Feeder schools are real

Not a suburban legend

In my last article, I mentioned that some private school applicants are very appealing to college admissions offices because they don’t force a choice between a smart kid and a rich kid. Some of those private school applicants are both.

Let’s explore today how much it matters to go to a private school. When I say private school, I mostly mean (formerly) WASP-y places like Lawrenceville, Harvard-Westlake, St. Albans, Menlo, Choate, St. Paul’s. Wherever Country Day.

Here’s my main assertion: an applicant who attends a prestigious private school—especially one that sends many kids to the college in question— is likelier to get into a selective college than an applicant with the same grades, classes, test scores, and extracurriculars who does not go to a prestigious private school.

Let’s think about colleges’ and private schools’ self-interest. What do they get out of sending a kid from a prestigious private school to a prestigious college?

The college sidesteps the tradeoffs among desired traits: smart, rich, likely to yield (the last because the high school will lean on the early decision applicant to attend). The private school gets more admission stats it can show off to the parents of potential students. They play this game for many rounds and form certain expectations of each other.

How would we know?

The best evidence would be a regression for college admission results that includes a dummy variable for attending a private school. We could then know the marginal effect of just that one thing, separate from legacy status, parents’ income, GPA, etc. After all, lots of private school kids have rich parents, are legacies, play rich-kid sports, have carefully curated extracurriculars, etc. It is likely that those other variables are muddying the waters when we hear how 35 percent of a Harvard class or 27 percent of a Stanford class attended private school.

Unfortunately, Peter Arcidiacono’s regressions in his expert reports for the Students for Fair Admission lawsuits against UNC and Harvard don’t include that variable. So we have to keep digging and do our best.

Evidence from Harvard

You know I have to tell you what the Harvard litigation turned up. These tidbits demonstrate how much Harvard cares about its relationships with some schools.

Here’s deposition testimony from Harvard’s dean of admissions.

“[R]emember we’re trying to create relationships with schools. You know the old Tip O’Neill [saying], all politics is local, as they say, and we’re trying to create 100-year relationships with schools.”

His immediate subordinate in the admissions office assigns someone to important schools. She said under oath that that assigned admission officer “really owns the relationship with that school.”

The Harvard admissions office casebook, which it uses to train new employees, included a comment on one applicant’s file that the “school would never understand if this student were not admitted.”

Numbers for MIT, Harvard, and Princeton

How about beyond Harvard? When you have five free minutes, go to the Polaris List to see how many kids each high school in the country sends to Harvard, Princeton, and MIT. There’s a dense cluster at the top of the list.

Early decision as a repeated game

Often, the high school counselor has to sign applicants’ early decision promises too. This is an implicit threat. The college is telling the high school counselor, “You better make Sally show up if we let her in. If she breaks her word, we will remember when the next crop of your students applies next year.” Now the college has enlisted the high school counselor to lean on Sally to follow through on her early decision promise and enroll if admitted.

Letters of recommendation

The school counselor also matters for letters of recommendation, and counselors at private schools have more time to write glowing letters. Here’s what an anonymous admission officer had to say about these.

“I had to take into account that the harried guidance counselors at a large urban school, writing hundreds of recommendations, often did not know the applicant well—this letter would be short and vague. The applicants attending private schools, where the rate of college acceptances is an important recruiting tool, received four-page tomes from their counselors. Fairness demanded that I factor in the inequity, but invariably I was told more—though in hyperbolic terms—about the private school student than I ever learned about the public school one.”

How much do counselor letters matter? In a 2019 survey, 55.5 percent of admissions officers said they were of “considerable” or “moderate importance.”

Counselor calls

There’s another way school counselors can put their thumbs on the scale: calling admission offices to talk up their students or appeal disappointing decisions.

Who has the time to make these calls? School counselors at private schools. At public schools, each school counselor is responsible for more than 400 kids. Swarthmore banned the practice in 2020 after the admissions office noticed that more than 90 percent of counselor calls came from private schools.

It isn’t clear that these calls actually accomplish their intended aim. This is a perfect example of the difference between measures of performance and measures of effectiveness.

Jim Jump is something of a celebrity in college admissions circles and is very smart and thoughtful . He’s skeptical that counselor calls do much and has said as much in two articles.

Here are some telling snippets of one of those pieces.

“I reached out to members of ACCIS, the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools. In a short time, I received more than 50 thoughtful and passionate responses from counselors at schools in 24 states plus the District of Columbia.

The consensus of the group was that the Times article misrepresented the influence that independent school college counselors have. The advocacy call has largely disappeared, especially at the nation’s most competitive colleges.

Early in my career, it was common to have a call with admissions officers at institutions where my school regularly sent applicants before decisions were finalized. It was a discussion, not a negotiation, but I had the ability to ask for a second look at candidates on the bubble. Occasionally a decision would be changed from deny to wait list or wait list to accept.”

On the other hand, presumably school counselors wouldn’t keep calling if it didn’t accomplish anything. Maybe their bosses lean on them to keep those good admission stats rolling in, and they have to be seen to make every effort.

I think we chalk counselor calls up as a weak benefit for applicants from private schools.

What does this mean for your kid?

If your family wants to optimize for admission, and you can afford to send your child to private school, it probably makes sense to do so.

I realize that this is kind of infuriating advice. I aim to present the whole buffet of admission-optimizing choices, even unreasonable ones, so you can choose what works for your family.

Even if you can afford it, you very well might think that the juice is not worth the squeeze. You might be optimizing for something else, including avoiding the hassle of applying to private school. You might also retort that one doesn’t just write a check and waltz into Sidwell Friends.

Or maybe your family is like the vast majority of American households, including mine, and can’t afford private school. Many people don’t have a spare $50k per child every year.

What to do?

Here’s my husband’s and my plan for our kids. We’re going to file private school under “things we can’t control,” and focus on the things we can. We’re going to save the money that would have gone toward private-school tuition and spend it giving our kids experiences and skills that will serve them well in admission and in life.

Unless this post drives a ton of business. You can sign up for online seminars or one-on-one consultations on my website.