This is what I’m referring to when I say that prep students understand the range of great colleges outside the usual suspects and why you need to see the whole matriculation list rather than focus on the top few. No matter how competitive each prep class is, 50% of these highly-qualified students are in the bottom half and will be “out-classed” at the most selective colleges by their peers, but they still attend fine schools. Also understand that most students at any prep school don’t attend Ivies and many don’t even apply as those schools were never their goal.
If attending any highly selective college is a student’s main goal, the elite prep schools may not be for them because the math is against them in those pools. The preps are good at ferreting out these motives at the incoming end and prefer to pass on this myopia as they are in the business of delivering a stellar high school education not any particular college result. Students who don’t embrace this going in may be disappointed.
In the same post I mentioned that UM, NYU, the top UCs, UVA and (to add) UNC Chapel Hill or Wisconsin are NOT typical public schools. They are prestigious and hard to get into. Applying to them is NOT a good example of boarding school kids applying to a less prestigious schools.
As someone who went to Harvard, I can tell you that yes, there are admissions mistakes.
I knew a lot of legacies. With most of them, you could not tell that they were legacies. They were just as smart and well trained as anyone else.
But there was the occasional legacy who absolutely did not belong at Harvard. One notable example, I knew a woman who had a couple buildings on campus that bore her last name. I don’t mean to be demeaning to her, but she probably had a below average IQ. Indeed, I felt sorry for her because the other students noticed and would snicker when she made an off-base comment in class.
There was also the kid who had been hard working and studious their whole academic career and then just decided to “get off the merri-go-round” and stop putting in the hard work that made them successful to that point in their lives. It isn’t an “admissions mistake” because they changed their behavior after getting in but…these people exist.
These trends can certainly play out in elite high schools. When it is time to apply to an elite university, some students may find that applying to Elite U is a card that is off the table.
Fair point, and I guess then the question is where you draw the line. If Wisconsin and Washington are still prestigious, what about Rutgers, Ohio State, or Purdue? Pitt or UMass-Amherst?
I think one thing that has been impressed on me hanging out on social media this cycle is there are some pretty competitive kids who apply OOS to schools like that, get waitlisted or even rejected, and can’t believe that a school they thought of as “safety” didn’t accept them. There are often plausible reasons for that, but I think it is also just a fact that almost all these colleges are getting more and more selective in their OOS programs as they become more attractive to the OOS market.
OK, so “bottom half” kids from some of these high schools are sometimes going to some of these colleges, but does any of that count as indicative of an “admissions mistake”? Like, who knows, but plenty of the kids I know about doing that from our feederish HS (to be sure not on this list of 40, but also generally considered the top HS in our metro) were huge contributors to the student community, some were actually quite good students taking various merit deals (a particularly popular path among the ample pre-med types), and so on.
And actually, the kids I know about who were not a good fit for the school (I hesitate to call them admissions mistakes, but I guess that has a literal application) generally transferred out, rather than sticking with it and graduating. The actually graduates are, in my mind, almost all some sort of success story in their way.
Define “prestige.” Never mind, there’s not enough popcorn. By the time prep school students are applying to colleges, they have a very good understanding of what they want out of their college experiences and which colleges might be good fits. And, the CCs have a very firm grip on where each of their charges stands competitively for the schools on their lists. Even if every single senior were competitive for every highly selective college, only a handful would be admitted and not all of them, maybe none, will be good fits. Applying to a college that would be a bad fit or where there is no chance of admission is a waste. The prep schools expose students to a broad range of colleges, maybe some they’ve never heard of, and CCs work with students to create college lists that match goals and where each student has good chance of admission, prestige is not a criteria. Every student will find a seat at a fine table, no clinkers in the bunch regardless of what outsiders think.
I think the fallacy here is the supposition that the purpose of prep schools is a particular subset of colleges rather the strong preparation of students to hit the ground running at any of the fine colleges they attend. The prep schools work hard to repair this disconnect.
BlockquoteI think the fallacy here is the supposition that the purpose of prep schools is a particular subset of colleges rather the strong preparation of students to hit the ground running at any of the fine colleges they attend. The prep schools work hard to repair this disconnect.
I never suggested this. In fact, I was answering the OPs question-- “Would be interested to hear why you guys think some states just aren’t popular, the role of the politics of red/blue state determining college enrollment or whether it’s just because some states don’t have any well regarded colleges for those concerned with prestige.”
Off topic but, as someone who also went to Harvard and left before graduating, I was told explicitly during outprocessing that “there are no admissions mistakes, only acceptance mistakes.” I was stunned by the arrogance of that comment but eventually accepted that it was true in my case. HBS was my second choice and I accepted because DH and I did not want to split up for those two years and he could transfer to his company’s Boston office but not the other. I knew it was the wrong program for me almost from the get-go.
No fooling. This has been discussed here several times, but it became clear to me an inordinate amount of our HS’s college counseling staff’s time and energy got consumed by a relative few families who were not on board with the idea that they had not paid for a ticket to a select few famous colleges, they had paid for highly-individualized counseling that would make sure each kid could have a substantively great college education and experience at a comfortable cost.
Fortunately those families were in a small minority, particularly after the first year or so of tough-talk meetings about the college admissions situation today. And our counselors had both the numbers and the individual energy to do the rest of their job too.
But still, I feel bad for those counselors. And also the kids, because they couldn’t just enjoy the process. Although they are all going to do fine with college anyway.
Blockquote Off topic but, as someone who also went to Harvard and left before graduating, I was told explicitly during outprocessing that “there are no admissions mistakes, only acceptance mistakes.” I was stunned by the arrogance of that comment but eventually accepted that it was true in my case. HBS was my second choice and I accepted because DH and I did not want to split up for those two years and he could transfer to his company’s Boston office but not the other. I knew it was the wrong place for me almost from the get-go.
To err is human. There are admissions mistakes. There are acceptance mistakes. People have biases. Universities have multiple agendas (athletics, legacies, etc.) which can lead to decisions that fly in the face of merit. People get tired. The list goes on.
Consider yourself wise to have not pushed a bad position at HBS. The unstated purpose of the CC forum is to try to reduce the uncertainty involved in applying to college, but in the end…no one truly understands what they are getting into until they get there. You made the leap of faith and found that it wasn’t for you. You recognized the mismatch and acted accordingly. Well done!
100% this, and that’s why the UW (Washington) seems like a “feeder” from the WA private schools on this list. No, prep schools in the area are not feeders to UW, although it might look like that to someone who doesn’t know the culture here. Kids from the Seattle area private schools who attend UW are doing so for any one of a number of reasons:
They were not admitted to top-20 schools (or top-whatever number they’ve deemed acceptable, and yes UW is a likely school for very high stats kids in-state)
They want engineering or CS or sometimes something like Neuroscience and UW is top-notch in STEM
They want to stay in the area after graduation and the UW network is unsurpassed. Tons of Husky pride here.
Cost - parents might be thrilled to pay in-state tuition for their kid at UW after shelling out private school tuition for 4+ years. Or: the kid was admitted to a lower ranked school for CS or Engineering and it just doesn’t make sense to pay that when they were admitted to UW for these highly sought after programs.
Rice also significantly transformed itself in the 1960s (fending off alumni lawsuits in the process), since its original model was becoming less socially acceptable and financially sustainable.
I want to apologise for the lack of clarity, this post was not meant to be a ranking of colleges. Clearly, just because the likes of Johns Hopkins, Caltech, Pomona etc are not represented in the top 40, it does not mean that these colleges are not well regarded or prestigious. My last image was meant to represent the location of the prep schools analysed and the (declining?) role regionalism plays in college destinations.
@NiceUnparticularMan has provided the most insight in relation to my question on the geographical distribution of colleges. Great historical knowledge!
That is why the name of your college is based on how well you did in high school along with parent support (paying for it, plus possibly hook advantages where relevant).
Probably more of the latter than the former. One other thing is the region of the prep schools and colleges – students are more likely to be aware of colleges in the same region. Political criteria are sometimes mentioned on these forums, but only by a minority of the posters. Political criteria mentioned here are usually on topics that could have results that affect the quality of life, such as state politics and laws on abortion and LGBT issues (particularly for T students), and Israeli - Palestinian wars on campus. In contrast, prestige / exclusivity / selectivity appear to be an undercurrent of a majority of posters’ searches.
Interesting thread, but I think the underlying premise could be flipped on its head. My guess is that a deeper dive would indicate that the data identifies which colleges most love prep students, and not the other way around.
In other words, Chicago and NYU really love prep students, and are willing to accept students from much deeper into class than other top schools. The result is more prep students end up at these colleges, but the colleges weren’t necessarily dream schools.