I'd love to be a fly on the wall during admissions decision meetings

[Anonymous]

How often does race/ethnicity come up?

[Anonymous]

12:02 Thank you so much for your candor! I have a question too! What about 3rd & 4th grade applicants? How much weight does the ERB or WISC have in the selection process? And what would automatically put a child in the NO pile? Sorry load you with more questions!!!

[Anonymous]

Does it help to have a letter written on your behalf from an existing family at the school? We are applying for 1st and our educational consultant told us to do this. I am assuming if the child is a maybe then perhaps it might help against other maybe applicants?

[Anonymous]

Hi, all, it is 12:02 back again. I will try to answer the additional questions while reiterating that practices might differ from school to school, and that I am no longer currently working in schools. In other words, take everything I say with a large grain of salt!

16:24 -- Race and ethnicity does come up in the admissions discussions (I would think this is the case with every school that as part of its mission statement states a commitment to diversity, which I assume applies to pretty much every DC independent school), but it is often at the macro level rather than applicant-specific. For example, admissions committees will discuss and strategize about outreach efforts (e.g., building relationships with charter schools; working with the Black Student Fund and Latino Student Fund; school visits). Where it comes up explicitly may be as a discussion of an interesting international background (e.g., student was schooled in Hong Kong), or as part of a discussion of what the school believes that student will be able to contribute to the community. My sense has also been that over time, the DC independent schools are beginning to go in the same direction as, for example, the Ivy League Schools in college admissions, and put more weight on socio-economic factors than race per se. So a student coming out of a difficult background with respect to income and prior education will get more of a boost in admissions than a student with all the prior advantages. Nevertheless, I think for most schools race on its own can still be a factor for groups historically underrepresented in private or collegiate education -- in practice this generally means African-American and Latino students -- but it is less of a factor than it used to be and more part of a larger discussion of socio-economic factors.

17:01 -- For third and fourth grade applicants, yes, there is significant attention paid to the ERB and WISC, as those tests are viewed as starting to be relatively good predictors of academic performance. There's still a recognition that tests don't capture everything, though, so schools still rely heavily on other material (teacher recommendations and comments and their discussions with the prior school attended by the student). And there's no question that a child who has an engaging interview can sway things as well. Hard to really give a good example of what would put a child in the "NO" pile--most often it is a sense that the child is just not academically the right fit (say it appears that the child has great difficulty reading, which will be more and more of an impediment as the grade levels increase). Sometimes a child makes it very clear in the interview that they do not want to go to the school -- this isn't the end of the discussion, as people realize that we don't generally ask 8 or 9 year olds to make major life decisions for themselves, but if you are trying to decide if a child would be happy at the school it can be seen as significant.

[Anonymous]

Another Admissions person here

I'm going to try to take some of the questions off of the first posters shoulders

Race/Diversity do come up as does anything else that gives the committee a well-rounded view of the child. Please remember that the schools are trying to build a heterogeneous group of kids (as much as possible) so students' experiences will resemble the real world (really, they do try - I know it doesn't seem like it)

The ERB/WISC are two different tests since one is achievement based (how much has the child learned and how does he/she perform academically) and the WISC is cognitive ability. It's just a part of the puzzle but if a child does extremely poorly, the school wouldn't want to put him/her in a daily learning situation where he could constantly feel not as smart or overwhelmed.

The letter from a current family can help assuming: 1) that the family knows the child (at least a little bit) and can say the family would be a good fit for the school and 2) that the current family is in "good" standing with the school itself.

PP Admissions poster - please feel free to disagree or add. I was just trying to help with the onslaught of questions!

[Anonymous]

Reading this thread with great interest and wanted to say a heartfelt thank-you to the former admissions folks who are offering such thoughtful responses to our questions. This is a refreshingly productive discussion!

[Anonymous]

Thanks for these valuable insights from insiders.

Another question: if this is the 3rd time a child has applied to the school, does that seem more desperate or committed?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Another Admissions person here

I'm going to try to take some of the questions off of the first posters shoulders

Welcome fellow Admissions person! This is 12:02 and it's great to have additional voices, particularly as practices may differ from place to place. I agree with what you've said. With respect to 09:52's question about a letter from another family, I think it can help occasionally (and agree with PP's points about the letter) as long as you don't put too much of your hopes on it. As with all sorts of letters, including college recommendation letters, a lot depends on the quality of the letter itself. If it is just sort of a 'pro forma' letter ("Family X is lovely and Child X would be great at this school"), then in my experience it is not given weight. If the family knows your family quite well (maybe from being at the prior school together), and can talk about how your family (including the applicant) would add to the life of the school. As PP also noted, the identity of the letter writer does matter. As a threshold matter, are they in good standing? But that is sort of a floor. If the letter writer is well known to the school (multiple kids) and has served in some significant capacity (board of trustees, parents associations, etc), that helps it get more "air time." As 09:52 recognized, of course, it is a relatively small part of the picture and something to think of in an effort to push a "maybe" into a yes. Full disclosure, though, it was more the exception than the rule in my experience. Nevertheless, it doesn't hurt.

[Anonymous]

11:30 Not an admissions person but I know several students who were accepted to schools like Sidwell, Maret and GDS the third time they applied.

[Anonymous]

Hi, 11:30, this is 12:02. I don't think applying for the third time is seen as a sign of "desperation," given that so many of the most sought after schools have different chances of admissions at different entry grades. You might want to take a hard look at your child's chances before applying again (my guess is that your post here is part of that process), as I can imagine maybe it could be somewhat discouraging for a particular child if they are not accepted in three tries. We are lucky in DC to have a lot of excellent choices for independent schools, so just as I've told former students applying to college to try not to focus too much on one "first choice college" (American universities are the best in the world by and large), I tell my friends whose kids are applying to independent schools the same thing: for the most part, it's like a multiple choice test with no wrong answer. Good luck!

[Anonymous]

....having to deal with the consequences of a possibly unhappy youngster over months or years. For money to matter (the fabled "development case") I think it has to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars/donate a new building category to matter, and the same still holds true that the schools don't want to have an unhappy child of Daddy Warbucks if the school is truly not the right fit for the youngster.

Is there any private school in the d.c. area with an endowment in the hundreds of millions of dollars? If not, the above statement has zero basis in fact. A school with an endowment of only 30 miilion dollars would be more than happy with a donation of a million dollars (1/30 of current endowment). This would be a significant contribution that would MATTER. The above quotation is utter bullshit...no connection to economic reality and finance theory.

Note, endowment of STA is only 30 million dollars .... not close to a billion like Phillips Exeter Academy. A paltry million dollar donation to STA would have them dancing in the hallways!!

[Anonymous]

I thought Episcopal High School was around 300 million, but that was before the Big Dip. Just checked - who knows how reliable generic public sources are- but it says down to 132m. Agree with PP 1,000,000 + would probably make a difference at some schools. It wouldn't guarantee anything.

[Anonymous]

Hi, this is 12:02 replying to 11:39. My original post was probably unclear and prone to being misinterpreted. And again, just my own experience and limited to the school(s) where I worked, so my response may be very off base as compared to practices at other institutions.

I understood the original question as asking what impact does the wealth of the parents have in average admissions committee decisions? My answer was not meant to suggest that schools only "sit up and take notice" if the donation itself is in the hundreds of millions level. Rather--and this is based on my own experience and may not be representative--for a student to be considered as a "development case" (which I emphasize is unusual) the parents had to have an extremely high net worth that made people think that a very high end gift was possible. If it is a child of a family that has attended the school for generations and made substantial but lower levels of gifts (not the new building level) over the years, then you get the "legacy" factor as well. So my post was really dealing with a new family applying. In general, wealth is not considered and it came up rarely.

I don't think most admissions folks like those situations where wealth is a factor is admissions, but most will grudgingly recognize that as long as costs for schools skyrocket and heads of schools are judged so much on fundraising (as compared to educational leadership), there will be occasions where the high net worth of a family is a significant factor in admissions. Sometimes (in my experience at least) a bit of a "deal" was cut in committee and the school would overenroll to make sure that nobody lost a spot on the basis of such an admission.

And now, it is time to very literally (not figuratively) clean my house (it's time for me to get off the computer). And yes, I do plan do watch some NFL football as well.

[Anonymous]

Different city and a whole other level of craziness, but watch "Nursery University" about the NYC pre-school admin process to get a peek inside admission committee deliberations. Very interesting.

[Anonymous]

Another question for the admissions folks who have been so helpful in this discussion. I have a question regarding progress reports for those students who are applying in the 3rd or 4th grade. Many kids coming from private in this area are in schools where the report card uses a system of letters (ie: student demonstrates a behavior/skill all the time, some of the time, not very much, or needs one-on-one support) that are different from the tradional A, B, C report card. Are these 8 and 9 year old applicants who come from schools who do don't use the tradional report card expected to get the equivalent of all A's (ie: student always demonstrates particular skill?) What do typical progress reports/report cards look like for these applicants?