Bethesda High School College Results for 2017 Graduates

[Anonymous]

Bethesda Magazine made its annual chart for college acceptances public to non-subscribers recently: http://www.bethesdamagazine.com/Bethesda-Magazine/September-October-2017/College-Bound/ Here are some acceptance rates for top schools with the 2017 acceptance rate overall in parentheses as comparison. Seems like a strong year overall.

Acceptance rates at some top universities:
Brown- 5.6% (compared to 9% overall)
Caltech- 12.5% (8%)
Columbia- 7.1% (6%)
Carnegie Mellon- 31.9% (14%)
Dartmouth- 12.1% (10%)
Cornell- 17.2% (13%)
Duke- 13.1% (10%)
Emory- 23.1% (22%)
Georgetown- 22.5% (16%)
Harvard- 4.2% (5%)
Hopkins- 9.5% (11%)
MIT- 10.4% (7%)
Northwestern- 8.9% (9%)
Rice- 15.6% (16%)
Stanford- 5% (5%)
Berkeley- 23.5% (18%)
UCLA- 28.3% (16%)
UChicago- 9.4% (8%)
U of M- 30% (27%)
UPenn- 10.6% (9%)
USCal- 22.4% (17%)
UVA- 14% (27%)
Vanderbilt- 11.1% (10%)
WashU- 26.9% (17%)
Yale- 11.2% (7%)

Acceptance rates at some top SLACs:
Amherst- 13.2% (12%)
Bowdoin- 8.2% (15%)
Carleton- 34% (21%)
Claremont McKenna College- 0% (11%)
Davidson- 29.7% (20%)
Middlebury-22.8% (20%)
Pomona- 6.1% (8%)
Swarthmore- 11.5% (10%)
Wellesley- 36.3% (22%)
Williams- 12.7% (15%)

[Anonymous]

Apologies- I should have put out of state acceptance rates for the public schools since that'd be more accurate.

UVA- 14% (22%)
UCLA- 28.3% (20%)
UC Berkeley- 23.5% (20%)
U of M- 30% (24%)

[Anonymous]

Interesting. I definitely had the sense from looking at our kids' W school Naviance that there was no love for our students from Brown, Bowdoin, or Pomona, and it looks like a more widespread Bethesda pattern. I do know someone from one of these schools going to Claremont McKenna, so the zero% must be rounded down.

[Anonymous]

Why are Wootton and RM on the list but not Rockville HS? I think the list should read "top MoCo" area HS or something like that. Wootton and Rockville HS are about equidistant to Bethesda.

[Anonymous]

It looks like Churchill had a tough year - slipping behind Whitman and WJ.

[Anonymous]

One thing I noticed is that at most of the LACs, the largest number of applicants come from Bethesda-Chevy Chase and Walt-Whitman HS, however across the top universities, the distribution tends to be even across the 7 or skewed towards Montgomery-Blair/Richard-Montgomery. I'm not too familiar with these schools- is there a reason why?

[Anonymous]

Forgot to include Princeton- 5.9% (6%)

[Anonymous]

Amazing data.

But aren't acceptance rates at wealthy high schools really misleading -- because the entire top half of these schools shotgun blasts apps out to top 50 colleges.

It's crazy to have 40 50 60 of your public high school classmates applying to Yale!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Amazing data.

But aren't acceptance rates at wealthy high schools really misleading -- because the entire top half of these schools shotgun blasts apps out to top 50 colleges.

It's crazy to have 40 50 60 of your public high school classmates applying to Yale!

Do you have evidence for that? My DC went to Whitman and applied to 11, which seemed to be about the norm for DCs cohort. And of course a lot of kids apply and are accepted ED, so they are applying to 1 (or maybe 2-3 if they also applied EA somewhere). DC knew one kid who applied to 20 and that was seen to be an extreme.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Amazing data.

But aren't acceptance rates at wealthy high schools really misleading -- because the entire top half of these schools shotgun blasts apps out to top 50 colleges.

It's crazy to have 40 50 60 of your public high school classmates applying to Yale!

Do you have evidence for that? My DC went to Whitman and applied to 11, which seemed to be about the norm for DCs cohort. And of course a lot of kids apply and are accepted ED, so they are applying to 1 (or maybe 2-3 if they also applied EA somewhere). DC knew one kid who applied to 20 and that was seen to be an extreme.

I don't mean literally dozens of colleges, but wealthy kids can and do apply to half a dozen or more colleges pretty easily. Matriculant data is much less misleading than acceptance data.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It looks like Churchill had a tough year - slipping behind Whitman and WJ.

It's hard to tell with Churchill because they don't report all the data--really annoying! Whitman seemed to do extremely well almost across the board. I'd be curious to know if this was an unusually good year for them. I haven't focused as much on prior year charts.

It's really interesting to see the patterns of colleges that are popular among students of the various schools and which colleges seem to return the love. I was struck by how many Wootton kids apply to Purdue, which I know has a great engineering program, and how many were accepted (23 of 36). Meanwhile, if the chart is accurate, Wootton went 0 of 24 at University of Florida. Can this be true?

What observations do others have?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Amazing data.

But aren't acceptance rates at wealthy high schools really misleading -- because the entire top half of these schools shotgun blasts apps out to top 50 colleges.

It's crazy to have 40 50 60 of your public high school classmates applying to Yale!

Do you have evidence for that? My DC went to Whitman and applied to 11, which seemed to be about the norm for DCs cohort. And of course a lot of kids apply and are accepted ED, so they are applying to 1 (or maybe 2-3 if they also applied EA somewhere). DC knew one kid who applied to 20 and that was seen to be an extreme.

My kid at Whitman was in the top 5% of students and applied to 10 last year. She knows most of the other similarly situated kids, and all applied to between 8 and 12 if they didn't get into their ED/SCEA choice, which many did. There is definitely peer pressure not to apply to a lot of schools, and doing so is frowned on by the counselors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It looks like Churchill had a tough year - slipping behind Whitman and WJ.

It's hard to tell with Churchill because they don't report all the data--really annoying! Whitman seemed to do extremely well almost across the board. I'd be curious to know if this was an unusually good year for them. I haven't focused as much on prior year charts.

It's really interesting to see the patterns of colleges that are popular among students of the various schools and which colleges seem to return the love. I was struck by how many Wootton kids apply to Purdue, which I know has a great engineering program, and how many were accepted (23 of 36). Meanwhile, if the chart is accurate, Wootton went 0 of 24 at University of Florida. Can this be true?

What observations do others have?

Could be a blacklisted school (poor relationship with counselor, past student who left behind a bad impression, 0% yield consistently so not point of admitting).

[Anonymous]

Seems Brown and Princeton are really popular. Anyone know why they seem hotter than the other Ivies to MCPS kids?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Seems Brown and Princeton are really popular. Anyone know why they seem hotter than the other Ivies to MCPS kids?

In some area publics, including Blair among at least some of the highly qualified magnet/CAP kids, applying to HYP is seen as pretentious and for wannabes. I know, it makes little sense and I'm not excusing it. For the magnet kids at least, the STEM offerings are better elsewhere. DC refused to tour, let alone apply, to HYP, even though we drove right past all of them on our way to see Penn, Columbia, BU, Vassar and others. We never pushed HYP and the same DC is now loving Columbia. I guess it's reverse snobbery.