Here the thing, a lot of those kids were going to go to those schools no matter where they went. It's not the high school. It's the students(and families) and their connections. If you have no connections, you better be one of the top 10 students in the class.

Last year GDS sent 6 to Penn; 5 each to Tufts and Tulane; 4 to NYU; 3 each to Harvard, Dartmouth, Duke, Williams, Michigan, USC, UCLA, and Bates; 2 each to Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Brown, Amherst, Haverford, Wesleyan, Oberlin, Georgetown, Carleton, Wash U, Vanderbilt, and Harvey Mudd; 1 each to MIT, Northwestern, Notre Dame, McGill, Toronto, and Columbia. No one to Stanford or Berkeley.

Not an exhaustive list but covers almost 2/3 of the class.

PP - and it doesn't always work. It may work better than a shotgun approach, however.

Our experience at Sidwell was that about 30-40% of the students were admitted EA / ED. And rather than taking an approach whereby a really smart student just applies to a number of the most selective schools (effectively rolling the dice in each case) many students took a lot of time to think about the "why" for a specific school. And perhaps their essays reflected this. This approach also allows the counseling office to make a strong appeal for each student based upon specific and not generic attributes. Once you get above a certain SAT, the correlation to success falls away.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is it the same 10ish kids getting into multiple top colleges - or different kids? The top colleges may be competing for the top students at the top privates?

No. 10 kids going to Penn. a different 7-8 going to Northwestern. And a different 5-6 going to Yale.

And a different 5 to Harvard and 3 to Princeton and 3 to Stanford and 2 to Brown and 4 to Dartmouth. All unique points.

Anonymous wrote:Is it the same 10ish kids getting into multiple top colleges - or different kids? The top colleges may be competing for the top students at the top privates?

No. 10 kids going to Penn. a different 7-8 going to Northwestern. And a different 5-6 going to Yale.

Is it the same 10ish kids getting into multiple top colleges - or different kids? The top colleges may be competing for the top students at the top privates?

Anonymous wrote:Bottom 25 go to schools you have probably never heard of.

What does that mean?

Bottom 25 go to schools you have probably never heard of.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:1. Sidwell doesn't face the same competition as New England/NY/Philly Boarding schools do. It is widely known as the best school in the D.C. area, and every top school stops by to recruit/take students from there.
2. Sidwell is quite small, with only 80 or so people in each graduating class. Compare this to Exeter and others, which have 200 or more.
3. By virtue of its small size and lack of competition, Sidwell can take the best students out there. The average SAT/ACT are comparable to that of the lower Ivies, so the student profile is quite strong. Students themselves are also interested in the Ivies to a greater degree than those at other schools, so the numbers look high.

What is Sidwell's avg ACT/SAT? Where do kids in the bottom 25% matriculate?

Graduating class this year has about 120 kids...

Anonymous wrote:1. Sidwell doesn't face the same competition as New England/NY/Philly Boarding schools do. It is widely known as the best school in the D.C. area, and every top school stops by to recruit/take students from there.
2. Sidwell is quite small, with only 80 or so people in each graduating class. Compare this to Exeter and others, which have 200 or more.
3. By virtue of its small size and lack of competition, Sidwell can take the best students out there. The average SAT/ACT are comparable to that of the lower Ivies, so the student profile is quite strong. Students themselves are also interested in the Ivies to a greater degree than those at other schools, so the numbers look high.

What is Sidwell's avg ACT/SAT? Where do kids in the bottom 25% matriculate?

1. Sidwell doesn't face the same competition as New England/NY/Philly Boarding schools do. It is widely known as the best school in the D.C. area, and every top school stops by to recruit/take students from there.
2. Sidwell is quite small, with only 80 or so people in each graduating class. Compare this to Exeter and others, which have 200 or more.
3. By virtue of its small size and lack of competition, Sidwell can take the best students out there. The average SAT/ACT are comparable to that of the lower Ivies, so the student profile is quite strong. Students themselves are also interested in the Ivies to a greater degree than those at other schools, so the numbers look high.

More than a couple of my friends who went to GDS and ended up at Penn have admitted they were mediocre students. But they were legacies whose parents could afford to pay sticker plus donate.

I think the rumor mill has exaggerated those numbers. unless your kid is an absolute superstar (or a legacy) at one of these schools, it won't be your kid getting into those colleges.

I don't understand how a school with such a small graduating class size (like at a Sidwell or GDS) can send such large numbers of kids to the same top schools. Rumor has it a few years ago that 10 Sidwell kids got into Yale. This year, we heard a similar amount got into Penn and 8-10 into Northwestern (both ED). Similar outcomes rumored at GDS. it's not the getting into good schools that I question, it's the seemingly large numbers getting into the same one or two schools. That doesn't seem possible percentage-wise....or do private school admissions people really have that strong of connections with schools of that caliber? We're considering Sidwell for HS and I don't know if the rumor mill here is working overtime?