That’s really interesting. That is a lot of Ivy matriculation.
If I had to bet, I would put money on most Lowell kids matriculating to UCs and Cal State schools, with maybe a few Ivies each year. And maybe 1-2 Stanford admits. Same thing for MIT/CalTech. There probably are a good number (maybe 25%?) who chase merit and/or land at out of state LACs, T50 schools etc, but that is the path less taken. The UCs (beyond just UCLA and Cal) are a great option for those who get in.
I suspect you are correct having seen Lowell labeled as the largest feeder HS into the Cal System in a somewhat dated Business Journal article but very little detail beyond that.
I tried to find stats for NYC’s Bronx Science and Stuyvesant HS to no avail. I have previously seen references suggesting 25% of those schools wind up at Ivies and have matriculation results similar to Bergen Academies while having an even larger Asian leaning demographic.
Why do you think Lowell’s placements would be so different? Not presuming you know but your username suggests CA experience.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think a big part of high school, for many, is just that - shaping oneself into the very best college applicant they can be. Some devote the majority of their time in sports, others in academics. I recall many discussions with parents who though it was crazy that our S devoted so much of his time to robotics and chess while not batting an eye at the amount of time their kids devoted to sports (high school, travel teams etc).
There is so much innovation coming out of colleges these days that keeping up with them all is nearly impossible. Limited to “investment bankers, management consultants and the like”? I don’t think so.
I can only go by what happens in our local public high school (which my kid does not attend, but I still speak with parents). It isn’t a magnet school, but it has a high rate of college attendance and is in a “great school district”. It doesn’t have as high a percentage of Asian students as Lowell, so it is quite different that way.
(1) lots of families don’t want the kids to leave the state or go too far away from home. Oregon and AZ are popular for those who want to leave California
(2) college counseling sucks, and people are simply unaware of options
(3) perceived expense
(4) not that great of acceptance rates to elites
(5) people just really like the state school system, and feel no need to go beyond.
(6) there aren’t a lot of recruitable athletes, and probably fewer legacies for East Coast schools than you would find on the East Coast. Lots of parents went to Cal around here.
In NY/NJ we want our kids to go as far away as possible but they keep coming back😀
Per the UC admissions by source school (Admissions by source school | University of California), in 2020 Lowell had 573 applicants to UCs, 473 admissions and 304 attending. Of those Berkeley was 435/106/64 and UCLA was 447/61/29. So yes, a huge number at many different UCs.
The published/Niche data suggest that BCA students have considerably higher average stats and they are also less constrained financially (5% qualify for free lunch vs 33).
25% to Ivies from Stuyvesant and Bronx Science seems a little high, that would be 400+ kids in total. I think it is safer to say that somewhere between 33 and 40 percent go to top 50 colleges. The most-frequently attended individual colleges are Binghamton and Stony Brook, although sometimes Cornell is nipping right at their heels, and in a typical year 30-35% go to a SUNY or CUNY.
The scary thing about that stat is 100 Lowell students out of 573 were rejected from the UCs.
I have no affiliation with Lowell except for watching the movie. It did not seem like a very happy place. Remember, however, that Lowell had a very strict admission policy as outlined below. Based on the movie, this policy was changed to align with admission to regular SF schools. It remains to be seen how successful the kids admitted under a non-selective policy are, and what exactly the educational value added of the school is.
In order to administer the process set forth in Board Policy 5120.1, staff collected transcripts for all eligible applicants from over 100 public and private middle schools; administered a Lowell admissions test; reviewed personal statements of applicants; analyzed transcripts and standardized test scores; and facilitated a District Level Lowell Admissions Committee to review non academic criteria, such as principal recommendations. In addition to these steps, middle school principals and other school staff actively supported their students with the preparation and submission of the materials needed for the applications.
The kids that went to Lowell had to endure the admission cycle starting in middle school. I guess my point is that Lowell is part of a ridiculously small cohort of HS and these amazing opportunities may come with heavy cost on these students psyche.
I wonder how many of the 100 only applied to UCB or UCLA because the others were below them?
Oy, one of my sons attended Oxford Emory! I resemble that remark😄
But seriously, it is not at all a community College, nor is it a “side door” into Emory and to characterize it as such is inaccurate and misleading.
Sorry - not meaning to misrepresent. That is how they described it in the movie. Actually they represented it as an awesome option, and I wouldn’t be surprised if their applications go up as a result. The kid who went there was really likable and balanced and his mom was not insane.
Well, it’s an awesome option for the right kid. It is a small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere (unless one has a car). That’s definitely not for everyone, though it was pretty perfect for my son. I wouldn’t describe it as being easy to get into (admit rate approx. 20% vs the main campus admit rate of 13%).
It sounds like there are several things in the film that are edited to make them more attention getting than they should be.
We looked hard into Emory and looked hard into Oxford. To some people it’s actually a preferred place to start for the reasons you shared. I might be misremembering, but I vaguely recall either being told by an Emory rep or reading somewhere that the Oxford-campus kids tend to do very well overall at Emory.
Not really. Higher ed wasn’t even on their radar. The Ivies were considered places for education of the White Protestant Elite and the alumni were seeing too many Jews at football games or other such events and demanded that the administration take action.
The anti-Jewish discrimination was not only limited to the Ivies, it was widespread in any locations which was considered the “property” of the White Protestant Ruling Elite. Jews were barred from upper class towns and suburbs, clubs, private high schools, and many more places. It was a widespread effort, on part of White Protestant elite, especially the nativists, to deny Jews entry to the ruling class.
It wasn’t about academia at all, since most did not see academia as part of the ruling class, except the university administration and board of trustees. It was only those colleges which were part of the education pipeline for the ruling class that they felt the need to keep Free Of Jews. That is why these policies were limited to the colleges which were attended by scions of the ruling Elite who were tapped to take their place among the leadership.
They had the exact same polices for admissions to all of the “elite” prep schools, both boarding and day schools. They weren’t doing it because these were feeder schools for the Ivies, but because they didn’t want there to be any significant Jewish presence.
Places like MIT, NYU, and public universities were fully open to Jews, and many big figures in academia attended these universities, including many Nobel laureates. in fact, of the Jewish American Nobel laureates who attended college in the USA before 1960 (there were over 50 of them), maybe half a dozen attended Columbia, no more two attended Harvard, and maybe one attended a different Ivy. A large number attended CUNY, the women attended Hunter Colleges, etc.
Also, there is simply no comparison between the banning of Jews from the Ivies in the 1920s and the admissions policies of “elite” colleges now because the situation is radically different. Aside from the fact that we are living in very different times, as I wrote, barring Jews from the Ivies was part of an attempt to bar Jews from joining the Ruling Elite.
On the other hand, what’s happening today is attempts by the administration to maintain a large number of wealthy alumni, while also pretending to care about diversity by having URMs. Since Asian Americans belong to neither, they are the ones who are getting screwed. Not because they are Asian, but because the don’t properly fit any specific “bucket” that the administrators want to fill, or more correctly, there are far more Asian applicants than are needed for their particular set of buckets.
One of the problems is that “Asians” are considered a single uniform group, and AOs often consider them to be uniform - high stats upper middle class ORMs with educated parents. It doesn’t matter if you are from a poor Vietnamese family, or if your family is from Wyoming and has been there as long as any White family. These will not be in the “low income” group, of the “state with few applicants” group, but with the rest of the “Asians”. It doesn’t matter if they need a tuba, and you play the tuba, if you are Asian, you won’t be considered because AOs assume that “Asians all play the violin or the piano”.
However, as I wrote, AOs aren’t trying to “keep Asians out”, they are trying to keep underprepared wealthy White kids in.
I agree but aren’t we (parents, schools, media, society at large) complicit because many of us (particularly in urban/metropolitan areas) “ooh and aah” those who attend MIT, Stanford, Harvard and the like?
I have not noticed all that much oohing and aahing. Outside of CC and job interviews (my last job interview was 21 years ago) I have learned to usually not mention where I went to university.
But yes, some people do seem to get carried away with the rankings of universities.
I like the “applying sideways” blog on the MIT web site. As I understand it, it recommends that students do what is right for them. If they are a student who belongs at MIT, then what is right for them will also be what is right to help their application to MIT. If they would be better off somewhere else, then what is right for them is more likely to help them get accepted somewhere else. Perhaps people need to have more faith that if they do what is right for them, it will work out.
I also like “applying sideways” a lot. My D22 and I had a discussion along these lines recently, in the context of whether to apply to be a U.S. Presidential Scholar. I told her, in my estimation, I didn’t think she would be so competitive because her ECs just didn’t take her in the direction that I thought was needed to advance in this competition and that it’s okay - life is a bit random that way and it didn’t reflect her value/worth. (Having said that, her GC seems to be encouraging her to go for it so it’s still a live issue in our household.)
I generally agree with your description of the history and rationale, but your conclusion:
doesn’t seem to directly follow from your description. Shouldn’t the conclusion be that as Jewish Americans were subject to quotas then, Asian Americans, a loosely defined group, are subject to “effective” quotas now because they generally don’t belong to any preferential groups, and Asian American applicants are effectively competing with each other within those “effective” quotas?
There’s a whole lot of unsubstantiated suppositions going on here. A whole lot. How do you know the poor Vietnamese family is treated the same as a wealthy Chinese (or Vietnamese) family? From my anecdotal view of having a non-wealthy kid in boarding school, this isn’t true at all. As the CDS’s come out this year, I suspect there will be a continuation of the trends of fewer rich kids and more urms. I don’t believe the schools are faking interest in urms. I agree legacy plays an outsized role, but wealthy, white and unprepared admissions numbers ain’t what they used to be. Fact is, this is a zero sum game. If more spots are going to urms (and I think they should), they will be taken away from someone else.