Where in the country/world are the colleges most popular with college prep school students? 40 Schools version

Parents Forum
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Updated list of colleges/feeder schools after some feedback from some of you - also, sorry, appreciate that some people want their prep schools included in the analysis but I’m on vacation abroad so I’m tight for time.

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I’m probably not going to check my DMs any longer so here is the raw dataset, alongside further analysis/caveats etc, for any future readers (it’s a google sheets link so hopefully won’t get removed):

With the raw data now provided, maybe someone else can shed some light on the chicken or the egg analogy. Please do share your insights here if so :slight_smile:

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It would make sense to me that the feeder schools to the colleges are prep schools. Maybe I am naive but isn’t that the very nature of prep schools? To prep the students for college? And at highly selective/rigorous colleges, wouldn’t they want their student body prepared? In our state, for every single public high school that graduates students with an even remote chance of these students being college-ready, there are about 10 other public high schools who will graduate students with a 33% attendance rate. So of course it would make sense to me that these high schools are producing students that get accepted to these colleges at a way higher percentage than the rest of the country does.

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Also want to flag the definition of pipeline schools is NOT solely based on a prep school sending the highest number of its student to a certain college, but rather:

  • Prep schools which disproportionately sent its alumni to a college relative to acceptance rate/student body/other prep schools

Other caveats are:

  1. Certain high performing schools were omitted from analysis as they only provided the names of the colleges where alumni enroll
  2. Some schools were chosen for the purposes of geographical diversity and to reduce concentration on the North East from skewing data
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I’m not sure I follow. In the first post you seem to be basing your data on enrollment. Are you saying that is not the case. If not enrollment then what? Did you have detailed records about applications and admissions from all these schools?

Also I dont’ understand your methodology identitying “pipeline” schools, or for that matter why you call them that.

Thanks.

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I don’t think this is naive at all.

I will take it a step further and note there are plenty of college prep public high schools doing a good job preparing kids for public colleges as their main sort of college “feeding”. There of course is overlap between preparing kids for public and private colleges, but these independent private high schools, and a limited subset of publics, are more directly focused on preparing kids for highly selective privates.

So they mirror such colleges in many ways, selectivity, academics, activities, institutional values, and so on. And it is indeed no particular wonder that they are recognized as doing a pretty good job at that specific sort of task, preparing kids for the colleges they intentionally resemble.

And then “normal” college prep public high schools more mirror public colleges.

Again, I don’t mean to imply no public HS kid is well-prepared for a private college. But I do think some kids benefit in admissions to highly selective private colleges from going to a selective private high school, or specialized public, that is focused on that specific task.

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46

Agreed but I will go out on a limb and say that these public high schools that do a good job of prepping high school kids are also self selective. They are more than likely charter schools or magnet programs or special gifted programs that selects certain kids or demographics to enroll.

And frankly, as someone with no access to prep schools and whose own kid went through the substandard public school system (the 33% attendance rate is not a product of my imagination), I do not begrudge colleges on the list for having an affinity for kids who graduated from prep schools. In order for these kids to thrive, they must have a good deal of preparation. Even with good intentions of diversifying their population, they can’t necessarily be throwing students to the wolves just to make themselves look good.

My kid was accepted to a few of these universities on the list and after attending those admitted student days, it is evident that my child starts his college journey on an uphill battle. I could immediately tell which kids there went to prep school. For starters, they looked and sounded about 5 years older than mine. The maturity and they way they were polished was just very evident. While my kid’s brain is brilliant, I can tell that the substandard high school preparation is going to be a challenge initially.

I am glad these schools took a gamble on my kid. But it is also that- a gamble. I think prep school kids are at a lower risk for crashing and burning than kids like mine who are starting out college already behind.

I am thinking these colleges are choosing their risks very, very carefully.

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Yes, although many selective colleges are keen to admit kids who’ve had to overcome adversity, and not advantage those who are already tremendously advantaged. So at some schools prep school is if anything a slight detriment.

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Here’s the secret the prep school kids know from the get go (and where much of their advantage comes from): make use of office hours, extra help/study groups, and advisors early and often.

Go to writing center! A main advantage prep school kids have is that they can write a 12 page paper in their sleep.

Don’t assume placing out of a STEM class or Freshman Writing with APs is the best option. Consider each case carefully.

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This can’t be emphasized enough.

My D’s school gave parents a fairly strong talk in 9th grade covering expectations of both students and parents. From that point students were expected to advocate for themselves and take ownership of their academic (and social) experience. Obviously parents could get involved if truly needed, but before that would happen the message would be “Have they been to office hours? Have they talked to the teacher? Have they met with the Dean?” Kids gain so much confidence from this approach. It takes confidence to ask for help. Preps do a fantastic job of that.

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So for sure they include such high schools, but I also had in mind the typical general entry HS in a “good school district” in the suburbs of a decent-sized metropolitan area. I note as an aside there is a “stealth” selectivity involved in this too, because it can be more expensive to live in a “good school district”, so this is selecting for families with both the means and the will to spend more for “better” schools for their children.

OK, so this sort of HS will usually have “college tracks” with at least a decent range of APs, or sometimes DEs. They will usually have big sports programs but also a wide range of other activities including newspapers, debate, student government, performing arts, STEM clubs, and so on. Not every kid will go to college, but among the ones who do, many will go to a pretty selective, sometimes even very selective, in-state public (like the flagship and maybe some others in bigger states, or sometimes equivalent publics in other states). Others will go to a less selective in-state public or community college. And some will go to various privates.

I think generally speaking the kids who go from these sorts of high schools to public colleges for which they are well-qualified are in fact well-prepared to do well at such colleges. And again, some who go to very selective private colleges will also do well. But I think these private colleges are sometimes not always sure who that might be.

Like, these days, a high school like that may be producing dozens of 4.0s who have taken around the same number of APs. Sometimes in fact they have double-digit people who “tie” for valedictorian. And I think the most selective privates are concerned that some such kids are really not going to thrive in their college, and they are not sure who will based on just their HS transcripts.

So they might look more to test scores. Or to activities. And so on. And what then happens is a much lower percentage of their kids with perfect or near-perfect grades and “top” rigor get admitted than at the sorts of selective private high schools, and some selective publics, where entry is selective, and then the prep is focused more specifically on such private colleges, with transcripts to match.

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I’m not so sure. Berkeley and UCLA have been always been dominated by kids from competitive public high schools, and that can be seen in the distribution of income of their students. They have a lot of kids who come from uppen income, but not from the highest levels of income.

The income distribution of the “elite” private prep schools is very similar to that at the “elite” private colleges. The privilege that wealth provides which allows these students to be accepted to the private colleges is the same privilege which made it easier for them to be accepted to private prep schools. That is true even for very wealthy families who are not legacies.

If you look at where students from top magnet schools, like the ones in Chicago (where the best high schools are public magnets, not private prep schools), far fewer end up in private colleges than do kids from private prep schools in Chicagoland, which are not nearly as good as the public magnet schools.

Magnet school kids are dominated by upper middle class kids from educated families, who generally are far less likely to be legacies of “elite” private colleges, and also tend to be in the notorious “donut hole” by way of income. They are also much more positively inclined towards top public universities, especially their state flagships.

There is a majority at the “elite” prep schools of the East Coast who come from the East Coast states (largely because these prep schools are on the East Coast), where state flagships don’t get the love that the state flagships get in their states in most of the rest of the country.

Finally, I think that prep school GCs are themselves biased towards private colleges, and are more likely to recommend private colleges for their students than public colleges, even if the public college is considered “better”.

So it’s an additional mix of concentration of kids from wealthy families, as well as regional, community, and institutional biases.

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So I think this raises a lot of interesting questions.

By way of background, we used what I call a feederish private HS for our S24, but it was not one of the very famous boarding schools being studied here. It undoubtedly skews upper-middle-class, but only has a few true upper class students, and there are plenty of at least superficially similar families choosing “top” public high schools in the area instead.

The reason I am raising this is high schools like this serve as a sort of natural control where there is at least less of that truly “elite” socioeconomic status factor, which at least potentially helps isolate more of just an institutional effect. Not purely, like I am pretty sure there are some legacy patterns at work as well. But at least we are a lot closer to just a “normal” UMC-district public HS in terms of college-bound kids’ family SES. Like, literally, my coworkers kids are mostly using such high schools.

And from what I can tell, we still place more kids with, say, tests in a given score range into highly selective privates than local “top” publics. Like, a lot more.

And I do think some of that is likely self-selection. Like I get the sense prominent OOS publics like Michigan might have more fans in the public schools, vice-versa for liberal arts colleges in our HS, and so on.

But still, I feel like there is plenty of interest in the top public high schools in the Ivies, Ivy+, T20s/25s, and so on, and yet lower hit rates among at least superficially similar kids.

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Perhaps another thing to consider is that if one is UMC, they tend to belong to that part of the population where Ivy/Ivy+ may be too pricey so they tend to favor highly regarded public universities instead.

My concern with the highly selective private universities (albeit with very little basis since this is my first child will only be an incoming freshman) is that with the way financial aid is designed, their population consists of families either with a high household income or really low.

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Typical distribution is about half with no financial aid (so probably top 4% or so income), 10-20% with Pell grant (so probably bottom half of income), and the remaining 30-40% with financial aid but not Pell grant (so probably top half of income excluding the top 4% or so).

However, most of them require both parents’ finances for financial aid, so students with financial need and divorced parents are likely very underrepresented.

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Back when the NYT published students’ family income distributions, I looked at quite a few selective private colleges. At each, the portion of the student population went up with each income group. So there was more representation from middle income than lower income, more upper middle than middle, and more true upper than upper middle.

Now some such private colleges had more true upper relative to others. Some had more lower relative to others. But none I saw did not have some sort of steady increase in their own portion as family income went up.

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No need to speculate. Chetty did the study, and that is true for some “elite” privates, while for others, they are dominated entirely by high income families.

Public flagships are more of a mixed bag.

Here is the NYT summary:

The data is from this article:

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I note one has to be a little careful with the Chetty charts because there are some widely referenced ones that show relative attendance rates controlled for high test scores. That is a potentially interesting thing to consider, but it isn’t the same as actual relative attendance rates. And in fact because there are such a strong correlation between test scores and family income, the actual relative attendance rate for upper middle income families is higher not lower than the actual relative attendance rate for low income familes, and the actual relative attendance rate for true upper income families is even higher still.

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Good points, and digging deeper, I think that the perception that there should be a bimodal distribution is based on the acceptance rates of high achieving kids who apply to “elite” private (and many “elite” public) colleges.

What we, meaning the people on CC, forget is that the ability of low income kids who be “high achieving”, even so far as to get a test score in the top percentiles, is constrained by income and availability of opportunities, as well as the advice and support needed to think of applying and to create an application that would attract the attention of AOs. A high achieving low income kid may have a higher chance of admission to an “elite” colleges than a upper middle class kid with similar achievements, however, the wealthier a kid’s family is, the more likely they are to have the sort of achievements that gets them accepted.

Looking at the actual distribution of income among students attending “elite” colleges, it is not bimodal at all. Instead, the relationship between family income and attendance at “elite” private, and most elite public colleges has the shape of an exponential function. There is no “donut hole” in income distribution of the students who attend these colleges. The only exceptions are the UC system, which have a bunch of different shapes.

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Just an addition, but when I was looking at the prominent publics, unsurprisingly perhaps, a lot of the OOS programs seemed to have similar family income distribution shapes to the privates. Among the reasons this is unsurprising is most OOS programs are more or less explicitly pitched to state legislatures and such as a form of fundraising that will help cross-subsidize in-state students.

In-state programs, on the other hand, were often significantly flatter than the OOS program, which again is the unsurprising opposite side of that coin. For sure the UCs were particularly good for this, but from what I have seen a lot of in-state programs were at least much flatter than typical privates as well as typical high-end OOS programs.

On the plus side, I think this means the public residential college systems in many states are working pretty well when it comes to a core mission like providing opportunities for upward socioeconomic mobility to the residents of their states (or in the case of kids from higher SES families, opportunities to at least avoid downward SES mobility).

On the minus side, when you start really digging into the details, it becomes clear access to that system is not even, that in some states, or some locations in some states, or so on, costs and other practical issues can still be a barrier for various lower income families to attending residential colleges, or indeed even good community colleges (as in, there may be no good community college within practical commuting distance for some residents).

But anyway, to sort of circle back, if you are looking at the sorts of families who can comfortably afford to live in a “good school district” in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area in a decent-sized state, then absolutely they might self-select into their state public university system, because that is basically the next level equivalent of a “good school district”!

And all the data I have seen suggests this all works quite well, that in fact the plan of raising your kids in a good public school district then sending them to a good public university will have a very good chance of achieving your educational and eventually career goals for your kids. No guarantees, they have to want it, they have to work for it, they have to get lucky in terms of health, and all that other stuff. But as far as the school part of things go, that is a very good plan.

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In general, a good school district is a good idea, because I believe that, for most kids, attending a public school is better, so long as the school can provide a good education. That is assuming, though, that the public school provides kids with a diverse community.

Many top performing public schools are even more bubbles of privilege than any of the top performing private high schools. For example, New Trier High School in IL, which is a very high performing high school, is 76% White, and has only 3.5% students who are low income or otherwise on free or reduced lunches (the bottom 40% by income or foster kids), and only 0.6% below poverty level. The median family income is over $250,000 a year.

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