Excellent information. Thanks you.

sorry for garbled tenses/numbers re 2009 blew me away kid vs. 2010 top of class kids. I should also add that I'm blurring details a bit for the sake of both the candidate's and my own anonymity.

The basic point is, knowing the resources available and what kids at the school have done in the past can raise the bar for applicants from schools like Sidwell. Those kids are competing not only against their immediate cohort but also past classes. Letters of recommendation for example, routinely ask recommenders to say whether this is one of the best kids in the class vs. best you've seen in the past 5 years vs. best you've ever seen.

Anonymous wrote:But in this environment, isn't almost every candidate an "iffy" candidate? Including, for example, the kid you interviewed last year who seemed stellar in every respect but who still got locked out.

Actually, that kid got in -- class of 2009. I was saying that a Sidwell kids with the same GPA/scores the next year but without the other things that made that kid look great could suffer by comparison.

My take is that there's a boatload of highly qualified kids and a shortage of truly exceptional kids. And truly exceptional kids are truly exceptional enough that not every excellent school has one (much less more than one) in every class. And, of course, that truly exceptional kid may not even apply to whatever the conventional wisdom suggests is the best college.

Anonymous wrote:I also wonder whether, if college advice is all that private counselors can offer, than this really isn't worth paying $30K+ for. Public HS have extensive databases that show where their kids got accepted in previous years, and this info is sorted by SATs, GPAs, and other factors. There are also online resources like College Confidential.

College selection/application advice (and quality control re letters of recommendation) is probably all that private school college counselors have to offer. But that's not necessarily all that (some) private schools have to offer. Basically, if a school gives your kid an exceptional education and helps provide the opportunities/abilities/motivation that lead your DC to do something different and interesting and impressive, then that school has probably contributed to your DC's college admissions success. I'm fairly certain, for example, that my own DC's take on what she wants to do with her life has had a lot to do with her school. She's a different person (and her talents have been channeled in different ways) than she would have been had she been educated elsewhere.

Blew-me-away applicant was a scientist but probably wouldn't have been as impressive coming from TJ or Blair. Not because the candidate would have been a worse scientist but because the candidate would have looked more conventional, less creative, etc. Similarly, I was a public school kid who probably would have been less impressive had I come from a private school like Sidwell. My school didn't provide the opportunities I craved, so I blazed my own trail. Had I been from a different high school where I was sufficiently challenged or content, I would have had the same grades/scores, but I doubt I would have looked as exceptional. Just high-performing.

So, basically, schools like Harvard seem to look for kids who transcend their environments rather than just ace them. They admit aces too, but at that point they've got a lot of applicants to choose from and other factors beyond the applicant's control matter more.

And, frankly, even though it's not in my own DC's interest to argue this, I'd prefer to see Harvard choose kids whose lives may be transformed by the experience rather than kids for whom Harvard is arguably more of the same and whose lives won't be much different if they go to Princeton or Amherst or University of Chicago instead. While no one from Sidwell's class of 2010 may have gone to Harvard, I'm not sure there's any downside (for Harvard or the kids involved) to that outcome.

The college admissions game has changed. With the Internet and the Common App (good at many Ivies), kids no longer need a guidance counselor on the ball to apply to the Ivies. More $$$ for middle class and working class families; LOTS of foreign apps, particularly from Asia; and the Ivies real focus on geographic diversity. I don't know what proportion of DCUM are Ivy moms and dads, but many of us wouldn't get in today. But it will take time for the reality to overtake the perception based on OUR admissions climate.

I'm the PP who mentioned the "weighting." When I referenced the deep relationships with the schools - I did not mean "connections," I meant what the other poster is discussing in that top colleges are well aware that students from a handful of top high schools perform well - and there are there are many students who may not be in the top 5% of their class but are well qualified. This particularly hold true with top schools and strong schools. According to the website Matriculation Stats on average 78.2% of a graduating class from NCS attends a "strong" University/College (the website administrator provides the list of the impressive group) and 57.2% of the class attends a Top" University/Colllege - "Top" including Ivies plus Stanford, Duke, MIT, Williams, Oxford, Cambridge, Cal Tech and several other top Universities - the lowest of rank being NYU. See school lists on this webpage http://matriculationstats.org/college-lists .

My point is that basically all of the "Top" schools are made up of students from the top 5% of their high school class, but actually draw from students in the middle of NCS's class. (I am using NCS because it has the strongest percentages in the DC-area - Sidwell probably is in the same league but don't even privately publish their placement). The reason being that the admissions offices weight the grades from certain schools based on the history of success and outstanding test scores that students from these high schools. I know specifically about this because My brother's kids who are at an Ivy went to a very well known boarding school and my brother hired an outside college counselor who explained the process, because my brother was concerned about competition within the New England boarding school. My brother specifically asked about St. Albans and NCS - as was told they absolutely were weighted as well. I have no doubt that Sidwell's student's grades are weighted as well. I'm not entirely sure how the weighting works but it is probably school specific.


http://matriculationstats.org/day-schools-outside-of-nyc

I take your points, especially about the "iffy" candidates for whom the counselor can go to bat.

But in this environment, isn't almost every candidate an "iffy" candidate? Including, for example, the kid you interviewed last year who seemed stellar in every respect but who still got locked out. So I still hang on to the theory that private counselors help, and perhaps not just with the truly marginal kids, but also by going to bat for some (not all maybe) of the stellar kids for whom nothing is sure in this new world.

I also wonder whether, if college advice is all that private counselors can offer, than this really isn't worth paying $30K+ for. Public HS have extensive databases that show where their kids got accepted in previous years, and this info is sorted by SATs, GPAs, and other factors. There are also online resources like College Confidential. So if "chancing" my kid at Harvard is all I want, the only different between public and private is whether the counselor does it, or we do it ourselves from the school databases on previous grads. For writing essays and the like, there are lots of books available, or consultants. So I'm hoping that private counselors have something to offer that isn't just available to public school families.

But you, as an interviewer, may have a closer perspective than me.

Sorry -- I was unclear and conflated a couple of different points.

My main point is that wrt Sidwell, if there's a multiplier, it's experience- rather than relationship-based. And a public school could, based on experience, also have a multiplier that was an inflator.

A secondary point was that once a university has taken a lot of kids from a particular school (public, private, whatever), it has its own basis of comparison across classes. So it may look at this years top tier at Sidwell and say this isn't what Sidwell's top tier usually looks like. We'll pass. In an environment that is really privileged, it may take more than success (top grades/scores) to wow admissions officers.

I interviewed a Sidwell kid last year who was one of those blow you away candidates. So I can imagine a kid who did everything right but who wasn't otherwise exceptional suffering by comparison.

Harvard's pool of candidates has widened recently because of the free tuition policy for middle class families (I was the PP you alluded to) and there's an increasing desire and ability to decrease the bastion of privilege perception of the school. Which doesn't bode well for the high performing elite private school kid who doesn't have some other hook.

I don't think that Sidwell kids (or kids at any local private) get a boost from their HS counselors' relationships with Harvard admissions (or Yale or Princeton or Stanford...). What makes the college counselors at these schools so important is the wide breadth of knowledge re different colleges and what has worked for whom in the past and their sense of reality re what makes a good application. I doubt you'll find any counselor at a local private that regularly sends kids to Harvard who claims that she or he gets those kids in.

Where a college counselor's input could make a difference in an admissions decision is turning an iffy candidate for a good but somewhat less selective school into an admit by (a) being well enough known and trusted that the admissions officer calls and lays out the concern in the first place and then (b) having a reasonable explanation as to why despite this concern, the applicant is likely to be a good fit for the school.

Truthfully, from a matriculation standpoint (vs. a stress/sanity standpoint), counselors probably do their best work for kids who aren't the stars of the class but who have a lot to offer and might be overlooked.

Anonymous wrote:Back in the day, we were told that Harvard had or was in the process of developing an experience rating for every HS that had sent students to Harvard. Basically, the goal is (was) to see how well the grades at that particular HS predicted how well their students did once at Harvard -- and the effect would be a customized multiplier for each school which might either be a grade inflator or deflator.

...

Which could explain why not every Sidwell valedictorian looks alike to them and some years nobody gets in. Whereas the deep relationship/special benefit analysis argues against years in which no one from one of these schools gets in to a particular elite university.

This is really interesting, and news to me. Without criticizing you (I'm thanking you), I want to think about this a bit. You would expect Harvard (and other colleges that do this) to look at moving averages of kids. You wouldn't expect them to say to themselves, "we won't take anybody from Sidwell's 2010 graduating class because the Sidwell kids among Harvard's class of 2009 or 2010 wasn't too impressive." That would give really volatile results, and goes against general rules of analysis. But this is the sort of thinking you'd need to explain, using this theory, why Harvard took 3-4 (or whatever) kids from Sidwell in 2009, but none in 2010.

Instead, I'd go with the argument that there are other longer-term trends going on as well. I'd go with something along the lines another poster suggested, that Harvard is offering more money to make it possible for lower- and middle-income families to go there, so the pool of candidates has widened dramatically in the past few years. If somebody wants, they could fit the school-weights theory in by arguing that Sidwell's kids over the past 5-10 years have been disappointing at Harvard, and we're starting to see this show up in the 2010 numbers, but I tend to doubt that has been the case.

I like the piece of info about weighting schools, though. I'm still trying to figure out how to fit in in. It would actually be consistent to argue three things at once: (1) Harvard's pool of candidates has widened dramatically recently; (2) kids from schools everywhere now have lower chances, but Sidwell kids get a good (or bad, as you wish) weight in the system described above which helps although, like other kids, their chances are still reduced from earlier years; and (3) Sidwell kids also get a boost from the relationship their college counselors have at the Ivies. These three pieces can actually seem mutually consistent.

Your mileage may vary. Other interpretations might be as good or better!

Back in the day, we were told that Harvard had or was in the process of developing an experience rating for every HS that had sent students to Harvard. Basically, the goal is (was) to see how well the grades at that particular HS predicted how well their students did once at Harvard -- and the effect would be a customized multiplier for each school which might either be a grade inflator or deflator.

So I don't think it's a question of a handful of private schools having deep relationships that benefit students. More like top universities have enough experience with elite local privates to feel like they know what they're getting when they read a transcript/look at letters of recommendation from the school. Which could explain why not every Sidwell valedictorian looks alike to them and some years nobody gets in. Whereas the deep relationship/special benefit analysis argues against years in which no one from one of these schools gets in to a particular elite university.

Anonymous wrote:Here's my question. Virtually every competitive college I look at says that 95% of their freshman class is in the top 10% coming out of high school. My child's school, Sidwell, does not rank kids, though I suspect colleges can judge on their own. My child takes the most challenging classes, but he may not end up in the top 10% simply because the school is filled with smart kids. Do schools like Sidwell Or TJ for that matter have good luck placing kids outside the top 10%? My child scores exceptionally well on SAT-like tests, so we expect good things on the PSAT, SAT, etc....

Top private colleges & Universities "weight" Sidwell, NCS & St. Alban's grades and ranking systems - in a way that benefits the students these schools. These high schools are among a handful of schools with deep relationships with the universities and where it is not about being in the top 5%. However, the impact can be found in public Universities who have a more rigid/impersonal admissions policy. If you look at the Matriculation Stat's website - you will see that something like over 80% of NCS grads end up at a top school.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: This is the fear, isn't it, that even the top 10% of a class are shut out of the most sought-after college, as happened this year to the senior class? It wasn't even an issue of some kid's not making the top 10%; no one got in. It was just a weak class.

No one got in where????

"the most sought-after college" - Harvard?

Or maybe there's an "s" missing from what was supposed to be "colleges"?