Reply to Worth it's own post: The Harvard-Westlake college matriculation data!!

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Also a HW parent. A few things that might useful to consider:

1. HW is the only school of its type in the country that publishes this kind of data. I know of no other school that breaks out the acceptances into hooked/unhooked. This says a lot about the school, in my estimation, both in terms of how things work internally and how it presents itself publicly.

2. it is useful to compare the unhooked acceptances with published acceptances for all students, which can also be found if you look around. But generally speaking many legacy-type students are also in that top band of 3.8+, from what I can tell. Unhooked students going to Stanford or Harvard are probably just a few per year. But there are many more hooked students going, and they are typically very good students if not tiptop. Many of the Princeton kids seem to be water polo players :)

3. HW does not, however, publish ED vs. RD numbers, which would tell us a lot about applications to schools like Chicago and NYU. The data would be that much more useful if they did this.

4. 3.8+ equates, as best I can tell, to the top 20 percent of a class. So let's say 55-60 students.

5. Financial aid at HW is only 25 percent of families. The parents are generally well-to-do, sometimes obscenely rich (I know of parents who live in 40-60 m dollar houses). But the vast majority of parents are upper-middle-class-to-rich professionals: law, finance, medicine. Not a few film industry people, but mostly the money side, not the "talent." I don't think the "famous parent" thing is really a big deal, though of course it will seem that way relative to other cities.

6. One other thought: HW is one of many, many schools in the city, but it strikes me as the one most likely to draw from kids all over the city, as a rule, though most are from the rich west side of the city. It is also much larger than other privates, with 300 students roughly per class. It is universally recognized as the most academically intense school in the city; it is in no way seen as simply as a school for the city's elite, even if that might be the perception outside of LA.[/quote]

Do you know what the “etc” means in the definition of unhooked? What students are excluded from this data, in other words.

Thanks for your insight. Your posts are interesting. [/quote]

I have asked the same question. I was thinking the "etc." implies URM -- and is a polite way of saying so -- but then the unhooked data includes Howard Univ and Morehouse. So I don't know how to reconcile those two things.[/quote]
Not this HW parent PP above--I'm the other one from earlier, with the unhooked kids.

The parents have a few meetings along the way to help them understand the college application process. In spring of Junior year, they have a meeting with the dean.

When figuring out what colleges to apply to for my 2021 grad, I remember the dean (college counselor) telling us that hooks were legacy, athletes, URM, and "developmental families" which are the super-rich who can donate a lot. It gets fed into a computer program. We'd look at a particular school and it's broken down by GPA.  So you match up your kid's GPA and look at how many of the previous class (or the last few years' classes) at that GPA point were admitted/deferred/denied.  You can also break it up by ED, EA, or RD.  You don't see the previous students' names, but the dean clearly knew who they were and the story of each result, because the dean would say things like, "oh, this student, this acceptance, they had a musical talent..."

So that gives your student a rough estimate of their chances at a particular school, and helps a kid pick an ED (or SCEA) school.  It's rough because it doesn't take into account SAT/ACT and extracurriculars, and also doesn't take into account the rigor of the course curriculum (e.g. same GPAs but one kid in hardest tier of classes and another in less rigorous)

The deans will also help strategize based on the composition of the current class.  For example, if, on average, a college that considers legacy usually accepts about 10 kids from HW, and this year there are 9 legacies applying and 8 other non-legacy kids applying, then chances are not so great...so if you are hooked, the dean will look at the stats of the other hooked kids to see where in line your kid falls, and same with unhooked.  I recall with my 2021 grad, over time one school went from target to reach to out-of-reach for my DC because it suddenly became a "hot" school with an inordinate amount of kids in that class becoming interested in it.

The only drawback is there is not a lot of time to do this, so you have to really come into that meeting with a researched and culled list and plow through it, and know what to ask. 
HTH [/quote]

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