<p>Oh, thanks for that clarification! My school sends 1-3 people to Ivies annually, but my area in general has very few kids,besides my school, that go on to a Harvard-type school. It’s not totally rural, but it is not really suburban (a tweener area, I guess).</p>
<p>Actually from what I heard, from that 500 (I think it’s less) that Boston Latin School admits, only 350 remain senior year for the admissions season.</p>
<p>I read that although 23 were admitted this year, usually its more, around 30 including the ones who get off waitlist every year. So 30/350 is around 8.6%, similar to your 9.3ish%? And as siserune said, there are a lot of kids who get into MIT and Princeton as well, and from the looks of the website around maybe 10-12 who got into MIT/Princeton this year.</p>
<p>BLS graduating class of 2009 is 381. 21 got accepted and 18 are going to attend. 12 got waitlisted.</p>
<p>mosty ivy school’s favor underrepresented school’s such as newly formed sub-20 year old private school’s or crappy urban schools. They want to really diversify themselves and show that they don’t favor BETTER schools</p>
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<p>The statistics spreadsheet BLS posts on its web site doesn’t say whether the 112 admits in 2005-2008 represent three school years (37/yr) or four graduating classes (28/yr). Anecdotally it’s around 30 a year, as you mention and as I wrote earlier, so we are hearing similar information. </p>
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<p>No, the picture at BLS is different from all other high schools. BLS isn’t getting a disproportionate number into Princeton, just Harvard and MIT. Quite the opposite: Princeton and the other schools appear to be inflating their BLS admission numbers to compensate for the undertow from Harvard. Any BLS student admitted to Princeton is likely to have a Harvard admission in their pocket, so most will defect. Harvard enrolled 92 (yield 82 percent) versus 4 (out of 13 admitted) at Princeton in the 2005-8 period tallied in the spreadsheet.</p>
<p>These “feeder ratios” are, if anything, the control experiment showing that BLS admission results are not due to a strong reputation, or a large number of professors’ children in the BLS applicant pool, but to preferences at Harvard and MIT admissions. The Wall St Journal compiled a list not long ago:</p>
<p><a href=“http://webreprints.djreprints.com/wsj_tuition_040104.pdf[/url]”>http://webreprints.djreprints.com/wsj_tuition_040104.pdf</a>
[WSJ.com</a> - The Price of Admission](<a href=“WSJ.com - The Price of Admission”>WSJ.com - The Price of Admission)
[WSJ.com</a> - The Price of Admission](<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/SB108085665347972031.htm]WSJ.com”>WSJ.com - The Price of Admission)</p>
<p>You can see the usual suspects from public schools appearing in the order of their perceived academic strength. TJHS and Stuyvesant on top, then Scarsdale, and so on.
The exceptions are school-specific feeders such as Princeton High School (24 per year at the top schools, but 12 of those are to Princeton), Ithaca HS (44 of 52 Ivy League matriculants going to Cornell), and Boston Latin. BLS sends about 9 percent of its students to the top universities, which is almost identical to the percentage it sends to Harvard. Lexington, Newton South, and Newton North are sending 25 students a year to the universities in question (4 to 7 percent of their students), with less than 1 percent to Harvard/MIT. This means that they have a far higher rate than BLS at schools outside Boston, which is in line with the number of National Merit semifinalists. Thus, Princeton and the other schools consider those suburban Boston schools’ applicants to be academically superior to BLS’, and the admission and matriculation results reflect this.</p>
<p>How do BLS and CR and L compare to each other in respect to academic vigor?</p>
<p>I’m also wondering if college applicants from these schools experience any bias against them because of proximity to Harvard/MIT at other elite colleges.</p>
<p>Boston Latin is one of the top schools in Massachusetts, admitting students by exam and weeding them out after entry. It has an endowment of tens of millions of dollars donated by alumni, in addition to whatever funding is given by the government. It is a competitive and demanding school with lots of homework and visible ranking. The building has been crumbling at various times.</p>
<p>Cambridge Rindge and Latin School is the lone public high school in Cambridge, and is open-admission. Cambridge has enormous funding per student, but also a lot of housing projects and academically mixed demographics. Half of CRLS students come from underperforming categories such as low income, black, Hispanic or non-Asian immigrant. Maybe a third of the school is children of Cambridge yuppie/leftist types and a small number of elites (professors, high tech workers, PhD’s). The elites don’t normally send the kids to CRLS unless it’s a question of money, ideology or the selective private schools not taking them. Web searches seem to show that CRLS has between zero and four National Merit semifinalists per year, with four being an unusually high number. </p>
<p>The 02138 article showed 4 Harvard matriculants from CRLS in the year analyzed. One of the College Confidential posters has a child who went from CRLS to Harvard and mentioned that in one of the recent graduating classes <em>eleven</em> students ended up at Harvard. The natural number of CRLS admits per year at Harvard, without preferences, would be between zero and two if the National Merit figures are any indication, or simply considering that it’s an average high school with no special academic qualities.</p>
<p>^That description of CRL doesn’t correspond to marite’s descriptions, which indicate that it is a dual-track school with a very rigorous, competitive program in the selective upper track, and a fair number of students accepted at hyperselective colleges outside of Cambridge. A gradeschool friend of my daughter’s wound up there after his family moved to Cambridge. I can assure you that his presence at CRL was not due to money or selective private schools not taking him (he was a complete academic star at this area’s most selective private school before the move, and has numerous desirable personal qualities), and that his parents would not have compromised his education to any significant degree for ideology. He just graduated from Yale.</p>
<p>^ I don’t know if marite has ever characterized the upper track as “very rigorous and competitive” or suggested that it is a track at all, as opposed to an ordinary well-funded school with college prep and AP courses but a bimodal population of the kind I described. The very-rigorous-and-competitive Newton public high schools (twice CRLS population) are getting 5 people a year into Harvard with 37 National Merit semifinalists and 50+ additional students getting into Ivy League or equivalent (see WSJ numbers). The CRLS numbers are about a tenth or (generously) an eighth of that, excepting the Harvard-only special admissions. So just how big is this upper track, exactly?</p>
<p>(added: I believe it is fairly well known that professors resident in Cambridge overwhelmingly choose to send their children to BB & N, Commonwealth, etc if there are no money or selection issues. I am sure that a few send the kids to CRLS. Marite has in excess of 10000 postings, so it is completely possible that I am missing key details she may have posted in other threads.)</p>
<p>Hi, I’ve been lurking here for a bit and I have a question. I find it very odd that BLS only had 4 National Merit Scholars Semifinialists this past year. When I graduated 10 years ago with a 35% under-represented minority population mind you, there were over 2 or 3 dozen in my class. I also find it strange that if these students are measured by a supposedly standardized metric, how BLS can compare so unfavorably against schools like Newton South or Weston even with equivalent if not lesser SAT scores. Is there a component to selection that I am missing beyond good grades and high SAT scores?</p>
<p>Finally, although I do see the pattern you are emphasizing for Harvard/MIT being generous in it’s admission of BLS students (data is always convincing), I think a key missing data point is the actual quality of the students that were admitted. As a school with ~340 graduating seniors each year, and because of it’s obvious proximity to Cambridge, isn’t it more likely that a student at this school would naturally try very hard to get admitted to Harvard and in much larger quantities? In other words, let’s assume 2 things.</p>
<p>1) Boston Latin is equivalent to the Lowell school in San Francisco.
2) Harvard is equivalent to Stanford.</p>
<p>The percentage of the student body applying to either school from the opposite coast is going to be very different from the ones applying for the local college. This is especially true of MA/CA because of it’s large selection of competitive schools. The care that these students have when applying to these schools will probably differ dramatically. This was certainly the case with me.</p>
<p>FYI, one of my classmates in the top 5% of the class with a 1590/1600 SAT score was rejected from both Cambridge schools. It’s okay though, just like me, he got over it pretty quickly and it certainly has stunted his success.</p>
<p>Thanks for any feedback.</p>
<p>Re: Boston Latin
[Boston</a> Latin School - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Latin_School]Boston”>Boston Latin School - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Re: CRLS.
CRLS is the result of the merger around 1979 of Cambridge Latin and the Rindge School of Technical Arts. Its population continues to reflect this duality. Like Berkeley High, another school that attracts both faculty children and children of low-income, limited English families, it is bi-modal. So it is quite hard to compare it with schools such as Newton North & South, Lexington or Belmont. The students who populate the AP classes and attend Harvard Extension school (and now, supposedly, day-time Harvard college classes) tend to come from very different backgrounds from those who can be found in ELS or CP classes. The son of a neighbor turned down admission at Commonwealth, BU Academy and BB&N to attend CRLS. The father is a bit dubious about the overall quality of the school but the son apparently loves it there. I’ve heard the same concerns from highly educated parents and grandparents of CRLS students, and the same enthusiasm from the students.
CRLS has been successful not only in sending students to Harvard, but also to MIT, Yale, Brown, Wesleyan and other selective colleges. Among S’s classmates, I know of three who are at MIT.
It might be useful to consider not only how many students matriculate from one school but also how many applied and how many turned down admission to a particular college. More than 11 students applied to Harvard the year I’ve referenced. Only one turned down Harvard (for Stanford); one who was rejected is now at MIT; another reject is at another Ivy League school (no legacy status or recruited athlete status there that I know of). A BLS graduate was turned down by Harvard but got into MIT and Princeton. He just finished grad school at a top school in his field.</p>
<p>@frankly - I thought siserune was referring to CRLS regarding the 4 NMSF number</p>
<p>@siserune - can you comment on:</p>
<ol>
<li>Do BLS students experience negative bias in admissions at other elite colleges (YPSMDuke) because of proximity to Harvard?</li>
</ol>
<p>2.Does BLS simply take the top 500 test scorers for their exam? No interview is involved?</p>
<p>^
- I’ll give you stats and you can decide yourself. 1 person got into Yale, but got waitlisted at H. 3 got into Princeton, 1 accepted to H and 1 waitlisted (last person didn’t apply to H). 1 got into S, got accepted to H, Dartmouth, Columbia. 7 accepted to M, 1 accepted to Princeton, 1 waitlisted by H, 1 accepted by H, 1 accepted to Dartmouth. I don’t remember where everyone got accepted, but this is roughly how it went this year.</p>
<ol>
<li>BLS considers the ISEE exam, grades, and I’m not sure if I’m remembering correctly, but maybe a rec from your previous school as well. No interview.</li>
</ol>
<p>No interview and no rec. Your talking about a Boston Public School with almost every 6th grader (or maybe 8th grader) in the city taking the exam. There is no way they would have the resources for an interview. And since they are public they cannot accept candidates on the basis of personality-only grades/test scores.</p>
<p>do we have the numbers on kids admitted or only on kids who matriculated? obviously BLS students are admitted at a rate higher than usual, but i bet they are also more likely to accept than are kids at other schools in the same boat. in my class at exeter, i know there were at least five kids who turned harvard down for various reasons. about fifteen end up at harvard every year, give or take. it is kind of hard to keep track of it.</p>
<p>i’m not trying to argue that harvars isn’t favoring cambridge students. they probably do get a tip, and i don’t see anything wrong with that. it would be helpful to see the stats of these kids to see if it’s really only a tip.</p>
<p>you have to remember, though, that if one comes from an elite school, rank isn’t as important as it is coming from a less good school. colleges know that someone in the 80th percentile at an excellent school is still probably an excellent student, so someone who is number 50 out of 300 at BLS may very well be a qualified candidate.</p>
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<p>That seems to be the norm for Exeter; Eleven admitted was the exception for CRLS. Four or five is more the norm. That is understandable, given the demographics of the two schools. I believe of the 11, at least 2 were facbrats. That is the biggest hook a student can have. I know of several more facbrats who attended other high schools and also got admitted that year.</p>
<p>Mazatl - Iffy data point based on heresy and 10+ year old memory if you’re interested.</p>
<p>In my class, I think 36 kids were admitted to the big H. Of the 36, I don’t remember exactly how many went but I think it’s around 20. Our valedictorian for example chose Yale.</p>
<p>It’s mind boggling but it was the last year our incredibly influential headmaster was at the school. Also, we were supposedly the brightest class of the 90s. As a separate tidbit, MIT didn’t initially admit a top 10 student a year or 2 before us. He probably would’ve been admitted had his essay not colored him so poorly. The rumor is that Mr. C (headmaster) made a call and this was “fixed”.</p>
<p>It’s funny how I suddenly care about admissions again now that I am thinking about having kids. The advantage of going to BLS is the same as going to Exeter or any number of top schools. Connections. Denying such things is a luxury only idealistic college aged kids can have. ;-)</p>
<p>Found this interesting. For the number of Nat Merit SemiFinalists that BLS has, a very large number of kids (20-25) end up getting admitted and attending Harvard every year.</p>
<p>here’s the link
[BLS</a> - BLSA ~ Support Services Home](<a href=“http://www.bls.org/podium/default.aspx?t=115637]BLS”>http://www.bls.org/podium/default.aspx?t=115637)</p>