Reply to Pros and Cons of Top 10 SLAC vs State Flagship Honors Program

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]One thing to remember is that Honors is just the "statistically" smartest students of the applicant pool. Most honors programs auto admit by SAT/GPA/class rank.

The top LACs reject the overwhelming number of those candidates. One need only look at Naviance or similar to see all the red Xs. All the tippy top ones have <15% acceptance rates.

From what I've observed as an educator who has seen the types of students who get into the top LACs (the ones with <15% acceptance rates), they really are filtering out for the best of the best- our star students who raise the most interesting points in class, those who go above and beyond merely making good grades, the students who we would say could change the world. The students who get into Honors are a larger group, about the top 10% of the HS class or so. Bright, capable, hardworking, but they're not going through the same filter.

Just some food for thought. [/quote]

Could be true at your school (depends on demographics), but the vast majority of kids in honors programs at state flagships didn’t apply to SLACs.  They weren’t filtered out — they opted out.  All you’re seeing is that quality of recs matters in SLAC admissions from your HS.  (Which is no doubt true.)[/quote]

You're correct, but I feel that most students who go to the honors programs wouldn't be able to stand out in a top 5 LAC admissions process. Those schools are almost Ivy-level selective. I have nothing but a hunch to back this up, but at our school, about a quarter to a third of the top 10% of students apply to a top 5 LAC, while almost all apply to the state honors program as a backup (and they get in). If that's reflective of the self-selecting nature of the LAC pool, then the students applying in the first place are almost all at the state honors students- of whom as few as 7% are ultimately admitted to the top 5 LAC.

Those LACs only admit 1-2 students per high school, so when there are 20 top notch applicants applying and only 1 gets in, that helps illuminate what the admissions processes at the LACs are like. Based on the references I write, there is a pre-form with the message "One of the top few encountered in my career", and those 1 or 2 students would have that checked. Being marked "Excellent (top 10%)" or "Outstanding (top 5%)" might not be enough to stand out.

This is just on the admissions side, though. It would depend on what the school did to help foster those students' potential once they arrived. But my impression at this level is that the top LAC admits are a more impressive group. [/quote]

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