Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Your child goes to high school to grow up and have an education. You don't send them to a school just for college admissions. How is sending your child to a less resourced school with less experienced teachers and weaker classmates going to improve their education? Pick the best education you can for your child. If they love the sciences, send them to a specialized magnet program. Even if they end up at the state land grant, they will start with a better foundation than most of their college classmates. No school is going to automatically get them into a top tier college. Exeter and Andover may send 25% of their class to HYPS, but 20% are legacy development cases.

+100 I will never understand those who say they skipped an opportunity like TJ for those reasons.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is precisely why my DD did not consider TJ. There is no life-time advantage. She is probably in the top 5% of her FCPS high-school (mostly all A's.) More importantly, she is happy and relaxed. She will do fine.

Silly way of looking at things. Polished TJ kids that don't get into the elites still breeze through colleges like UVA, UMich, Wisconsin, VTech.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Your child goes to high school to grow up and have an education. You don't send them to a school just for college admissions. How is sending your child to a less resourced school with less experienced teachers and weaker classmates going to improve their education? Pick the best education you can for your child. If they love the sciences, send them to a specialized magnet program. Even if they end up at the state land grant, they will start with a better foundation than most of their college classmates. No school is going to automatically get them into a top tier college. Exeter and Andover may send 25% of their class to HYPS, but 20% are legacy development cases.

I mostly agree with this. Ds is at blair science magnet and it is very hard to get straight As and extremely hard to stand out We thought about whether we should send him to our Bethesda area high school to improve his college admissions chances but we never considered it seriously. Ds would not have been happy at his home high school. He loves the challenging curriculum, the other students and the teachers are very good. 40%!of the program goes onto UMD where they typically enroll in their honors program and most get considerable merit aid. This is a definite possibility for ds. We know he will be in good company, and he will have most of his college fund available for grad school. These kids do well upon graduation from UMD so that is reassuring. He will apply to a range of schools mostly top 30 but we don't have tunnel vision

Anonymous wrote:Your child goes to high school to grow up and have an education. You don't send them to a school just for college admissions. How is sending your child to a less resourced school with less experienced teachers and weaker classmates going to improve their education? Pick the best education you can for your child. If they love the sciences, send them to a specialized magnet program. Even if they end up at the state land grant, they will start with a better foundation than most of their college classmates. No school is going to automatically get them into a top tier college. Exeter and Andover may send 25% of their class to HYPS, but 20% are legacy development cases.

Anonymous wrote:I'm impressed and surprised that several posters have considered what is best for their child's development, and not just purely academics, when choosing a school.

I went to a run of the mill high school in the mid West and all of the smart kids went to very average universities (think VTech). They all became engineers, professors, lawyers, doctors, etc.

Anonymous wrote:This is precisely why my DD did not consider TJ. There is no life-time advantage. She is probably in the top 5% of her FCPS high-school (mostly all A's.) More importantly, she is happy and relaxed. She will do fine.

Anonymous wrote:oh one other thing about the magnets

I hate to break it to you but the so called teacher quality and curriculum are the exact same at the AP/honors track at almost any decent high school vs what is being taught at the magnet.

For those local to DC this even goes for TJ for most of the kids. There are only a handful of students who actually complete a second year of Calculus there most finish with one year of Calculus just like the top track at any other school in Fairfax County.

Anonymous wrote:I recently learned about Naviance and explored it for S's HS, which is ranked in the top 30 by US News and has been for the last 5 years. Said school is widely regarded as the best in a (very large) city, and it is acclaimed for supposedly preparing graduates for college. 100% pass district tests and on average students take 6 AP exams with a pass rate of over 95%. The average SAT and ACT are upwards of 1900/28. The top 10% take nearly 14 APs on average and most get near perfect scores on testing. I took a look at Naviance data and was surprised to see that across the top LACs and universities, there was seemingly no benefit of attending this HS. Actually, more places had LOWER admit rates than the usual average and the few with higher ones were barely higher. Keep in mind that a 4.4+ is equivalent to the top 15% and a 4.6+ the top 5%. With these statistics, what's the point of going to a supposedly more rigorous HS? Many people in this HS could easily be in the top 10% or even valedictorian at other schools.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The admit rate includes people with geographic diversity. Compare to a local HS admit rate. We are in the same boat - extremely challenging, highly-ranked school that is smaller than local HS. From what I can tell, we are sending a higher percentage to top schools compared to the local HS.

why do red staters who hate race-based affirmative action never talk about the geographic affirmative action they/their kids receive when it comes to applying to top schools?

Funny, but those blue state folks from Washington, Oregon, New Mexico, Minnesota, etc. likewise have no problem with geographic affirmative action when applying to East Coast schools. Why is that?

I can't speak to all of the states you mentioned but Washington state kids don't really get that much if any bump - there are too many high scoring people in WA, especially high scoring asians.

You aren't getting any geographically adjustment applying out of Lakeside School, Redmond High, Bellevue High, Mercer Island High, etc.

Anonymous wrote:Your child goes to high school to grow up and have an education. You don't send them to a school just for college admissions. How is sending your child to a less resourced school with less experienced teachers and weaker classmates going to improve their education? Pick the best education you can for your child. If they love the sciences, send them to a specialized magnet program. Even if they end up at the state land grant, they will start with a better foundation than most of their college classmates. No school is going to automatically get them into a top tier college. Exeter and Andover may send 25% of their class to HYPS, but 20% are legacy development cases.