Getting into St. Albans

[Anonymous]

Are they athletes?

[Anonymous]

It is true, you will see Landon boys who go on to Yale and Princeton. Almost all of them are athletes. You will see very few who are getting in because of academic merit alone (as opposed to St. Albans). So if you have a son at Landon who DOESN'T plan to play lacrosse, don't plan on him going on to Princeton or Yale.

[Anonymous]

If you have a top grades student with off-the-chart SAT scores and a generally well-put-together "admissions "package," then I don't see that boy being any more or less likely to get into Princeton or Yale from either STA or Landon. STA's parent body seems just slightly more obsessive than Landon's, meaning they they spend that many more thousands on extra tutors, premium prep courses, top consultants, etc.

None of the "top" DC area prep schools' names are such that Sidwell or STA or Landon or NCS or Maret or GDS or wherever else gives any admissions advantage over the other. (At least, that's what my friend, a former director of admissions at Yale says.) And all of these schools offer perfectly challenging and respectable courses and general academic and extracurricular programs. What it really boils down to is how motivated the students/applicants are (or how much their parents are) and what sorts of resources they're willing to devote to additional preparation.

If you give each school a graduating class of, say, 50 140 IQ kids who (and whose parents) are motivated to get them into an Ivy League (or the sort) school, I bet about the same percentage of each graduating class would get in regardless of which top prep school they graduated from. What's different is that some schools weigh certain characteristics more heavily than other in their admissions decisions and some parent bodies, as a group, are more willing to devote resources to various different goals than others. That doesn't mean that any given school doesn't do a satisfactory job of preparing students for what comes next.

[Anonymous]

I've heard that your child is better off being one of the top students at a local public high school than almost-at-the-top at NCS, etc., in terms of getting into the Ivy League schools. It does seem that there are more opportunities for competitions and awards at the public high schools than at private schools. Do students at the private schools participate, for example, in the Intel Science competition?

[Anonymous]

By the way, why do the universities care so much about sports? It's not like lacrosse is going to solve world problems, is it?

[Anonymous]

Alumni care, for some weird reason.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I've heard that your child is better off being one of the top students at a local public high school than almost-at-the-top at NCS, etc., in terms of getting into the Ivy League schools. It does seem that there are more opportunities for competitions and awards at the public high schools than at private schools. Do students at the private schools participate, for example, in the Intel Science competition?

I don't think this is true. Check out: http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/4251.html

If you control for senior class size (for example Thomas Jefferson has 450+ seniors versus less than 150 at Sidwell/GDS/Maret/etc.), I think the private schools are doing better than the top-notch public schools in the area (at least in terms of getting into Harvard).

[Anonymous]

I'm not sure this would be the case if you also controlled for the number of legacy applicants.

[Anonymous]

And to editorialize just a wee bit, I don't think this is a good reason for choosing one school over another.

[Anonymous]

I agree. How many people out there in cyberspace went to Harvard? And I bet most of us are doing just fine. Why all this new fascination with Ivy League schools?

[Anonymous]

Not to mention it's impossible to know in advance if your child will be at the top of your public school or near the top at NCS. In fact, given the quality of some of the schools around here, your at-the-top student at NCS might be just near the top at a public school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm not sure this would be the case if you also controlled for the number of legacy applicants.

Being legacy no longer guarantees admission.

[Anonymous]

No, but the odds are much much higher. "Harvard’s general acceptance rate hovers around 8 or 9 percent—this year, a mere 7.1 percent were admitted. Yet the admissions rate was between 34 and 35 percent for legacy applicants to the class of 2011 ."

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=522881

[Anonymous]

I would much rather send my kids to one of the little Ivies anyway.

[Anonymous]

Just curious-- where did you go?