No ranking. But I think the concern about ranking is overblown on CC related to admission to most schools. Stop trying to read the tea leaves. 
@intparent Ranking kills the kids at our school. Per Naviance, No one in last 3 years admitted HYPS, or D, 1 to penn, 1 a year to brown, 1 URM to columbia. Guessing that although 30-40 kids with straight As and APs the HYPS schools aren’t taking kids who rank below #10 in their class who aren’t URM.
Correlation does not imply causation… If nobody got into HYPS in 3 years, it’s not because the HS ranks, IMO.
Yup. Interested and interesting kids with high enough stats to show they can do the work. That is what it takes.
D’s school doesn’t rank, but is a highly regarded public with each grade having about 450 kids. The last 3 years, 10-12 have enrolled in Cornell (not sure how many accepted). Every other Ivy takes between 1-3. BUT a lot of these kids can afford to pay full freight and likely have alumni ties to the schools. Hard to say how much that helps vs. the school just having a great rep at certain colleges/unis.
Yes. Numerous students have been admitted to Harvard from our local public high school (via Early Action).
I believe Dean J (UVa AO who posts on here) said 47% of their applicants do not have a class rank
Our HS has never had two students get accepted to the same Ivy. But then again, it’s not one of the high schools #14 describes so well!
yes @skieurope correlation isn’t causation but I don’t see an argument for how individual ranking helps the student get into HYPSCoPenn type schools. Literally the only 2 kids to get into Stanford in the last (at least 6 years) were twins who ranked 1/2 and transferred into the district and didn’t have to take mandatory freshmen PE (which is lower GPA units). (these facts were conveyed to me by students). I cannot fathom Harvard will ever take the 28th Ranked kid from a public high school, which might mean they took 2 fewer APs over a 4 year career or took an elective that wasn’t offered as an honors class. It’s against human nature to think people knowing they only need to take “perfect” kids can take students ranking in the teens, twenties, and thirties - not ranking allows the kid to be looked at more deeply without knowing that for example taking a ceramics class in our school will lower your rank 4-8 slots, etc. If ranking didn’t matter, private prep schools would rank too.
And I did look at the last 3 years of data available in naviance. I am waiting for someone to chime in who comes from a public high school with individually ranked students with multiple kids a year getting into the same Ivy (particularly above cornell/brown)
Please see the link below for the number of HS from which Brown’s admitted students come from – http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/21723775/#Comment_21723775
Good luck to your son’s application.
anon145, when schools don’t rank, even if they provide ways a school could figure out rank, the rank does not count against the school’s stats. I’m sure Harvard would go for a student further down the rank if that student had outstanding achievements. It’s not all so easily lined up in some sort of ratio or even ordinal scale. A Juilliard level pianist who performed a solo at Carnegie Hall as a 15 year old vs someone without such unusual achievements but who is valedictorian in the same school. Same for IMO winner vs Valedictorian. Harvards not going with the valedictorian if only one is chosen. That’s true even if the pianist is 48th in her class.
@anon145 It is quite unlikely that a kid in the 20s or 30s is going to get letters of recommendation that say one of the best students ever at the school. My DS school doesn’t rank, but that doesn’t mean that the faculty don’t know who the top students are that get the type of letters that are necessary ( but not sufficient) to get them into the top schools.
There is also the factor that the number of applicants per school differs. So, for the last year for which my kid’s school has data, only one kid, of a graduating class of about 800 got into, and went to, Harvard. However, only 12 students actually applied to Harvard that year. On the other hand, 36 applied to UCHicago, and 6 were accepted (4 attended).
So it just may be that few kids from most public schools even apply to Harvard. Even IMSA, one of the best high schools in the country (has higher SATs and other intellectual achievements than most of the private high schools mentioned above) has very few kids who actually apply to Harvard, and only one got in and went.
It is logical, after all. It is not really affordable for families which make less than about $200K without substantial scholarships or loans. So unless a kid really wants to go, and hopes that they’ll get a good scholarship, or maybe has the possibility of other sources of funding, they’re not going to waste times and money applying, especially ED. This may be why schools like IMSA, which is full of high-stats kids, but mostly kids from upper middle class educated families also don’t apply.
So perhaps the reason that only one or two students are accepted in a given year to Harvard is that not many students apply.
PS. schools like Lawrenceville with 200 graduates a year are also full of legacies, and kids from families that can afford an Ivy. So their acceptance rate to places like Princeton is exactly what you would expect if you modify the regular 5% acceptance rate for ED students who are also legacies. So ED rates at Princeton were 14.7% and legacy admittance rates are 33%. So, 34 students going to Princeton from a class of 200 which is full of legacies is not surprising.
Harvard says they do not consider class rank in their CDS at https://oir.harvard.edu/files/huoir/files/harvard_cds_2017-18.pdf . This policy may relate to only a small portion of students submitting rank, including many not submitting rank who attended public high schools, not just private prep schools. They also claim that it’s not a matter of who takes the most AP classes wins. For example, the Dean of Admissions at Harvard said, “It’s crazy for students to think in lockstep they must take four or five or six advanced-placement courses because colleges demand it.”
Harvard is one of the most affordable colleges in the country for typical families who make less than $200k. Cost to parents as listed in their NPC are below, assuming typical assets and no other kids in college:
$65k Income – $0 Cost to Parents
$100k Income – $5k Cost to Parents
$150k Income – $15k Cost to Parents
While the cost is generally lower than state schools for this income group (ignoring full ride type merit scholarships), I agree that few kids from most public schools apply. Not everyone is aware of the lower cost, and cost certainly isn’t the only factor. Instead kids who attend public high schools tend to apply to public colleges, often not far from the location they live. If the vast majority of parents, teachers, friends, family members, and others you know who attended college went to state and you’ve never met anyone who attended Harvard or similar type college; odds are, you are not thinking about attending Harvard. Of course, some also do not apply because they think they don’t have a shot at admission.
I attended a public HS in upstate NY. Being in upstate NY, Cornell was really popular. More students applied to Cornell than all other Ivies +SM combined. In contrast, Harvard received few applications. With huge number of applications, Cornell had a large number of acceptances every year. With the small number of applications, nobody was accepted to Harvard most years.
" Literally the only 2 kids to get into Stanford in the last (at least 6 years) were twins who ranked 1/2 and transferred into the district and didn’t have to take mandatory freshmen PE (which is lower GPA units). (these facts were conveyed to me by students). I cannot fathom Harvard will ever take the 28th Ranked kid from a public high school,"
My son just graduated from a public magnet school; graduating class of just under 200 students, all of whom are going to college. This last year (my son’s graduation year) there was one student accepted to Stanford and she declined the offer and is attending an other-than-Ivy in Boston right now. There was one student accepted to Harvard who is now attending Harvard. Neither were in the top third of the class, best guess is that both were around the 50% mark if the school were to give individual rankings, which is doesn’t. The school does give enough information with the school profile that the colleges are well aware that these two weren’t in the top 10% or 20%. It’s a magnet school though, so even the bottom half of the class does well in college admissions.
The thing both those students had in common is that they are national/international level athletes.
Depending on the year, there are generally 15-20 or so unhooked kids who get into the USNWR top 20 colleges. Fewer than that 15-20 attend those colleges, mostly for economic reasons.
@roethlisburger and @Eeyore123 are both kinda making my point. There are schools each year that send multiple kids to multiple HYPS each year; they are probably not public non-charter schools nor do they likely rank their kids. No one yet has provided an example of a public school that ranks its kids that does this. as for @Eeyore123 somehow the public school never has multiple kids that are worthy but elite feeder schools somehow find the best 30 kids ever to attend the school EACH year… For north carolina by law the official transcripts as reported to “higher education institutions” must have the ranking on it, there’s no chance elite schools admin folks don’t see that information regardless of the box they check on the CDS.
@Eeyore123 I would disagree with your statement that you have to be in the top ten to get a great recommendation. My daughter, who is a senior this year, just moved into the top 10% (weighted) of her class because of the ranking game that starts early in her public HS that she chose not to play. Some electives are weighted and if you don’t take weighted electives your freshman year, you will never be one of the top ten kids in her school. My daughter waived her right to see her recommendations, but two of her recommenders shared them with her. Her counselor said that she is one of the top students that he had ever met in his 35 plus years of teaching and counseling, and her Japanese teachers said the she is one of the top three students she has ever taught. My daughter has passion and drive which shines through and was noticed by both her teacher and counselor. We will see how it shakes out in the college admission process.
The so called “feeder” schools have a high rate of matriculations primarily because they have selective admissions such that they have high concentration of highly qualified applicants and a high concentrations of applicants who are interested in applying to selective colleges. Whether they rank or do not rank students is far less influential.
Ranking students generally hurts more students than it helps, so an increasing number of high schools have abandoned class rank. At some selective colleges, less than 1/4 of matriculating students still submit class rank. However, there are some excellent public high schools that still rank students outside of states where it is required, some of which have high rates of admission to highly selective colleges. It’s also possible for a public high school to have a high rate of HYPSM… type admissions without selective admissions. As an example, Lexington High School is a public school whose profile mentions that their class of 2017 had the following Ivy + M acceptances: I didn’t see anything on Lexington’s website about selective admissions. Instead I’m guessing they have a high concentration of excellent students who are interested in HYPSM… type colleges due to being located in a high median income area that is ~10 miles away from Harvard and MIT.
Cornell – 16 acceptances
MIT – 8 acceptances
Brown – 7 acceptances
Harvard – 6 acceptances
Yale – 4 acceptances
Colleges see all kinds of things that they don’t consider in admissions. I wouldn’t assume class rank is a key factor, if the college says they do not consider it, regardless of whether the information is provided.