Why do some highly ranked schools seem to avoid some high schools?

[Anonymous]

Our school does pretty decent but Dartmouth accepts very few students from ours. Yet every year they sent a rep in our school. Why bother?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Our school does pretty decent but Dartmouth accepts very few students from ours. Yet every year they sent a rep in our school. Why bother?

Well, Dartmouth is usually a waste of an app for anyone that doesn't go their feeder high schools. I wish they'd break things up, and do things differently. There are a lot of students interested in Dartmouth. But they seem to be muddling along with their old-timey preferences.

Someone posted something about yield - offering acceptances but getting relatively few students to actually attend. I think that's a big reason why some high schools might be having a hard time. At our high school five years ago, Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, Northwestern and Brown would generally extend two to five acceptances or so. But when they are only yielding one student each bc the students chose HYPSM instead, those schools have effectively become impossible admits now in RD. Colleges want people that want to be there. And they seem to be taking notes. I think that applies to every school ranked 5-20. Which is why there is so much pressure to apply ED.

[Anonymous]

Our school did not have anyone accepted to Harvard for over a decade. We don’t know why that was but Dd broke that streak — not ALDC or URM. She had a balanced list but wanted to see what would happen if she applied— no stress or expectations. No one from our school has been accepted after her either. Affluent suburb with a fancy private school. If I were to speculate, I think the public school kids are compared to the private school kids. They just don’t compare — my DD certainly did not. She just lucked out!