DH is not impressed with college admissions from the private schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DH actually attended a very average high school but the honors students (~25) all got into ivy leagues or similar. He was looking at the admissions from some of the privates around here and the number of acceptances to top colleges was worse than his very average high school.

Tell your DH to compare the % of students going to Ivy colleges from local private schools versus local public school. He'll soon discover the difference.

That's just stupid. Public schools have to take kids. If you look at the top 50 entering Whitman or Churchill in 9th grade, the outcome at 12th grade will be about the same as the top 50 entering a private.

Proof?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DH actually attended a very average high school but the honors students (~25) all got into ivy leagues or similar. He was looking at the admissions from some of the privates around here and the number of acceptances to top colleges was worse than his very average high school.

Tell your DH to compare the % of students going to Ivy colleges from local private schools versus local public school. He'll soon discover the difference.

Don't do this, because the comparison is stupid, as PP well knows. Many kids from area publics aren't planning to go to college, or they are in that middle position between qualifying for FA (about $50k household income) and being able to pay the full $60k/year at an Ivy (none of which give merit aid). So many public school kids are not even considering Ivies, instead they are looking at state schools or 2nd-tier privates that will give them lots of merit aid. This might be a useful comparison if we could compare private school exmissions to the public school kids who can afford at least $30k/year (what the private school kids are already paying) in tuition, but we don't have that data.

For the PPs with tons of classmates going to Ivies, times have really changed since our day. Most Ivies take fewer than 10% of applicants, and they take an even smaller percent of unhooked kids.

Send your kid to private school for the small class sizes, and for better art, music, science, social studies and PE in elementary school. As for Ivies, some here think that private schools do a better job motivating the middle-of-the-road kid and then championing him with the college admissions teams in their Rolodexes, but there's no hard evidence to say one way or another.

Actually, HHIs under $60k will qualify for significant FA at HYP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DH actually attended a very average high school but the honors students (~25) all got into ivy leagues or similar. He was looking at the admissions from some of the privates around here and the number of acceptances to top colleges was worse than his very average high school.

Tell your DH to compare the % of students going to Ivy colleges from local private schools versus local public school. He'll soon discover the difference.

Don't do this, because the comparison is stupid, as PP well knows. Many kids from area publics aren't planning to go to college, or they are in that middle position between qualifying for FA (about $50k household income) and being able to pay the full $60k/year at an Ivy (none of which give merit aid). So many public school kids are not even considering Ivies, instead they are looking at state schools or 2nd-tier privates that will give them lots of merit aid. This might be a useful comparison if we could compare private school exmissions to the public school kids who can afford at least $30k/year (what the private school kids are already paying) in tuition, but we don't have that data.

For the PPs with tons of classmates going to Ivies, times have really changed since our day. Most Ivies take fewer than 10% of applicants, and they take an even smaller percent of unhooked kids.

Send your kid to private school for the small class sizes, and for better art, music, science, social studies and PE in elementary school. As for Ivies, some here think that private schools do a better job motivating the middle-of-the-road kid and then championing him with the college admissions teams in their Rolodexes, but there's no hard evidence to say one way or another.

Actually, HHIs under $60k will qualify for significant FA at HYP.

True. But even at HYP, this FA help phases out at about HHI=$120k unless there are strong extenuating circumstances. We are still talking about a huge middle class in the public schools with HHI between $120K and $300k who can't afford even private school tuition of $30k (if you believe the endless DCUM threads about how you need HHI>$300k to go private) let alone pay full freight of $60k at an Ivy. These public and private school populations are in no way comparable in terms of ability to afford $60k/year ivies.

[Anonymous]

Would a valid way to construct a comparison be to take the top 25% of each school, and compare just their results?

For example: Top 25% of Whitman (~100 students) vs. top 25% of STA (~20 students). Rank the college destinations of each group, and compare how they look. If the schools are truly equal, then the college quality for those two groups should be about the same. The same could be said for SAT scores.

Not sure if data is available for all this. Just wondering if that construct might allow for a "fair" comparison.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DH actually attended a very average high school but the honors students (~25) all got into ivy leagues or similar. He was looking at the admissions from some of the privates around here and the number of acceptances to top colleges was worse than his very average high school.

Tell your DH to compare the % of students going to Ivy colleges from local private schools versus local public school. He'll soon discover the difference.

That's just stupid. Public schools have to take kids. If you look at the top 50 entering Whitman or Churchill in 9th grade, the outcome at 12th grade will be about the same as the top 50 entering a private.

Proof?

Not the PP, but Whitman had 25 NMSFs last year, 21 this year (the cut off went up again, they also had 59 commended scholars). About 20-25 went to ivies last year and another big group to SLACs and other selective schools like Stanford, too soon to tell for this year of course. So I do think the top 100 are comparable to the top 100 at a private school (if not actually a little deeper since in a private school class of 100 you will probably have 10-15 who may be lifers or children or alums or whatever who aren't quite the same caliber). I will say that Whitman has a large group (over half the grade) applying to UMD - including many of the top students. You don't typically see that in private schools. So there is a bit more of a public bias even at Whitman. I don't know about Churchill but assume it's pretty comparable.

OP - if you both went to ivies and your kid is an academic superstar then either public or private will be fine. Ultimately the first screen is grades and SAT scores - if the kid doesn't have both then it may not matter what school he's in (unless he's an awesome athlete of course).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't think it's stupid at all. First, just as there are many public school kids who don't consider Ivys, the same applies to many private school kids. Second, just as there are some public school kids who might have the grades/scores to be admitted to an Ivy, but don't attend because they cannot afford it, the same applies to many private school kids. Your points may carry more weight if comparing Bethesda private schools against public school from low-income areas. But I suspect the public schools we're talking about here are ones in Bethesda/Chevy Chase/Potomac/McLean, so I doubt the "admitted to Ivy but couldn't afford it" story is too common. And finally, to the extent your points have some merit, I'd consider them where the public school has only a little smaller % than the private school. But where the private school is sending 3-4 times more students to Ivys on a % basis, your points don't account for the difference.

Also, if you look at factors not-so-easily dismissed by supposed family income -- like National Merit Semifinalist % for example -- you see the same pattern as with Ivy attendance. The strong private schools will have 3-4 times as many Semifinalists on a % basis. Surely even if some highly qualified public school students were admitted but chose not to attend Ivy colleges because of finances, those same students tried just as hard on the SAT and PSAT tests.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking public schools; I'm a proud public school grad. And I'm especially not knocking public schools in the DC area; they're incredibly strong. But looking at the objective data on student success, it's inaccurate to claim the strong private schools don't have better outcomes. If you want to argue those better outcomes are partially the result of the strongest students flocking to private schools over public schools, I'd probably agree. It's hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison of which situation will bring out the best in any particular kid, and harder still to say by how much. But again, saying the objective data doesn't favor the strong private schools just seems to be ostrich-like to me.

I'm not sure where to start, with your word chocies or with your overall comparison. For example, private schools selectthe strongest students - it isn't that the stronger students are "flocking" to the privates as you say. This pretty much negates your point about NMSSFs, because the fact that private schools cream the good test takers (like my high SSAT-scoring kid) indicates less about the private schools' educational successes and more about private schools' ability to...cream the good test takers and, FWIW, the kids who can afford expensive private SAT tutoring.

It sort of drives me nuts when you compare anything on a percent basis--like you're doing again with NMSSFs. This may be out of the realm of your experience/bubble, but I hope you can see that many public school kids don't even take the PSATs or SATs... because they aren't planning to go to college. So your percent-of-the-population statistics are equally misleading when you look at an entire public school class for Ivies as for NMSSFs.

Yes, I too know Sidwell kids who flat out refused to apply to Ivies because they were sick of the pressure cooker. But a much larger number of public school kids are going to be applying to 2nd-tier SLACs because they can get merit aid. Again, probably outside your experience, but I know public school kids who turned down top Ivies for places that offered full rides.

Most important, you have a very wishful and naive view of HH Income curve at area publics, even at the western MoCo publics you name. At all of these schools, you will find FARMS rates of 5-15%, and FARMS thresholds are very low -- HHI <$25K last time I checked (although feel free to double check, I have to run). This is without going into the percent that is non-English-speaking, and those stats are also readily available for you to check. But the biggest problem is that you ignore the huge bulge of the middle class in the middle of that public school income distribution, the kids from families with HHI under maybe $300. I think we can agree that private school families are mostly (not always, but with a private school kid, I have an idea what that distribution looks like) at the very upper tail of the income distribution in this area. It's simply not true that the HHI distribution at a school like Churchill is identical to the HHI distribution at most area privates.

In short, you need to compare apples to apples, the college-bound kids within the public schools, and particularly the college-bound kids at the very top end of the income distribution at these public schools, even at the western MoCo public schools. This is the peer group that is most comparable to private school kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Would a valid way to construct a comparison be to take the top 25% of each school, and compare just their results?

For example: Top 25% of Whitman (~100 students) vs. top 25% of STA (~20 students). Rank the college destinations of each group, and compare how they look. If the schools are truly equal, then the college quality for those two groups should be about the same. The same could be said for SAT scores.

Not sure if data is available for all this. Just wondering if that construct might allow for a "fair" comparison.

I think this might work. I assume you mean top 25% by GPAs. You'd probably need SES data for both groups, too, because family finances drive a lot of college decisions. FWIW, I'm the person arguing with the "let's compare percents across schools" poster, and I'm an economist and statistician. I tend to go a little nuts when I see sloppy thinking - but I think you might be on the right track here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't think it's stupid at all. First, just as there are many public school kids who don't consider Ivys, the same applies to many private school kids. Second, just as there are some public school kids who might have the grades/scores to be admitted to an Ivy, but don't attend because they cannot afford it, the same applies to many private school kids. Your points may carry more weight if comparing Bethesda private schools against public school from low-income areas. But I suspect the public schools we're talking about here are ones in Bethesda/Chevy Chase/Potomac/McLean, so I doubt the "admitted to Ivy but couldn't afford it" story is too common. And finally, to the extent your points have some merit, I'd consider them where the public school has only a little smaller % than the private school. But where the private school is sending 3-4 times more students to Ivys on a % basis, your points don't account for the difference.

Also, if you look at factors not-so-easily dismissed by supposed family income -- like National Merit Semifinalist % for example -- you see the same pattern as with Ivy attendance. The strong private schools will have 3-4 times as many Semifinalists on a % basis. Surely even if some highly qualified public school students were admitted but chose not to attend Ivy colleges because of finances, those same students tried just as hard on the SAT and PSAT tests.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking public schools; I'm a proud public school grad. And I'm especially not knocking public schools in the DC area; they're incredibly strong. But looking at the objective data on student success, it's inaccurate to claim the strong private schools don't have better outcomes. If you want to argue those better outcomes are partially the result of the strongest students flocking to private schools over public schools, I'd probably agree. It's hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison of which situation will bring out the best in any particular kid, and harder still to say by how much. But again, saying the objective data doesn't favor the strong private schools just seems to be ostrich-like to me.

I'm not sure where to start, with your word chocies or with your overall comparison. For example, private schools selectthe strongest students - it isn't that the stronger students are "flocking" to the privates as you say. This pretty much negates your point about NMSSFs, because the fact that private schools cream the good test takers (like my high SSAT-scoring kid) indicates less about the private schools' educational successes and more about private schools' ability to...cream the good test takers and, FWIW, the kids who can afford expensive private SAT tutoring.

It sort of drives me nuts when you compare anything on a percent basis--like you're doing again with NMSSFs. This may be out of the realm of your experience/bubble, but I hope you can see that many public school kids don't even take the PSATs or SATs... because they aren't planning to go to college. So your percent-of-the-population statistics are equally misleading when you look at an entire public school class for Ivies as for NMSSFs.

Yes, I too know Sidwell kids who flat out refused to apply to Ivies because they were sick of the pressure cooker. But a much larger number of public school kids are going to be applying to 2nd-tier SLACs because they can get merit aid. Again, probably outside your experience, but I know public school kids who turned down top Ivies for places that offered full rides.

Most important, you have a very wishful and naive view of HH Income curve at area publics, even at the western MoCo publics you name. At all of these schools, you will find FARMS rates of 5-15%, and FARMS thresholds are very low -- HHI <$25K last time I checked (although feel free to double check, I have to run). This is without going into the percent that is non-English-speaking, and those stats are also readily available for you to check. But the biggest problem is that you ignore the huge bulge of the middle class in the middle of that public school income distribution, the kids from families with HHI under maybe $300. I think we can agree that private school families are mostly (not always, but with a private school kid, I have an idea what that distribution looks like) at the very upper tail of the income distribution in this area. It's simply not true that the HHI distribution at a school like Churchill is identical to the HHI distribution at most area privates.

In short, you need to compare apples to apples, the college-bound kids within the public schools, and particularly the college-bound kids at the very top end of the income distribution at these public schools, even at the western MoCo public schools. This is the peer group that is most comparable to private school kids.

Should add - my kid just started full-pay at a top Ivy, which is a stretch for us but not impossible.... Just saying this to deflect the inevitable charge of sour grapes, and to establish that I have a pretty good idea about how finances affect college choices.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Would a valid way to construct a comparison be to take the top 25% of each school, and compare just their results?

For example: Top 25% of Whitman (~100 students) vs. top 25% of STA (~20 students). Rank the college destinations of each group, and compare how they look. If the schools are truly equal, then the college quality for those two groups should be about the same. The same could be said for SAT scores.

Not sure if data is available for all this. Just wondering if that construct might allow for a "fair" comparison.

I think this might work. I assume you mean top 25% by GPAs. You'd probably need SES data for both groups, too, because family finances drive a lot of college decisions. FWIW, I'm the person arguing with the "let's compare percents across schools" poster, and I'm an economist and statistician. I tend to go a little nuts when I see sloppy thinking - but I think you might be on the right track here.

I'm a Whitman booster and I can tell you that STA will win this one. The top 25 kids in each school are comparable, probably even the top 50, but not the top 25%. As others have pointed out public schools take all comers. There is a large special ed group at Whitman, plus plenty of normal average kids. There is also a large high performing group. I don't think anyone is claiming that a public school is equal to a private school since the private school pre screens and counsels out kids (some of whom end up at Whitman in fact) so they should have a nearly perfect group by he time they get to 12th grade. But for a top student I think either school can be a good fit and end up with very similar college outcomes.

Overall I doubt there are that many people really weighing the two based just on college admissions. If you want to go to a small, single sex, religious school then Whitman is not the place for you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thanks for sharing!

Ha ha, this one made me laugh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do you have a question?

Do you see a difference in college admissions from the private schools compared to any decent public in MD/VA?

I am trying to convince my DH to go for private school. DH actually attended a very average high school but the honors students (~25) all got into ivy leagues or similar. He was looking at the admissions from some of the privates around here and the number of acceptances to top colleges was worse than his very average high school.

You should both do some reading about the changes in college admissions since you were in high school. This is not anecdotal – the acceptance percentages for the most highly selective schools have gone down. When I was in college in the early 80s, there were something like 10 international students in my whole class. Now this same undergraduate institution gets literally thousands of international applications, many of them superb. Any parent assuming the landscape is the same as when they were applying to college, will most likely be very surprised and disappointed. Save yourself the angst, and get educated about the college admissions landscape.

[Anonymous]

Do the kids around here not apply to the ivy leagues as much? I am genuinely curious.

Students from my high school class all applied to most all ivy league schools so we had a strong mix of acceptances to Penn, Browne and Cornell. HYP is a stretch for most students but the lesser ivy league schools were not all that hard to get into. I went to a small high school and we still had 20 kids go to ivy league schools. If you added the schools like Amherst, Wellesley and similar, it was more like the top 50.

Have you considered that it has gotten more competitive in the last 20 or so years to get into top colleges and universities because the applicant pool is larger and more national and, increasingly, international? People in this area definitely apply to top schools, but Harvard only takes 5% of its applicants. Also the class sizes at private schools are small.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We just toured several private schools with $30,000 tuitions and DH is unwilling to pay for it. He is unimpressed with the college admissions at the private schools. DH and I both attended ivy league schools from public schools. Both our high schools in New England had many more ivy league acceptances than the privates we recently toured.

Um, OK, good for you. Would you like a sticker or something?

[Anonymous]

Don't do this, because the comparison is stupid, as PP well knows. Many kids from area publics aren't planning to go to college, or they are in that middle position between qualifying for FA (about $50k household income) and being able to pay the full $60k/year at an Ivy (none of which give merit aid). So many public school kids are not even considering Ivies, instead they are looking at state schools or 2nd-tier privates that will give them lots of merit aid. This might be a useful comparison if we could compare private school exmissions to the public school kids who can afford at least $30k/year (what the private school kids are already paying) in tuition, but we don't have that data.

Eh, the picture is more complicated than that. They give out need based aid as per the expected family contribution from the FAFSA, which holistically looks at income, how many kids are in college, and how many assets you have. Not saying that "not rich for DC" (in the low six figures) are going to get much aid, but it's not you pay the full $60K or you get a full ride. Pell grants are phased out at ~50K, but there are also institutional grants that need blind schools give for 10K or 20K or whatever they deem is "demonstrated financial need."

[Anonymous]

OP, if you are real, I feel sorry for your kids. I have older kids, including a senior, and the children I see of the "I went to an Ivy so God Damn-it so will my kid" parents really, really struggle emotionally. And invariably they don't go to an Ivy, either because they aren't accepted, in which case way to make your child feel like a failure, or they actually have a personality and tell there parents to F off with imposing their expectations. I mean how old is your kid, 4? or maybe 10?

I'm sorry, but your husband sounds like a real narcissist. I hope one day he realizes his kids are not him and their role is not to allow him to bask in their reflected glory.