Reply to Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't see why we're screwing around in this discussion with partial and obscure results from Sidwell; we all know Sidwell keeps their students' data on lock-down, and the data PP posted is crappy and incomplete.  Let's just do a full comparison against private schools that provide lots of data.

[u]2013 grads: School / class size / # attending Ivy colleges / % attending Ivy[/u]
Holton Arms: 85 seniors / 11 to Ivy / 13%
Landon: 78 seniors / 9 to Ivy / 12%
Potomac: ~90 seniors / 9 to Ivy / 10% (5yr average)
GPrep: ~115 seniors / 8 to Ivy / 7%
Bullis: ~100 seniors / 3 to Ivy / 3% (5yr average)
Whitman: 461 seniors / 20 to Ivy / 4%

Note: I know Ivy colleges are not the only good colleges out there, and I know lots of people might prefer certain non-Ivy colleges.  But they provide an easy measuring stick for this sort of comparison.  If you want to compare the high schools based on some other measure (e.g., USNWR top-25 colleges, HYPMS, top party schools in the PAC-10, etc), be my guest.[/quote]

Apples to apples, people. Your metrics basically show the percent of a class that matriculates at Ivies. That doesn't even begin to answer the question here, which is: if a kid wants to apply to Ivies, will they have better success coming from private or public schools?

Here's an example. From the Whitman class of 500 kids in 2013, only 25 kids actually applied to Harvard (according to Bethesda Magazine, check it out for yourself). So obviously the percent of Whitman kids matriculating at Harvard compared to the total class of 500 kids (your metric) is going to be very low.  Are we supposed to conclude that Whitman does a crappy job getting kids into Harvard?  Of course not. We should conclude that, for whatever reasons, Whitman kids don't apply to Harvard in droves.

To answer the question about whether your chances at Harvard are better coming from a private or public school, we need to look at the pools of public and private school kids [i]who actually applied to Ivies. [/i]  To continue the example from above, at Whitman, 25 kids applied to Harvard and 2 got in (according to Bethesda Magazine). At Sidwell, 3 kids got into Harvard but we don't know how many applied. For the sake of argument, let's assume that 25 Sidwell kids applied to Harvard (although Sidwell will never tell us). If that's true, then with 3 Sidwell acceptances out of 25 Sidwell applicants to Harvard, then, and only then, could we say that Sidwell does a better job than Whitman in getting people into Harvard. [/quote]

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