Anonymous wrote:We go to a Virginia public HS that is not Langley/Oakton/McLean/etc.

Top kids are looking at maybe Duke/Cornell/Darmouth but maybe 1-2 kids a year go to a T15 school. Maybe 20 or so kids a class go to UVA, another 40 go to Tech, same for JMU, a sprinkling go to W&M if they want a small school. Then you have the party kids going to big southern state schools. Then you have the kids that didn't get into JMU who are at Longwood, CNU, etc.

Is this what others are seeing?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our four kids went to North Arlington publics (Yorktown/W-L/HB Woodlawn). A handful of grads went to Ivies, a few more went to other top 20 privates, and a few others went to top LACs. I have no doubt these numbers would be quite a bit higher without UVA or William & Mary and in state tuition. One of my own kids turned down a top 20 for UVA, and another turned down W&M only because they were offered a large merit award from a top 15 LAC.

The point is that the college choices that you're seeing don't mean that the kids can't get into the top privates -- it's that they're either not applying or not choosing them because of the excellent in state options. We are talking about public school families. They just don't place the premium on private colleges that private school families do.

There’s some truth to this, but I think the numbers are still probably quite small. ACHS (which is the largest high school in the state) always publishes its grads’ destinations in the local paper, and there are usually only a handful of T20s listed. That’s often just one or two kids to each of those schools. Even if you throw in some “going to UVA but could have gotten in higher” kids, you’re looking at maybe 3-5% of the class total going to T20s or could have.