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College Acceptance/Matriculation Stats: NCS/STA, Holton/Landon
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Anonymous
Exactly! I find it funny that OP finds these stats so newsworthy -- affluent kids attending prestigious schools are getting into the best colleges in the country. Not exactly shocking news. |
Anonymous
I really don't think legacies carry much weight at ivies anymore. A few of them post admission stats for legacies and they are not very different from the regular pool. At other schools it may still be a factor. College admissions has change a lot in the last 10 years. |
Anonymous
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Being a legacy is not the boost it once was (c. 1950, it virtually guaranteed admission). But it's still quite a boost. Latest stats suggest that at many top private schools it doubles chance of admission.
Athletes too get a big boost-- not just in squash etc. Read Derek Bok's book. He was pres of Harvard when I was an undergrad-- and though I was never crazy about him, its a good book and rather frighteningly highlights the negative impact of admissions boosts for athletes, esp. at smaller liberal arts schools (eg, Princeton, Amherst). |
Anonymous
| Unless you are a generous and consistent donor, legacy status counts for very little. In fact, I have been told by a former Ivy AD that many of the top schools actively seek to shrink their legacy percentages as a badge of honor of sorts. |
Anonymous
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They should shrink their legacy preferences. But the comment is just in reply to OP: raises the q of how much NCS/STA exmissions success is due wholly to good teachers etc., v. how much due to have a way above average # of parents who went to top schools and are affluent enough to be "generous and consistent donors." Which is turn raises the question: if your child is smart and interesting, but you're not super rich and you and your spouse don't have ivied pedigrees, can you look at exmissions from elite schools and assume attendance at one of these schools will significantly boost *your* child's chances of admission to a top college? Answer: not necessarily. If college admissions is what it's all about for you, move to Nebraska and put your bright, not-rich, non-legacy child in public school.
Not saying college admissions should be what it's all about-- plenty of independent reasons to choose a fancy school. Just saying: be clear on what these schools can do and what they can't, and on causation in college admissions. |
Anonymous
| The top 10% at any of these schools will go to one of the top 20% of colleges/universitites. My question is what happens to those kids who are not stellar, relatively speaking? |
Anonymous
Agree with this after reading "The Price of Admission", which is only 2-3 years old and so fairly current. The book says that legacies are still a huge factor at most top colleges, but only if you donate. He has some interesting corollaries. First, the "international" diversity is all about getting rich families from abroad who pay full freight. The book also quotes a study that saying that legacy families who don't donate much, because they chose professions in teaching or not-for-profits, don't get any preferences at all. The problem is that alumns are still a key source of money, so most colleges can't afford to alienate them for too long. Maybe Yale and Dartmouth are doing better on this front, I don't know. But the book talks about Harvard having an exclusive group of major donors that it cultivates with special programs, even as it offers free tuition to a handful (really, a small number) of lower income kids. Brown is noteworthy for cultivating the kids of rich and famous artists and actors. |
Anonymous
Very interesting question. I'd love to see what happens to the kid from a top area school who has high SATs and straight A's but no legacy status or wealth. I doubt we will ever know, however. Privates depend on these families to fill out classes, and they would be crazy to alienate them by releasing this type of statistic. |
Anonymous
As to the first point, it certainly appears from the statistics OP posted that more than the top 10% of private high schools are attending top-20% colleges. I read OP's statistics to indicate that from most of those schools approximately 50-70% of the class goes on to attend a top-25 college (which probably translates to top 5% of colleges). The statistics don't indicate how many were accepted at top-25 colleges but chose not to attend, but I imagine there were some of those. I'd also imagine that most of the other 50% from those schools also went to strong colleges, just not one of the top-25 colleges. As to the second point, your whole comment seems to presuppose that high-caliber students from these top schools ("high SATs and straight As") are unable to attend top colleges without legacy/wealth. I just don't accept that premise. Yes, I've read that "Price of Admission" book and all the articles that routinely get cited on DCUM. They all suggest that all colleges routinely give some extra preference to legacy/wealth, and I have no reason to doubt that claim. However, legacy/wealth applicants do not make up the entire class at these schools. I think "Price of Admission" claimed that up to 15% of the class (at most) at certain schools might be legacy/wealth applicants. That leaves 85+% of the spots left over for us regular folks. I understand that the competition for those remaining 85% of slots is thus more fierce, and the chances of admission for any particular student are correspondingly lower, but there are still lots of slots up for grabs. It seems that graduates of top high schools have pretty good success getting admission to top colleges. I seriously doubt that 50% of each graduating class from these schools attended the same college one of her parents did (which would be required to hit the legacy element). I also would be very surprised if 50% of these graduates come from the extreme wealth that signals big donors to these schools. I recall in Golden's book that most of the examples of wealth-driven admissions occurred when families were giving upward of $1 million. Very few people have that kind of extra cash. I suspect the vast majority of the students behind OP's statistics gained admission to top-25 colleges the way most applicants get admitted: a combination of hard work + good grades + strong SATs + strong school. Several people on this thread have made the point that these high schools are admitting only the top students, which probably tends to skew the statistics in their favor when it comes to college admissions. That's probably correct. I'm sure most of those students have lots of natural advantages -- most probably come from stable families making good incomes, their parents probably value education highly and instilled that view in their children, etc. But I also think good schools do a lot to help develop the kids. I'm sure people here could argue whether the $20-30,000 per-year price-tag is worth it, but that's a question for each family to decide, and probably the subject of another thread. Just to be clear, I'm not trying to criticize or pick a fight with either PP. You raise interesting and important questions. I just want to make sure everyone gives proper credit to the students and the schools that generated these impressive statistics, and not simply write them off by assuming they're legacy/wealth cases. |
Anonymous
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Out of curiosity, I dug out my copy of "Price of Admission". The claim is actually that 10-25 percent of the students in liberal arts colleges -- varying by college, I guess -- are legacies (page 6). This translates into much better odds of getting into the Ivies than for a non-legacy kid, which I'm sure is in the book somewhere and if somebody really wants the figure, I'll dig it out.
So one observation would be that, if Top DC School "X" has a class with 33% kids who are legacies, and these legacies have a better chance of getting into the Ivies than non-legacy kids -- well then, it's no surprise that Top DC School "X" has more graduates at the Ivies than third-tier privates or the local publics. The really scary news, on the next page, is that non-preference kids are competing for 40% of slots. These would be the kids that don't have athletic, potential donor, faculty, celebrity parent, minority and other preferences. Interestingly, the author points out the the preferences for minority kids are swamped by the preferences for rich white kids, like legacy, athletic, donor, faculty and celebrity preferences. The related question, that somebody above raised, would be how DC privates do in terms of getting the non-preference kids into those 40% of non-preference slots. I have no idea, and I doubt the schools release this type of information. Obviously, for many families the Ivies aren't the reason they're doing private school. Instead, the quality of education, nurturing, and development they get in a top private is reason enough to stay. And on this we can agree! |
Anonymous
| PP here. I just re-read the book (it's been a while) and the author says that maybe 1/3 to 1/5 of applicants got preferential treatment in the admissions process. He then goes on to say that a Berkeley chancellor looked at one Ivy and found that 60% of kids got preferential admissions treatment -- producing that 40% figure for non-preferential admissions slots that I gave above. |
Anonymous
Prezactly! |
Anonymous
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So everybody seems to agree that the really interesting metric is what a private school does for the non-legacy, not rich, not super-athletic kid. (And we all also agree that Ivy admittance isn't the only or even the first goal, it's just an interesting side issue. It's actually nice that we agree on this.)
In the absence of published data, does anybody have any good anecdotes to share? Sort of the converse of "my connected nephew didn't get into Yale," which was interesting, but answered a different question. Instead, the question here is, "DH and I went to no-name colleges and are scraping to pay for the private so we can't donate anything, but not only did DC get a great education, he/she also got into Yale." |
Anonymous
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Link to Princeton's admission stats for 2009: http://www.princeton.edu/admission/applyingforadmission/admission_statistics/. Legacies = 12.7% of class. That leaves 87% of slots for non-legacies.
I've got no good recent anecdotes leaning either direction. For older anecdotes, both my sister and I fit the exact profile -- parents scraped to send us to private school, and we both went to Ivy league colleges with no money, legacy, or connections. I can remember six other people from my class who went to Ivy league schools, and only one had a money/legacy connection. |
Anonymous
I've lost track of what we're arguing about. Is it the effect of legacy kids who go to DC elite schools? Or is it the number of slots that are actually "open" to high-achieving kids who don't get preferential treatment. If the latter, then you'd have to reduce that 87% figure for faculty kids, athletes, minorities, celebrity kids, and the kids of Washington's powerful. In any case, for most kids at the top DC schools, it's probably easier to be a legacy, or the kid of somebody powerful, than to be a recruited athlete or faculty kid. |