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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I just made the most reasonable choice from year to year, which was usually “stick with this good-enough but imperfect school,” and everything turned out fine. I think that’s actually pretty common? Anyway it worked for us. [/quote]

People overemphasize the name brand of the school and underemphasize how well your child does there. If you really want your kid to go to Harvard, he or she can get there from any number of schools in our area, if you do well enough. [/quote]

Yes we actually had a college strategist suggest our child should go to Eastern HS so they would be one of the only kids applying to top colleges from there. Because at the application HS, the students are competing with each other eg Harvard will only accept 1 student from each HS so if
You go to a HS where fewer students are applying to the colleges you want, you will have better chances of getting in. It's a whole racket[/quote]

It is a racket, but this strategy requires that you accept your child will have very few academic peers all the way through high school, and you take the risks that requires. Will your child sustain an interest in academics and a top college when few peers do? Will your child develop the social skills to help the on succeed at a top college at a school where most students don't go on to 4 year colleges? Will your child develop the study skills or discipline to succeed at a top college or in their chosen career at a school like this?

Getting into college is only part of the picture. If you focus on gaming that at the expense of everything else, what have you really done for your child?[/quote]
The PP’s strategist is being too strategic.

The alleged one-child-per-school rule is nowhere near that rigid. This year Walls has at least two kids going to Harvard and Eastern has none.

The big bonus is being in the top 10%-25% of the class (those being numbers that colleges typically report on the common data set). Being head and shoulders above all your classmates, academically, is not necessarily any better than being in the top 10% — and it is almost always a lot lonelier.

That top 10% bonus is readily achievable at schools that have a larger cohort of stronger students, such as JR, MacArthur/JT, McKinley, Duke, and Banneker. Where it gets harder is schools like Walls; where it becomes miserable is schools like TJ where 90% of the class is trying to be in the top 10%.

All that said, my kid has friends-of-friends at Eastern and I believe it can be a good match for some kids, especially if there’s some kind of draw (eg, a team they want to play on). But going there strategically just to get into Harvard is ridiculous. [/quote]

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