Excellent post by SAM2 at 10:08, thank you.

If your school has Naviance, and makes it available (not always the case), that's a great way to see how kids from your own school do with acceptances.

Naviance displays a graph for each college with two axes, SATs and GPA. Then the graph shows red and green dots or maybe X's representing which score combinations got accepted, rejected and waitlisted at that college.

Be aware that the two data points, SATs and GPA, don't tell the whole story. That is, the kid with SATs 2000 and GPA of 3.7 might have a tremendous hook, and Naviance isn't going to tell you about the hooks in order to protect the kid's confidentiality. For the same reason, some schools don't even make Naviance available.

If you're looking for acceptances at multiple privates, not just your own, then Naviance won't help. Although you could ask friends at each school to help you, I suppose.

If you want to investigate matriculation data, there are better sources than the old WSJ analysis. As others have pointed out, it looked at just one year quite a while ago, and only at certain colleges. Also, IIRC, the WSJ interns simply obtained copies of the "freshman face books" from a few friends at those colleges, and counted up the number of high schools listed there. That leaves a lot of potential error because it depends entirely on the accuracy of the freshman face books. Here are two other places you can look. There may be other data sources, but these are the best I've seen.

1. Data from the FAQ - If you follow the link in the FAQ from this forum, you'll see lots of data I pulled together on college matriculation. I combined the results and methodologies of WSJ and a couple other similarly limited studies, and expanded them to cover many more years. I also worked hard to include results from a broad range of local high schools. The results are still limited to just some colleges (14 colleges, I think), so my statistics don't lend themselves to simple claims like "__% Ivy League!" Also, if a particular high school traditionally sends many (or few) students to those covered colleges, that still might affect the results, but less so than it did in WSJ because I covered many years. It's not totally up-to-date because I haven't had as much time or interest in recent years, but it's relatively current.

2. Matriculationstats.org - A kindred spirit parent from NYC got interested in matriculation stats when one of his children was applying to high schools, so he stated gathering data and calculating statistics. His website is much more user friendly than mine, and he focuses on metrics like Ivy League and HYPMS, which are attractive and easy to digest. But he covers fewer DC-MD-VA schools, his time horizons are shorter, and he is a little more out-of-date. Still, his stuff is great, so I'd definitely look there.

One word of caution - Please don't rely too heavily on the matriculation results in picking a high school. They are interesting, and perhaps useful, but they are only one comparison point among many. College matriculation results are only partially reflection of what the school does for its students, and just as much, reflects what the individual students bring to the table regardless of the high school. How much of the matriculation success can be credited to the school is a question none of us can answer, and the answer probably depends on the particular high school. Like other data points, they're an interesting proxy, if you keep them in perspective.

Sam2

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I was looking for information on the acceptance rates at top privates, but haven't come across anything definitive yet. I did stumble across this somewhat dated WSJ study of national matriculation into the very best schools

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html

Not sure if this was ever updated, but it blows away the myth that ANY school in this area is sending 30% of grads to top schools. Holton is the highest with barely 10%.

Interesting that they researched students actually enrolled rather than unverifiable "acceptances."

Do you know how to read? You're clearly not a statistician.

Harsh but funny and true. Among other things, as I know from alumni interviewing, lots of DC kids go to Yale . . . BUT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL THINKS THEY SHOULD BE AT POMONA. Lol.

Does anyone know if this study was updated? I find it very helpful, but the information is nearly a decade old.

Anonymous wrote:I was looking for information on the acceptance rates at top privates, but haven't come across anything definitive yet. I did stumble across this somewhat dated WSJ study of national matriculation into the very best schools

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html

Not sure if this was ever updated, but it blows away the myth that ANY school in this area is sending 30% of grads to top schools. Holton is the highest with barely 10%.

Interesting that they researched students actually enrolled rather than unverifiable "acceptances."

Do you know how to read? You're clearly not a statistician.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The WSJ "study" looked at the freshman classes at 8 schools:

Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins

So . . . No Yale. And for that matter, no Columbia, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell. No Stanford. No Duke. No Amherst (but Williams). Pomona, but no Claremont McKenna (if we're thinking West Coast), or Middlebury, Bowdoin, Wellesley, Haverford, Davidson (if we're not confined to the West Coast). MIT, but no Cal Tech. Johns Hopkins, but no Northwestern, Rice, Wash U., Vanderbilt.

Essentially, while indicating to some degree which high schools send grads to some very selective school, it also is highly skewed by what schools have geographic or other ties with a particular college/university.

I see some California schools on that list that would have even higher admission rates if you took into account Stanford -- still the in-state favorite.

I meant matriculation rates.

Anonymous wrote:The WSJ "study" looked at the freshman classes at 8 schools:

Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins

So . . . No Yale. And for that matter, no Columbia, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell. No Stanford. No Duke. No Amherst (but Williams). Pomona, but no Claremont McKenna (if we're thinking West Coast), or Middlebury, Bowdoin, Wellesley, Haverford, Davidson (if we're not confined to the West Coast). MIT, but no Cal Tech. Johns Hopkins, but no Northwestern, Rice, Wash U., Vanderbilt.

Essentially, while indicating to some degree which high schools send grads to some very selective school, it also is highly skewed by what schools have geographic or other ties with a particular college/university.

I see some California schools on that list that would have even higher admission rates if you took into account Stanford -- still the in-state favorite.

The WSJ "study" looked at the freshman classes at 8 schools:

Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins

So . . . No Yale. And for that matter, no Columbia, Penn, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell. No Stanford. No Duke. No Amherst (but Williams). Pomona, but no Claremont McKenna (if we're thinking West Coast), or Middlebury, Bowdoin, Wellesley, Haverford, Davidson (if we're not confined to the West Coast). MIT, but no Cal Tech. Johns Hopkins, but no Northwestern, Rice, Wash U., Vanderbilt.

Essentially, while indicating to some degree which high schools send grads to some very selective school, it also is highly skewed by what schools have geographic or other ties with a particular college/university.

The list is even less reliable than that. It actually doesn't include Yale either. Moreover, it is just the number of matriculations divided by the size of the class. So if half the class didn't apply to the listed schools, then the admit rate (better than a success rate at predicting imdivid school admission) would be double. If the list included all these other strong schools too, the success rate as defined would go up for that reason. But this still wouldn't tell you the acceptance rate of applicants from that school.. And, of course, the data is now 7 years old -- a lot has changed in that time too. So the chart gives you a rough idea of something related to college admissions, but exactly what isn't too clear.

Anonymous wrote:I was looking for information on the acceptance rates at top privates, but haven't come across anything definitive yet. I did stumble across this somewhat dated WSJ study of national matriculation into the very best schools

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html

Not sure if this was ever updated, but it blows away the myth that ANY school in this area is sending 30% of grads to top schools. Holton is the highest with barely 10%.

Interesting that they researched students actually enrolled rather than unverifiable "acceptances."

See above on the methodology -- they just picked and chose, even among the Ivy League. A few years ago somebody did the legwork from school-released results to put together a website called matriculationstats.org which was pretty good.

Do schools send 30% to "top schools"? Maybe, depending on how you define top schools. Two to three years ago St. Albans had something like 30% of the kids get into Ivy/Stanford/MIT (somebody posted their list on the board and it dovetailed with the kids who got in from my alma mater), but their typical percentage is probably between 20-25% for Ivy/Stanford/MIT (remember, their average class size is about 75 so only 15 kids have to get in to those schools for it to be 20% and I think they hit that). However, if you add in Duke/UChicago type schools, not to mention your Davidson/Swarthmore/Amherst/Williams, I'm sure they are routinely easily above 30%.

Anonymous wrote:I was looking for information on the acceptance rates at top privates, but haven't come across anything definitive yet. I did stumble across this somewhat dated WSJ study of national matriculation into the very best schools

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html

Not sure if this was ever updated, but it blows away the myth that ANY school in this area is sending 30% of grads to top schools. Holton is the highest with barely 10%.

Interesting that they researched students actually enrolled rather than unverifiable "acceptances."

See below on the methodology -- they just picked and chose, even among the Ivy League. A few years ago somebody did the legwork from school-released results to put together a website called matriculationstats.org which was pretty good.

Do schools send 30% to "top schools"? Maybe, depending on how you define top schools. Two to three years ago St. Albans had something like 30% of the kids get into Ivy/Stanford/MIT (somebody posted their list on the board and it dovetailed with the kids who got in from my alma mater), but their typical percentage is probably between 20-20%. However, if you add in Duke/UChicago type schools, not to mention your Davidson/Swarthmore/Amherst/Williams, I'm sure they are routinely above 30%.

That list looks at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Pomona, MIT, Swarthmore, Williams, Johns Hopkins, and University of Chicago as a proxy for top schools. So if kids go to Stanford, Caltech, Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Northwestern, Amherst, etc it doesn't get counted in this list. This list is by no means a perfect measure of the percentage of the class going to selective schools, although it gives you a rough idea.

I was looking for information on the acceptance rates at top privates, but haven't come across anything definitive yet. I did stumble across this somewhat dated WSJ study of national matriculation into the very best schools

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html

Not sure if this was ever updated, but it blows away the myth that ANY school in this area is sending 30% of grads to top schools. Holton is the highest with barely 10%.

Interesting that they researched students actually enrolled rather than unverifiable "acceptances."