, as it is clearly one of the best public high schools in the entire country.</p>
<p>Many students in the Cambridge area take courses (or audit them) at Harvard when they are in high-school or middle-school giving them a leg up in admissions.</p>
<p>There is no “confounding factor”; Harvard is unequivocal about the fact that they give explicit admissions preference to local candidates. How else to explain the fact that Boston Latin applicants’ admission probability at Harvard and MIT is 2-3 times higher than at schools of comparable (or far lower) selectivity not located in Boston? </p>
<p>Note that Boston and Cambridge public schools range from disastrous to OK; the high quality applicants you are talking about come from the suburbs, and do not get the same level of preference as those from towns where Harvard and MIT have property and facilities.</p>
<p>(added, re: BCeagle ) There is no leg up for taking Harvard Extension courses, any more than for taking classes at Bunker Hill Community College.</p>
<p>“There is no “confounding factor”; Harvard is unequivocal about the fact that they give explicit admissions preference to local candidates. How else to explain the fact that Boston Latin applicants’ admission probability at Harvard and MIT is 2-3 times higher than at schools of comparable (or far lower) selectivity not located in Boston?”</p>
<p>siserune - as someone who attends a recognized local “feeder school” - like Boston Latin - for another Ivy school, I think I can give a little context to this phenomenon.</p>
<p>We too have an inordinate amount of students going off to our Ivy school, but that is not necessarily because our Ivy gives preference to our school. Certainly they know the name, but our high admissions rate is mostly to do with the fact that so many of our students are either legacies (some of the college’s graduates settle in the surrounding area, and have families), or have parents that are professors and doctors and stuff at the school. This latter reason is probably the biggest reason that ALL colleges tend to pick more local students: because being the child of a tenured professor at the college (or a person holding any other important administrative position) is an enormous leg-up in the admissions process.</p>
<p>And indeed, I know a lot of students (who have no legacy or parent that’s a professor) who didn’t get in to the local Ivy but got in to many other Ivy League schools. So in general, I’m going to conclude that it’s the same at Harvard. Living near Harvard is perhaps a very very slight benefit, but the real benefit is more the fact that so many local students are Harvard legacies, and so many local students have parents that are professors, or work at the Harvard Medical School or are an accountant for Harvard or something like that.
But if I were a student with no such affiliations, I would MUCH rather live in Missouri or Oklahoma or something than Boston. I have no doubt that that would be a much better boost for admissions.</p>
<p>That is usually the case only for colleges where there a handful of local high schools (usually one public and/or 1-2 dominant privates) that are “the only game in town” for professors and comparable elites living near the university. Ithaca HS, Hanover HS, Moses Brown and (maybe) Classical [public Latin] HS in Providence, Princeton has its incredibly expensive public high school. Nothing like that is true for colleges like Harvard or Columbia which are in big cities with, literally, dozens of strong high schools in the metro area. </p>
<p>Boston Latin enrolls more students at Harvard than Andover or Exeter. Consider the National Merit semifinalist numbers:</p>
<p>Philips Andover: 37</p>
<p>Newton public schools: 37
Lexington public high school: 17
Buckingham Brown & Nichols (Cambridge private, 115 grads/year) : 9 </p>
<p>(The above three, plus Brookline, Belmont, Arlington and assorted private schools, are where professors send their kids.)</p>
I don’t see what the difference is. Harvard’s (and Columbia’s too I suppose) large faculty send their kids to multiple schools then - so? The fact that there are many schools around the Boston area that have Harvard faculty kids there supports the illusion that Harvard gives preference to students all around Boston.</p>
<p>And I would think that they enroll more students than Andover and Exeter - despite NMSQ numbers - because few students at Andover and Exeter are children of Harvard professors. Whereas, as you state, Boston Latin sends tons more kids to Harvard. I’m sure Brookline and Newton schools send more kids than they “should” (using # of NMSQ students as a loose reference) to Harvard, too.</p>
<p>The reality is that Harvard <em>says quite clearly</em> that it gives preference to students from Cambridge, Boston and (to a lesser extent) Massachusetts and New England. The illusion is this strange theory that it’s actually all about professors’ children, and that Harvard admissions has gone out of its way to publicize false information about a preference for locals, maybe as a cover story.</p>
<p>Reality: “Faculty brats” are a tiny sliver of the applicant population, and most of them aren’t qualified for Harvard even with preferences.</p>
<p>Anyway, Boston public schools are the <em>last</em> place professors put their children. That includes Boston Latin. Harvard faculty (and MIT faculty, BU faculty, etc etc) tend to put their children in the public school systems I listed in the earlier posting, and in private schools. Boston Latin is a regimented and competitive school with very visible ranking, which is the opposite of what is desirable to highly educated, liberal parents of not entirely high-achieving children. There is just too much risk of Junior being ranked seventieth in the class, when the parents can send the child to a private school or posh suburban school full of similar elites. </p>
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<p>It is clear from the numbers posted that Boston Latin has many fewer students at the top academic levels than Newton, and it surely has fewer children of professors. But it sends more to Harvard. Talking about professors cannot explain those numbers. Harvard talking about its preferences, <em>does</em> explain the numbers. </p>
<p>Boston Latin is the only public high school in the city (proper) producing a large number of graduates that Harvard could potentially admit, no matter what level of preferences it uses. Harvard has to show some love to the city of Boston, and there is only one way to do that in admissions without totally debauching the entry standards: over-admitting Boston Latin graduates.</p>
<p>Is it unequivocal? Does Harvard actually say they do this?</p>
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<p>It seems to me that one simple answer is that Boston Latin is by far the most reputable public school in all of Boston, and arguably in all of New England.</p>
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<p>Exactly where do they say so quite clearly?</p>
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<p>I would proffer that there may be another story at play here: namely the URM issue and AA. Granted, I don’t know what Boston Latin’s proportion of minority students is, yet since 76% of the entire Boston public school system’s students are African-American or Hispanic, Boston Latin may have a high number of students that are both academically strong and still allow schools to top up their AA demands.</p>
<p>Here are some references for those who challenged the (rather well known) information about Harvard’s admission preferences for Cambridge, Boston and Boston Latin. </p>
<p>The key word is “approximately”, meaning a lower and somewhat elastic admission standard for locals. The main source of approximately admissible Bostonians is the Boston Latin School next to Harvard’s medical campus. </p>
<p>Boston Latin publishes complete college admissions statistics of its students (of whom 99 percent go on to 4-year colleges): number who applied, were accepted, waitlisted, and matriculated at hundreds of colleges over the last several years. See:</p>
<p>The statistics paint a very clear picture. MIT ranks 104th and Harvard 119th in admissions difficulty for BLS applicants. Considering only schools that receive large numbers of applications from BLS, MIT is about the 20th-hardest to get in (30 percent admitted) and Harvard about the 40th-hardest (34 percent admitted). That’s right: forty other schools are harder for interested BLS applicants to get into than Harvard. Harvard’s peer schools accept BLS graduates at rates of 10 to 25 percent.</p>
<p>At most of those other schools the yield from BLS is comparable to the overall regular-decision rate (Stanford 40%, Yale 50%, Dartmouth 40%, Princeton 31%, Brown 37%, Amherst 33%, etc), so any arguments about yield protection would tend to fall flat. In fact, schools that prefer enrollment management over yield management, or simply want some target number of BLS matriculants per year, might elevate their natural BLS admission rate to take account of the drawdown by Harvard. Such a strategy would lower the overall yield but increases the predictability of the number matriculating (BLS being a large and range-restricted source of applicants).</p>
<p>Not that any speculation is required in the case of BLS. An ex-Harvard admissions officer, Chuck Hughes, documented the preference at work. In his book on Ivy League admission, Hughes includes several case reports of actual admissions files, including followup on the outcome at Harvard for the ones admitted. One is an academically weak applicant (by Harvard admission standards) from Boston Latin, ranked 19th in her class. Hughes says that being from Boston public schools is “a huge plus”, and that the girl further benefited from being a resident of Brighton, where Harvard has enormous real estate holdings.</p>
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<p>Thus, BLS applicants get a second interview, unlike ordinary applicants, and Harvard may keep interviewing them until they know for sure that admission is impossible. This bending over backward to give every possible consideration is similar to the treatment of minority applicants, whose files receive additional readings to prevent needless rejections. “Boston public schools” really means BLS, as it is a rarity to have National Merit finalists and Harvard matriculants from any other City of Boston public high school. See pages 233-236 of Hughes’ book:</p>
<p>See above. As usual, I checked my information before posting. I suggest you do some homework of your own instead of continually posting lazy calls for work by others.</p>
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<p>Read the question again and try to explain any scenario wherein Harvard and MIT do not have an admissions preference for Boston Latin, but comparably (and not so comparably) selective universities outside Boston all admit BLS graduates at a rate 2-3 times lower than Harvard and MIT. This pattern includes Massachusetts and New England schools such as Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, Yale, and others, so there is no lack of familiarity with Boston Latin, just as Harvard/MIT are perfectly well aware of Stuyvesant, TJHS, Henry Gunn, Harvard-Westlake, and other leading high schools in faraway states.</p>
<p>The statistical anomaly is rather striking. All similar colleges in and out of New England admit BLS students at no more than about 10-25 percent. There are two outliers, both in Boston, at 30 and 34 percent. They are extreme outliers when you consider the relationship between national selectivity rank and the selectivity rank for BLS applicants – most other superselective schools end up in a spot comparable to their national ranking, but Harvard and MIT jump from the very top to 40th and 20th respectively. </p>
<p>Ignore for purposes of this question the proof I posted above concerning Harvard’s favoritism for BLS. Suppose I hadn’t posted it; would you then see any scenario that could explain the statistical facts, short of outright affirmative action for BLS applicants?</p>
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<p>That too is statistically impossible. Boston Latin sends 30 students a year to Harvard, as I mentioned above. That’s compared to 10-20 for the best high schools in the country, including quite a few that are far stronger than BLS. If a minority “tip” were making the difference, that means 10 minority students a year are getting into Harvard from BLS, and more like 15-20 URM getting into Harvard if one takes into account that BLS is not of the same academic caliber as Exeter, Andover, Stuyvesant, TJHS, etc. No high school in the country sends 10, 15 or 20 underrepresented minority students to Harvard each year. Not even close. </p>
<p>In fact, Boston Latin is famous for a lawsuit that forced it to end its 35 percent quota for minority admissions about 10 years ago. As Wikipedia reports (entry: “Boston Latin School”), BLS was under 19 percent minority the last time figures were reported. In the same vein, the overwhelming majority, 75 percent or more, of high school students at Boston Latin, previously attended private school rather than the city public schools. The demographics are similar to those of Stuyvesant, i.e., some high achieving immigrants of assorted national background, plus a lot of affluent whites and Asians. Stuyvesant is also heavily Jewish, but I believe that this is not the case for BLS, because Boston’s Jews tend to live in the suburbs and in Cambridge more than in the city itself.</p>
<p>I should also point out that the spreadsheet at BLS’ web site provides another, seemingly quite conclusive, piece of evidence that there is no special admissions advantage for Boston Latin even in the Boston area itself — except at schools with real estate holdings in the city. </p>
<p>The enrollment rate for BLS applicants (admissions rate times yield) is the fraction of applicants who end up matriculating. This is a measure of a school having an upward or downward effect on applicants’ chances; if Boston Latin’s rate is higher than the enrollment rate of the whole applicant pool, the college’s admissions process (whether explicitly or through some correlation) prefers traits that BLS students possess more than others. </p>
<p>At the colleges receiving large numbers of applications from Boston Latin, the BLS enrollment rate is close to, and consistent with, the rate for the whole applicant pool. That includes Ivy League schools and schools in the greater Boston area such as Tufts, Wellesley and Boston College. Most schools show no statistically significant difference between the BLS rate and the overall national rate.</p>
<p>The exceptions, of course, are Harvard (28 percent BLS, 5 percent national) and MIT (18 percent BLS, 6 percent national). Factors of 3 to 5 are far outside the range of random statistical accidents, they are gigantic in this context.</p>
<p>There is also moderate BLS preference (on the order of 1.2 or 1.5 times above normal) at Northeastern and Boston University. Those schools enroll huge numbers of BLS students each year. I think the explanation is that whereas Harvard and MIT can express preference only through admission, NEU and BU express preference through full-ride scholarships, but only for a few students, with regular or slightly elevated admission rates (relative to expected yield) for the majority of Boston Latin admits who don’t get the scholarship.</p>
<p>I come from a medium sized good private school in Colorado. One of the best in the state, but definitely not a feeder like Boston Latin, Exeter, Episcopal, or Andover.</p>
<p>There’s a lot to be mined there, but as a first observation, notice that the Cambridge public high school (there is only one, the Cambridge Rindge and Latin school) has more Harvard matriculants on the list than any of the ultracompetitive suburban high schools around NYC: Scarsdale, Great Neck, Roslyn, etc.</p>
<p>Also, there are 3 matriculants from Boston Latin Academy, a much less prestigious version of Boston Latin with far lower SAT scores and no web-searchable indicator of student successes in the National Merit exams, nor in any science or math competitions extending beyond Boston.</p>
<p>One matriculant from Brighton High School, an average Boston public high school in the part of town containing massive and controversial Harvard real estate holdings. No matriculants from the ordinary public schools in the non-Harvard-owned parts of the city.</p>
<p>I live in Boston and go to a private boarding school (I’m a day student) with very strong connections to Harvard. We usually sent about 13-15 kids to Harvard (out of a class of 150). We also have strong ties to Brown, but don’t send many kids to Stanford or Princeton (about 2 to each, every year).</p>
<p>Anyway, Boston Latin School is an exam school so it takes the top 500 kids in the city for each grade. Boston Latin Academy takes the next 500 kids-it is generally not considered a good school at all. The worst school is the John D O’Bryant which takes the following 500 kids-also not considered a good school. </p>
<p>While BLS gets many students into Harvard it is important to note that the class size is AT LEAST 500. So the percent of the senior class that matriculates to Harvard actually is not high at all. The H-Bomb article said 23 students went from BLS to Harvard. Thats only 4.6 percent of their senior class. My school sends 10 percent of our class to Harvard every year, and I am sure you can find other schools-both private and public- that send higher than 4.6 percent of its students.</p>
<p>Guys, I don’t know a ton about the Boston area schools, but I do hear how many students get in from those “feeder schools” into prestigous universities, such as Harvard, other Ivies, and other top-notch schools. I don’t know if the connection is family faculty, great schools, or what, but all I do know know is that I hear a lot about Boston public schools and their “tickets” into good schools (hope you get what I’m trying to say).</p>
<p>I met a guy during summer course at Brown and he said that his high school located right down the street from Princeton gets like 20 kids in every year, and it’s public. I just thought of a great Princeton/ high school relationship and faculty’ children went to that school.</p>
<p>I live in a fairly small town in NC, and most kids don’t shoot for the Ivy-ish schools, let alone Harvard. How would this work out for me if I have a potential hook, right score/grades, and the essays/recs? Since it’s an underrepresented area, this does work to my advantage, right? Also, as of right now, I’m the only kid in my grade looking at Harvard, if this helps at all.</p>
<p>Do you live in a rural area? Do you attend a school that sends a low proportion of graduates to universities? If so, these things will help you; the state or county you live in probably won’t (unless you live in or around Boston, of course).</p>