Sidwell throttling down college admissions?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:1. I have a daughter, not a son, but way to be sexist. You couldn't have said "kid"?

2. My daughter has not applied to Sidwell, Andover, or Exeter.

Oh good god, are you an Andover/Exeter grad yourself? ... one who's old enough to have a child, and yet you're still picking fights on an anonymous message board to try to prove your high school was the best?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Depends on whether you assume that "abnormal" has a negative connotation.

Would you not call geniuses or world-class athletes abnormal?

Well, clearly your previous comment was meant to imply something qualitative about people who look beyond their immediate metro area for HS. Now you're trying to backtrack by claiming you were using the word "normal" to denote typical behavior.

Yes, the "something qualitative" I was implying is that while lots of people may choose to apply to colleges based on national rankings, the concept of national rankings driving similar decisions about high schools (as if they were equally fungible quantities as colleges) is laughable.

National high school rankings! That's the funniest thing I've heard all week.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't get the controversy here. When has Sidwell (or anyone on DCUM affiliated with the school) EVER billed itself as an Andover or Exeter? They're like apples and oranges.

The issue is Sidwell bills itself as the best of the best. The point people are making here is that there's daylight between what the school bills itself as, and what it actually delivers, from a college acceptance standpoint.

GDS boosters have touted that school's college admissions record. I used to think that was largely B.S., but there may be something to it.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:7:20 here. I’m not surprised to hear the limits has been raised to 10 applications.

There are three college counselors w a caseload of about 40 each.

If SFS has that kind of a relationship with a top 20 school, I haven’t heard of it. That’s not to say it doesn’t exist. You do sometimes hear of a kid who doesn’t get in anywhere and then the counselors start making calls to places where they have relationships. Of course that is the exact scenario they are trying to avoid in the first place, which is why they are conservative in their predictions re very competitive schools.

If the counselors have relationships with schools, do they usually make contacts about applicants before decisions come out?

If they do, I’ve never heard anything about it.

Back in the day the headmaster of Exeter used to call his good pal the Dean of Admissions at Harvard to talk about which boys to admit. I think some parents have an idea that this is how it still works at Sidwell and other elite privates but I think the world has moved on, thank heaven. Highly competitive schools are drowning in applications from super qualified candidates and have their own ways of selecting candidates. They don’t need to waste time on the phone with college counselors from this or that elite private school. How does that help them?

The old days at Exeter are gone, if they ever existed, but there's no question that focused contacts by a good college counselor can make an admissions difference particularly at some SLACs. The very experienced, better counselors know how to do this kind of advocacy, particularly how to highlight certain aspects of the application or preemptively to address questions that might otherwise imperil an application. It may no longer work at Harvard or Stanford because of sheer numbers, but could work at colleges like Bates, Bowdoin or Carleton.

They did exist, as they did at Andover (my HS). Did that ever happen at Sidwell?

Also, Andover and Exeter college counselors have established relationships with the Deans of Admission at the top colleges. That’s what you need to get the matriculation stats they have. They make calls; trust me.

Yeah, so of course they still make calls. Maybe not from Sidwell, but the top prep schools do -- they are still generating significant numbers for the top ivy matriculating classes.

I don't know how or why anybody ever though Sidwell was a top prep school. Never has been. Maybe in some future universe it will be.

Sidwelll is the top prep school for the Washington area. So it's far enough to call it that (I'm aware that through the 1980s it was considered a good private school but Washington was a different town in those days too).

Andover and Exeter are a in a different category unto themselves and have always been. The gap between Sidwell and Andover/Exeter is probably larger now than it was in the waspy heydays because not only are these two schools truly national and global, they take in a pretty diverse intake of students from all kinds of backgrounds now. Sidwell really doesn't. The New England boarding schools work closely with programs that place minority/disadvantaged students into the schools and a lot of these kids go on to the Ivies and constitute a pretty high percentage of the Ivy bound intake from Andover/Exeter. And much of the remaining intake will be kids from families with serious hooks (mega wealth, mega legacies, mega famous parents). Your typical white upper middle class kid is likely no better off from a college placement perspective at Andover than at Sidwell or, heck, even Bullis.

I do think that for a long time there was truth that a major advantage of going to Sidwell or any of the top DC prep schools was that it could make the difference in getting into Bowdoin or Haverford or Davidson, or Carnegie Mellon, but I have a feeling that advantage has been substantially weakened in recent years due to the admissions juggernaut.

All the more reason why the SFS college advising office today needs to bring its A-game.

Well, I think PP's point, which I tend to agree with, is that even the A-game for college advising will bring middling results.

PP argues -- again, I agree, that top prep schools are running their admissions systems to develop candidates that will be accepted, in good part through minority students.

Whites w/out real influence (and this bar has been raised substantially) are going to continue to have hard time.

I'd be very interested to know how the resources of the SFS college office compare with similar schools in the DC area. SFS has three counselors for a relatively large senior class, which means 40+ advisees per counselor, one of whom also has managerial responsibilities. It appears that the office could use some additional, experienced counselors (not intern staff).

[Anonymous]

Friends: Please ignore these trolls... These are obvious attempts to provoke angry posts....

[Anonymous]

The problem is that Sidwell has drunk its own kool-aid. It thinks it's the best when in fact it is just a good private school, no different than the others in the area. This is why people are all over it because they are appalled by its sheer arrogance. It is so not a Quaker school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The problem is that Sidwell has drunk its own kool-aid. It thinks it's the best when in fact it is just a good private school, no different than the others in the area. This is why people are all over it because they are appalled by its sheer arrogance. It is so not a Quaker school.

Eh, the Cathedral schools are better than Sidwell by almost every objective measure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:More like, I doubt Sidwell cares or ever thinks about where it sits in some hypothetical ranking versus Andover and Exeter. My guess is that it cares way more about where it stands relative to GDS and STA/NCS.

You keep telling yourself that. Obviously Sidwell's primary competitors are area schools, but they are absolutely competing against Andover and Exeter.

Also, it's not a hypothetical ranking. It's literally every ranking of private high schools you can find. Andover and Exeter are higher on every single one.

Competing for what? Students? Maybe a handful.
Dollars? no

This makes no sense. It isn't a boarding school, so its peers are day schools, mostly in the DC area.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The issue is Sidwell bills itself as the best of the best.

Where and how? Show us, or else we know you're full of it.

Seriously? Sidwell charges $40K for kindergarten, whereas everyone else charges way less. Why? Because they think they're hot s*t and can get away with it.

Are you now advocating that Sidwell is just another school? Because there are endless threads here about how to get a vaunted Sidwell acceptance letter, so it certainly doesn't seem like that's how it's viewed around here ...

You make no sense and your arguments make less sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Also, I find it hilarious that you care so much that you went through a 21-page thread to find comments I apparently made.

You claim you don't care but YOU ACTUALLY CARE SO MUCH.

DP - search is your friend.

It literally takes seconds.

[Anonymous]

People with whom I have been arguing, take note: I did not make any of the most recent posts. I didn't bring up the Cathedral schools. I didn't talk about Sidwell drinking its own Kool-Aid.

Ergo, I am not the only one who thinks Sidwell has an inflated sense of self.

[Anonymous]

I've one of the PPs who's been arguing with you and have no problem with folks who want to think that Sidwell has an inflated sense of self, but bringing up schools like Andover and Exeter is completely irrelevant and pointless.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I've one of the PPs who's been arguing with you and have no problem with folks who want to think that Sidwell has an inflated sense of self, but bringing up schools like Andover and Exeter is completely irrelevant and pointless.

I think the point of bringing those schools up is to point out concrete examples of places that outperform Sidwell, to counter the notion that Sidwell is somehow unrivaled. It's meant to poke holes in the inflated narrative Sidwell has built for itself.

[Anonymous]

But the prevalence of the phrase "Big 3" on DCUM over the years goes completely against your perception of folks thinking that Sidwell is unrivaled.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:But the prevalence of the phrase "Big 3" on DCUM over the years goes completely against your perception of folks thinking that Sidwell is unrivaled.

Yeah, but is anyone going to honestly say that Sidwell isn't considered to be just a tad above the other 2 members of the "big 3"?