Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 20:38     Subject: Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
And ultimately let us remember that a whole host of things also affect these numbers - legacy status, race (can't pretend it doesn't matter) and finances all affect both where kids apply and where they get in regardless of what school they come from.

My sister was not accepted at Bowdoin, her first choice or Cornell, her second. She went to Harvard instead. Go figure.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:43     Subject: Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The big difference between the top publics' exmissions and the top privates' exmissions? Family finances. Step out of your bubbles, won't you, and take a look at the realities facing families who aren't already shelling out $35k/year for private school.

Your average two-govt worker family with a household income of $200k faces the following facts:
- None of the Ivies offers merit aid. None of the Ivies.
- The $200k HHI family won't qualify for any financial aid.
- The $200k HHI family will probably be hard put to pay the full $60k/year Ivy/private university tuition.
- UMD and UVA look like bargains by comparison.
- Early decision boosts your acceptance chances dramatically, but it's a game for families that can lock into a school without waiting to see the financial aid award.

Why you guys can't see this is mystifying. Welcome to the real world.


So these average 2-govt.-worker families are living in the Bethesda clusters? Where houses are $1M?


Sure. They bought around 1995 when their kids were born, obviously. We know plenty of middle-income families living in Bethesda communities like Hillmead, which feeds into Whitman.


Good point. My kids were born in 2006+ and there is no way that the parents of kids that age over there now are regular feds.


Ooops, reformatting:

Back in about 1996 we looked at houses costing $350-400k in a nice neighborhood of modest colonials that fed into Whitman.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:42     Subject: Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The big difference between the top publics' exmissions and the top privates' exmissions? Family finances. Step out of your bubbles, won't you, and take a look at the realities facing families who aren't already shelling out $35k/year for private school.

Your average two-govt worker family with a household income of $200k faces the following facts:
- None of the Ivies offers merit aid. None of the Ivies.
- The $200k HHI family won't qualify for any financial aid.
- The $200k HHI family will probably be hard put to pay the full $60k/year Ivy/private university tuition.
- UMD and UVA look like bargains by comparison.
- Early decision boosts your acceptance chances dramatically, but it's a game for families that can lock into a school without waiting to see the financial aid award.

Why you guys can't see this is mystifying. Welcome to the real world.


So these average 2-govt.-worker families are living in the Bethesda clusters? Where houses are $1M?


Sure. They bought around 1995 when their kids were born, obviously. We know plenty of middle-income families living in Bethesda communities like Hillmead, which feeds into Whitman.


Back in about 1996 we looked at houses costing $350-400k in a nice neighborhood of modest colonials that fed into Whitman.

Good point. My kids were born in 2006+ and there is no way that the parents of kids that age over there now are regular feds.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:41     Subject: Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:

You're sounding increasingly desperate. Of course not everybody in Bethesda lives in a million-dollar home.


Well I'm new to this exchange so I don't think I am who you think I am, but I'll be honest that my impression from over here in Silver Spring was that 3+ bedroom houses for families in Bethesda are primarily over $1M.

My search of Redfin seems to confirm this. Out of 122 listings with 3 or more bedrooms in Bethesda, only 26 were less than $1M. Only 19 were less than 800K. Exactly 1 was less than 500K.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:41     Subject: Re:Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:I'd argue that 461 isn't really the right denominator for Whitman. That includes special ed kids (with significant disabilities), international students who are in the ESOL program, and plenty of ordinary students who are aiming for MD schools below UMD. The only selection process for Whitman is living in bounds.

But whatever - you keep paying $35k a year for private school and tell yourself it's the road to ivy covered wonderland. See you in Ann Arbor for a football game!

Careful ... you're starting to sound defensive.

Whitman profiles are useful here -- here and here The student body is not nearly as hard-up as you suggest. You know in the middle of Bethesda, right? 97% of Whitman students attend college (89% at 4-year colleges). Over 70% white, and I'd bet most are pretty high SES in light of the price of real estate in that neighborhood. (I know I can't afford to live there!) Parent group is "80% college graduates, mainly professional and managerial." Hardly any ESOL or FARMS students, or dropouts, or suspended students. 95+% graduation rate, and 95% attendance rate. It's pretty much a kick-ass school.

I didn't post the Ivy college data to pick a fight with you or any other public school supporter. I'm a happy graduate of public schools. There are all sorts of great reasons to choose public schools over privates, just as there are some things private schools do better. I just wanted to bring some real numbers to the discussion.

If you want to argue that you can't afford private school, or that you think the ROI for private school versus Whitman is not enough to justify the cost, you'll get no counter-argument from me. That's your choice.


But your Ivy data is immaterial because, for whatever reason, fewer public school kids than private school kids apply to Ivies. You can see this in the magazine table. It's unfair to slam Whitman for low Harvard admits, when only 25/500 Whitman kids even applied to Harvard. What we need is acceptance ratios (admits/applications), which we have for the public schools but not for the private schools.

We can argue endlessly about how many kids we *think* apply from private schools to Ivies. And why we *think* fewer kids apply to Harvard from Whitman than from STA. And whether we *think* the acceptance ratios are higher or lower at private schools, if only we could compare the two relevant figures, which are the number of applicants and the number of acceptances. But we really don't know the answers to any of these questions.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:37     Subject: Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The big difference between the top publics' exmissions and the top privates' exmissions? Family finances. Step out of your bubbles, won't you, and take a look at the realities facing families who aren't already shelling out $35k/year for private school.

Your average two-govt worker family with a household income of $200k faces the following facts:
- None of the Ivies offers merit aid. None of the Ivies.
- The $200k HHI family won't qualify for any financial aid.
- The $200k HHI family will probably be hard put to pay the full $60k/year Ivy/private university tuition.
- UMD and UVA look like bargains by comparison.
- Early decision boosts your acceptance chances dramatically, but it's a game for families that can lock into a school without waiting to see the financial aid award.

Why you guys can't see this is mystifying. Welcome to the real world.


So these average 2-govt.-worker families are living in the Bethesda clusters? Where houses are $1M?


They weren't always 1M, when my cousing bought his shack in 1992 for x amount of dollars, I called him crazy. Now he can get upwards of 1.2 for it...
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:32     Subject: Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The big difference between the top publics' exmissions and the top privates' exmissions? Family finances. Step out of your bubbles, won't you, and take a look at the realities facing families who aren't already shelling out $35k/year for private school.

Your average two-govt worker family with a household income of $200k faces the following facts:
- None of the Ivies offers merit aid. None of the Ivies.
- The $200k HHI family won't qualify for any financial aid.
- The $200k HHI family will probably be hard put to pay the full $60k/year Ivy/private university tuition.
- UMD and UVA look like bargains by comparison.
- Early decision boosts your acceptance chances dramatically, but it's a game for families that can lock into a school without waiting to see the financial aid award.

Why you guys can't see this is mystifying. Welcome to the real world.


So these average 2-govt.-worker families are living in the Bethesda clusters? Where houses are $1M?


Sure. They bought around 1995 when their kids were born, obviously. We know plenty of middle-income families living in Bethesda communities like Hillmead, which feeds into Whitman.


Good point. My kids were born in 2006+ and there is no way that the parents of kids that age over there now are regular feds.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:32     Subject: Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The big difference between the top publics' exmissions and the top privates' exmissions? Family finances. Step out of your bubbles, won't you, and take a look at the realities facing families who aren't already shelling out $35k/year for private school.

Your average two-govt worker family with a household income of $200k faces the following facts:
- None of the Ivies offers merit aid. None of the Ivies.
- The $200k HHI family won't qualify for any financial aid.
- The $200k HHI family will probably be hard put to pay the full $60k/year Ivy/private university tuition.
- UMD and UVA look like bargains by comparison.
- Early decision boosts your acceptance chances dramatically, but it's a game for families that can lock into a school without waiting to see the financial aid award.

Why you guys can't see this is mystifying. Welcome to the real world.


So these average 2-govt.-worker families are living in the Bethesda clusters? Where houses are $1M?


You're sounding increasingly desperate. Of course not everybody in Bethesda lives in a million-dollar home.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:31     Subject: Re:Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:I'd argue that 461 isn't really the right denominator for Whitman. That includes special ed kids (with significant disabilities), international students who are in the ESOL program, and plenty of ordinary students who are aiming for MD schools below UMD. The only selection process for Whitman is living in bounds.

But whatever - you keep paying $35k a year for private school and tell yourself it's the road to ivy covered wonderland. See you in Ann Arbor for a football game!

Careful ... you're starting to sound defensive.

Whitman profiles are useful here -- here and here The student body is not nearly as hard-up as you suggest. You know in the middle of Bethesda, right? 97% of Whitman students attend college (89% at 4-year colleges). Over 70% white, and I'd bet most are pretty high SES in light of the price of real estate in that neighborhood. (I know I can't afford to live there!) Parent group is "80% college graduates, mainly professional and managerial." Hardly any ESOL or FARMS students, or dropouts, or suspended students. 95+% graduation rate, and 95% attendance rate. It's pretty much a kick-ass school.

I didn't post the Ivy college data to pick a fight with you or any other public school supporter. I'm a happy graduate of public schools. There are all sorts of great reasons to choose public schools over privates, just as there are some things private schools do better. I just wanted to bring some real numbers to the discussion.

If you want to argue that you can't afford private school, or that you think the ROI for private school versus Whitman is not enough to justify the cost, you'll get no counter-argument from me. That's your choice.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:24     Subject: Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The big difference between the top publics' exmissions and the top privates' exmissions? Family finances. Step out of your bubbles, won't you, and take a look at the realities facing families who aren't already shelling out $35k/year for private school.

Your average two-govt worker family with a household income of $200k faces the following facts:
- None of the Ivies offers merit aid. None of the Ivies.
- The $200k HHI family won't qualify for any financial aid.
- The $200k HHI family will probably be hard put to pay the full $60k/year Ivy/private university tuition.
- UMD and UVA look like bargains by comparison.
- Early decision boosts your acceptance chances dramatically, but it's a game for families that can lock into a school without waiting to see the financial aid award.

Why you guys can't see this is mystifying. Welcome to the real world.


So these average 2-govt.-worker families are living in the Bethesda clusters? Where houses are $1M?


Sure. They bought around 1995 when their kids were born, obviously. We know plenty of middle-income families living in Bethesda communities like Hillmead, which feeds into Whitman.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:22     Subject: Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The big difference between the top publics' exmissions and the top privates' exmissions? Family finances. Step out of your bubbles, won't you, and take a look at the realities facing families who aren't already shelling out $35k/year for private school.

Your average two-govt worker family with a household income of $200k faces the following facts:
- None of the Ivies offers merit aid. None of the Ivies.
- The $200k HHI family won't qualify for any financial aid.
- The $200k HHI family will probably be hard put to pay the full $60k/year Ivy/private university tuition.
- UMD and UVA look like bargains by comparison.
- Early decision boosts your acceptance chances dramatically, but it's a game for families that can lock into a school without waiting to see the financial aid award.

Why you guys can't see this is mystifying. Welcome to the real world.


Yes, I'm sure every family looks at college costs and factors that into decisions. And perhaps that analysis scares off some students from matriculating/applying. But the Holton/Landon % are three times higher than the Whitman percentages. Are you really trying to argue that three times as many Whitman students would have been admitted to Ivy colleges, but simply chose not to apply because they couldn't afford it? That seems unlikely to me.

Also, FWIW, are student loans no longer available? When I attended college, I was in the exact situation you describe -- parents made enough to limit my financial aid options, but not enough to pay for college -- so I just financed my college tuition via low-cost student loans. I spent the first several years of my working life paying those off, but that's just the price I had to pay. Even dumb me knew it was a smart bargain. And if I'd been admitted to some fancy-pants college like Harvard or Yale, I'd surely have taken on extra loans in a heart-beat.


Yes, of course student loans are still available, both subsidized federal loans for low-income kids, and non-subsidized federal direct student loans for your generic two-govt worker family. But when you attended college tuition was much, much lower. Now tuition is at or over $60K at many private colleges. For a family that's not already happily shelling out $35k/year for private high school, that probably means borrowing tens of thousands of dollars over four years. Oh, and the interest rate on non-subsidized federal direct student loans is now something like 7%, and it begins accruing while you're still in college. Student loan debt is the new crisis in higher education. Of course state schools and smaller SLACs that offer merit aid are going to look like bargains in comparison to the high-priced Ivies.

FWIW, I personally know several kids at a big MoCo high school who were admitted to schools like Yale and Columbia this year, but turned these down for smaller SLACs that offered generous aid. I'm sure many more families think this through before even applying to Ivies, so they don't end up in a position where they're turning down Ivies like the kids I know.

Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:15     Subject: Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:The big difference between the top publics' exmissions and the top privates' exmissions? Family finances. Step out of your bubbles, won't you, and take a look at the realities facing families who aren't already shelling out $35k/year for private school.

Your average two-govt worker family with a household income of $200k faces the following facts:
- None of the Ivies offers merit aid. None of the Ivies.
- The $200k HHI family won't qualify for any financial aid.
- The $200k HHI family will probably be hard put to pay the full $60k/year Ivy/private university tuition.
- UMD and UVA look like bargains by comparison.
- Early decision boosts your acceptance chances dramatically, but it's a game for families that can lock into a school without waiting to see the financial aid award.

Why you guys can't see this is mystifying. Welcome to the real world.


So these average 2-govt.-worker families are living in the Bethesda clusters? Where houses are $1M?
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:13     Subject: Re:Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:
I'd argue that 461 isn't really the right denominator for Whitman. That includes special ed kids (with significant disabilities), international students who are in the ESOL program, and plenty of ordinary students who are aiming for MD schools below UMD. The only selection process for Whitman is living in bounds.


HEre's the data for Whitman:
http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/regulatoryaccountability/glance/currentyear/schools/04427.pdf

11.9% special ed, <5% ESOL.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:12     Subject: Re:Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:I don't see why we're screwing around in this discussion with partial and obscure results from Sidwell; we all know Sidwell keeps their students' data on lock-down, and the data PP posted is crappy and incomplete. Let's just do a full comparison against private schools that provide lots of data.

2013 grads: School / class size / # attending Ivy colleges / % attending Ivy
Holton Arms: 85 seniors / 11 to Ivy / 13%
Landon: 78 seniors / 9 to Ivy / 12%
Potomac: ~90 seniors / 9 to Ivy / 10% (5yr average)
GPrep: ~115 seniors / 8 to Ivy / 7%
Bullis: ~100 seniors / 3 to Ivy / 3% (5yr average)
Whitman: 461 seniors / 20 to Ivy / 4%

Note: I know Ivy colleges are not the only good colleges out there, and I know lots of people might prefer certain non-Ivy colleges. But they provide an easy measuring stick for this sort of comparison. If you want to compare the high schools based on some other measure (e.g., USNWR top-25 colleges, HYPMS, top party schools in the PAC-10, etc), be my guest.


Apples to apples, people. Your metrics basically show the percent of a class that matriculates at Ivies. That doesn't even begin to answer the question here, which is: if a kid wants to apply to Ivies, will they have better success coming from private or public schools?

Here's an example. From the Whitman class of 500 kids in 2013, only 25 kids actually applied to Harvard (according to Bethesda Magazine, check it out for yourself). So obviously the percent of Whitman kids matriculating at Harvard compared to the total class of 500 kids (your metric) is going to be very low. Are we supposed to conclude that Whitman does a crappy job getting kids into Harvard? Of course not. We should conclude that, for whatever reasons, Whitman kids don't apply to Harvard in droves.

To answer the question about whether your chances at Harvard are better coming from a private or public school, we need to look at the pools of public and private school kids who actually applied to Ivies. To continue the example from above, at Whitman, 25 kids applied to Harvard and 2 got in (according to Bethesda Magazine). At Sidwell, 3 kids got into Harvard but we don't know how many applied. For the sake of argument, let's assume that 25 Sidwell kids applied to Harvard (although Sidwell will never tell us). If that's true, then with 3 Sidwell acceptances out of 25 Sidwell applicants to Harvard, then, and only then, could we say that Sidwell does a better job than Whitman in getting people into Harvard.
Anonymous
Post 08/30/2013 17:04     Subject: Re:Bethesda Magazine - List of College Acceptances
Anonymous wrote:I don't see why we're screwing around in this discussion with partial and obscure results from Sidwell; we all know Sidwell keeps their students' data on lock-down, and the data PP posted is crappy and incomplete. Let's just do a full comparison against private schools that provide lots of data.

2013 grads: School / class size / # attending Ivy colleges / % attending Ivy
Holton Arms: 85 seniors / 11 to Ivy / 13%
Landon: 78 seniors / 9 to Ivy / 12%
Potomac: ~90 seniors / 9 to Ivy / 10% (5yr average)
GPrep: ~115 seniors / 8 to Ivy / 7%
Bullis: ~100 seniors / 3 to Ivy / 3% (5yr average)
Whitman: 461 seniors / 20 to Ivy / 4%

Note: I know Ivy colleges are not the only good colleges out there, and I know lots of people might prefer certain non-Ivy colleges. But they provide an easy measuring stick for this sort of comparison. If you want to compare the high schools based on some other measure (e.g., USNWR top-25 colleges, HYPMS, top party schools in the PAC-10, etc), be my guest.


I'd argue that 461 isn't really the right denominator for Whitman. That includes special ed kids (with significant disabilities), international students who are in the ESOL program, and plenty of ordinary students who are aiming for MD schools below UMD. The only selection process for Whitman is living in bounds.

But whatever - you keep paying $35k a year for private school and tell yourself it's the road to ivy covered wonderland. See you in Ann Arbor for a football game!