Sidwell throttling down college admissions?

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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).

Our experience as parents with kids who graduated from/currently attend SFS and another independent school is that the problem is not one of resources. The SFS program as currently staffed could do a better job of working with students to put together lists that are both reasonable and attuned to individual strengths and interests. This could yield better results -- both in terms of acceptance rates and, more important, students' happiness at college. That said, however, many SFS parents' expectations have become increasingly unrealistic over the 10+years that we have had kids in the school.

Sidwell's college couns. office definitely could use one or two more professional staff... and with more experience.