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[quote=Anonymous]If you have a top grades student with off-the-chart SAT scores and a generally well-put-together "admissions "package," then I don't see that boy being any more or less likely to get into Princeton or Yale from either STA or Landon.  STA's parent body seems just slightly more obsessive than Landon's, meaning they they spend that many more thousands on extra tutors, premium prep courses, top consultants, etc.

None of the "top" DC area prep schools' names are such that Sidwell or STA or Landon or NCS or Maret or GDS or wherever else gives any admissions advantage over the other.  (At least, that's what my friend, a former director of admissions at Yale says.)  And all of these schools offer perfectly challenging and respectable courses and general academic and extracurricular programs.  What it really boils down to is how motivated the students/applicants are (or how much their parents are) and what sorts of resources they're willing to devote to additional preparation.

If you give each school a graduating class of, say, 50 140 IQ kids who (and whose parents) are motivated to get them into an Ivy League (or the sort) school, I bet about the same percentage of each graduating class would get in regardless of which top prep school they graduated from.  What's different is that some schools weigh certain characteristics more heavily than other in their admissions decisions and some parent bodies, as a group, are more willing to devote resources to various different goals than others.  That doesn't mean that any given school doesn't do a satisfactory job of preparing students for what comes next.[/quote]

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