Arlington: 2018 college admissions

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not surprised by the low admit rates to the Ivies. I AM surprised by the low admit rate to UVA.

According to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, UVa admitted 35.5% of applicants from Arlington County this past year. Granted, some of those students will have gone to private school, but it still tends to suggest that Arlington Magazine's reported admission rate of 27% is underreporting by some amount.

Where did you get 27%?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not surprised by the low admit rates to the Ivies. I AM surprised by the low admit rate to UVA.

According to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, UVa admitted 35.5% of applicants from Arlington County this past year. Granted, some of those students will have gone to private school, but it still tends to suggest that Arlington Magazine's reported admission rate of 27% is underreporting by some amount.

By my calculation the magazine shows a 29 percent admit rate to UVA, not 27, but still that’s a pretty big discrepancy from SCHEV. The magazine doesn’t include private school students applying as Arlington residents, but I can’t see that affecting the numbers this much. So I too have to question the accuracy of the magazine’s numbers.

As for the comparison to the Bethesda schools on the other thread, it’s worth noting that there are five times as many Ivy League applications coming out of the Bethesda schools, probably because, as others have suggested, the allure of UVA is so high in NOVA schools that many Ivy caliber candidates simply don’t apply to Ivies and apply instead to UVA.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not surprised by the low admit rates to the Ivies. I AM surprised by the low admit rate to UVA.

According to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, UVa admitted 35.5% of applicants from Arlington County this past year. Granted, some of those students will have gone to private school, but it still tends to suggest that Arlington Magazine's reported admission rate of 27% is underreporting by some amount.

By my calculation the magazine shows a 29 percent admit rate to UVA, not 27, but still that’s a pretty big discrepancy from SCHEV. The magazine doesn’t include private school students applying as Arlington residents, but I can’t see that affecting the numbers this much. So I too have to question the accuracy of the magazine’s numbers.

As for the comparison to the Bethesda schools on the other thread, it’s worth noting that there are five times as many Ivy League applications coming out of the Bethesda schools, probably because, as others have suggested, the allure of UVA is so high in NOVA schools that many Ivy caliber candidates simply don’t apply to Ivies and apply instead to UVA.

+1. I know UMd has gotten better, but outside of this immediate area it simply doesn't have the reputation of UVa. I expect my kids will apply to UVa, but if I lived in Maryland, UMd would hold little appeal.

[Anonymous]

SCHEV says 406 Arlington residents applied to UVA last year and 144 got in. The magazine says 389 public school kids applied and 113 got in. So that means that 17 non-public school kids applied and 31 of them got in -- almost two acceptances to UVA per private school application. I knew private school kids had an edge, but not that much, ha ha.

There's also the TJ factor, of course. Some of the 406 applications reported by SCHEV would be Arlington residents attending TJ, and presumably most got in.

Still, no matter how you slice it, 17 more kids applied UVA from Arlington than the magazine reports, and 31 more Arlington residents got in. So the bottom line is that the magazine's numbers are clearly inaccurate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I live in the Yorktown zone, and based on the dynamics I see in my neighborhood, these statistics don't concern me. Most of my neighbors are not drowning in money like some people want to believe of 22207, they are people who stretched their budgets a bit more to buy a smaller house on a smaller lot than they could have gotten in Fairfax but who wanted shorter commutes for more family time and better overall quality of life. These same people tend to prefer UVa and similar over Ivies for college because they see it as a better value and thus a better route for setting their kids up for a good quality of life later (lower debt burden after college = less pressure and more flexibility). Yes, Ivies are great, but not the be-all and end-all that someone should bankrupt themselves over. Their kids are more like to apply early to UVa and forego Ivy applications if they get in even if they could be competitive for Ivies. Not everyone fits that mold, of course, but I've also seen a trend for the families who are really gunning for Ivies to put their kids into private school early on (or if they can't afford private move to Fairfax in the hopes of getting into TJ, because they don't want to drive their kid from Arlington to TJ and then back the other way for work every day) because they feel that will maximize their chances. What this leaves is an applicant pool from Yorktown that is somewhat self-selecting and less likely to strive for Ivy for the sake of Ivy.

So why 138 applications from Yorktown to Ivies last year? It's not the number of applications that is low, but the number of admissions.

Public schools elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic and elsewhere in the DMV fare much better. APS has really done a poor job with YHS.

Those applications also likely are not 138 kids but multiple applications from a smaller set of kids so you can't tell what the actual % admitted to at least one Ivy is.

It looks like it was 118 applications (not 138) and three acceptances to 2 schools (Cornell and Penn). It's possible that only two Yorktown students were admitted to those schools.

Given North Arlington demographics and how often people claim to move from DC for the schools, there's no way that isn't a disappointing outcome.

[Anonymous]

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I live in the Yorktown zone, and based on the dynamics I see in my neighborhood, these statistics don't concern me. Most of my neighbors are not drowning in money like some people want to believe of 22207, they are people who stretched their budgets a bit more to buy a smaller house on a smaller lot than they could have gotten in Fairfax but who wanted shorter commutes for more family time and better overall quality of life. These same people tend to prefer UVa and similar over Ivies for college because they see it as a better value and thus a better route for setting their kids up for a good quality of life later (lower debt burden after college = less pressure and more flexibility). Yes, Ivies are great, but not the be-all and end-all that someone should bankrupt themselves over. Their kids are more like to apply early to UVa and forego Ivy applications if they get in even if they could be competitive for Ivies. Not everyone fits that mold, of course, but I've also seen a trend for the families who are really gunning for Ivies to put their kids into private school early on (or if they can't afford private move to Fairfax in the hopes of getting into TJ, because they don't want to drive their kid from Arlington to TJ and then back the other way for work every day) because they feel that will maximize their chances. What this leaves is an applicant pool from Yorktown that is somewhat self-selecting and less likely to strive for Ivy for the sake of Ivy.

So why 138 applications from Yorktown to Ivies last year? It's not the number of applications that is low, but the number of admissions.

Public schools elsewhere in the Mid-Atlantic and elsewhere in the DMV fare much better. APS has really done a poor job with YHS.

Those applications also likely are not 138 kids but multiple applications from a smaller set of kids so you can't tell what the actual % admitted to at least one Ivy is.

It looks like it was 118 applications (not 138) and three acceptances to 2 schools (Cornell and Penn). It's possible that only two Yorktown students were admitted to those schools.

Given North Arlington demographics and how often people claim to move from DC for the schools, there's no way that isn't a disappointing outcome.

Why does moving "for the schools" = my kid must go to an Ivy? Some people really don't care. Or some might care a little but are in that spot where they can't afford those schools but make to much to get financial aid so they figure it's not worth applying when their kid will be fine at a strong state school or a lower-tier private that gives great merit aid (IME this is a lot of Arlington families). But those who do care a LOT about Ivy admission find it impossible to believe that others don't think it's super important. So this is an argument that will circle around endlessly.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yale seems to really like Bethesda. Just about 12% of the kids that applied got in. Less than 1% of Arlington’s applicants got in.

These stats don't track legacy status (which people are likely to lie about in surveys anyway). Bethesda, Chevy Chase, et al. is full of old money Yale legacies. North Arlington, less so.

People don't realize that if you're white/Asian, and not a huge donor/legacy at the HYP, your chances of getting in are far, far worse than the publicly available data suggest.

Which is fine, because undergrad education at those places ranges from an afterthought to outright terrible.

Unless you're doing STEM, go to a selective liberal arts school. Ivies are for graduate school. And if you do the LA thing, you've probably got a better shot at that anyway.

While I tend agree with you that in many cases the little Ivies (Amherst, Williams, Swarthmore, etc.) can be the better choice for many undergrads, your claim that Ivies offer an outright terrible undergrad education is a stretch too far, don't you think?

DP. I certainly wouldn't agree it's a terrible undergrad education, but IME it doesn't seem to be anything special. Grads from those schools seems to be riding on the name more than education that was superior to what they could have gotten at a good but lower-ranked school. I've done enough interviewing/hiring of college grads at this point that Harvard or Yale on a resume doesn't impress me any more than, say, Emory or Tufts. And my best hires seem to come disproportionately from SLACs like Amherst and Bowdoin.

I'm the poster from 9:38. Putting aside STEM, which I admit I have close to zero experience with, I feel pretty comfortable with that assessment. It depends also on what you think the goal of the program is. If it's to teach kids how to look, talk, and act like our nation's current crop of meritocratic sociopaths and form a network of relationships they can leverage for future gain, they are VERY effective.

But the value-add in terms of knowledge gained, no. You have to be a very specific kind of smart to get in in the first place, but if you look at things like grade inflation, the percentage gaining honors, the vanishingly small drop-out rate, it's clear that these institutions don't see academic rigor as a core element of the undergraduate experience. They suffer from the same things that other large universities do, except even more so. The professors are hired for being superstar researchers who are looking to avoid teaching, the graduate students are administering coursework that keeps essay-writing to a minimum in order to keep grading manageable, and the students are all hard-charging go-getters who have never failed at anything and will contest any possible bad grade. Why should overworked TA or superstar professor go to the mat every time a kid wants their B+ turned to an A-? That's not what they're paid for. So grade inflation is worse there than at many other places.

I don't mean to single these institutions out; obviously they are seen as the best for a reason and most every other institution has huge, glaring problems that I could also go on about at length. But I think it's worth noting that when people hold up HYP as the Holy Grail of college admission, they are advancing a pretty narrow, frankly twisted view of what undergraduate education should be.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How do you not get accepted to community college?

I'm very confused by this as well.

AND, due to the skyrocketing cost of college tuiton and Sue Orzman's rec's, going to community college for 2 years and then transferring for the last 2 years saves THOUSANDS of $s in student loans. Also, there is guaranteed admission from NVCC after 2 years to some State universities. This is why rates are high in many HSs.

I went to community college first and highly recommend it to everyone. I was able to work full time and had my own apartment and car and no debt. and had an amazing experience. I went on to a State university and law school. It all worked out well for me.

What type of work do you do now?

I am a government attorney. Which I guess is not glamorous but it was the sole reason I wanted to go to school in DC. I have wanted to work for the government as long as I can remember. I am not saying community college is for everyone, but community college may be a smart choice for many (I was not a bad student in HS, I had almost a 4.0 GPA and took AP classes, I just had zero desire to go to a 4 year university right after).

[Anonymous]

What do Arlington parents who live in the Yorktown district need to do to make sure their kids can go to W-L instead?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What do Arlington parents who live in the Yorktown district need to do to make sure their kids can go to W-L instead?

Move to the W-L zone. There's only a limited number of transfers available and no guarantees.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yale seems to really like Bethesda. Just about 12% of the kids that applied got in. Less than 1% of Arlington’s applicants got in.

What % of FCPS and ACPS got in?

Don't know about percentages, as I can't find a source for how many students applied, but at least two kids from TC Williams got into Yale this year, which is, of course, twice as many kids as Arlington's four high schools combined.

j

Please feel free to send your kids to TC Williams.

I just very well might. I'm becoming less and less convinced that a move to Arlington would be beneficial. Not with Arlington's embarrassing college stats, anyway.

Cool, we'd rather the gunners go elsewhere.

One thing is clear: there are very few gunners in Arlington (at least successful ones), so you're living out your dream, PP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What do Arlington parents who live in the Yorktown district need to do to make sure their kids can go to W-L instead?

Move to the W-L zone. There's only a limited number of transfers available and no guarantees.

Thanks, but that costs money. We wish we’d known how crappy Yorktown is before buying in 22207. It seems like IB at W-L would be better.

Sigh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What do Arlington parents who live in the Yorktown district need to do to make sure their kids can go to W-L instead?

Move to the W-L zone. There's only a limited number of transfers available and no guarantees.

Thanks, but that costs money. We wish we’d known how crappy Yorktown is before buying in 22207. It seems like IB at W-L would be better.

Sigh.

Eh, maybe you should have been smart enough to research schools before buying a house.

[Anonymous]

The Arlington apologists can try to rationalize this all they want. The fact remains that Arlington's stats just aren't impressive. Does anyone have FCPS stats? I can't find them. Look at Bethesda. Much better stats. Arlingtonians want to talk up the UVa factor, but a significant portion of the Bethesda population is getting into UVa too---as out-of-staters, nonetheless. And Bethesda's admission rate to William and Mary is virtually equal to Arlington's. How is it that out-of-state Bethesda is yielding the same admissions result as in-state Arlington????