St. Mark's Admission for 9th Grade

[apple44]

Yes that list was how I first learned about St. Mark's.
I lived in New York for years and I have friends who would kill (I'm only half joking) for their kids to go to Trinity. Then we moved to Dallas and I found that St. Mark's was ranked higher than Trinity and St. Mark's is right here in Dallas! I feel like I'd be crazy not to apply.

On the value of attending secondary school: I'm an Ivy League graduate, and I heard multiple classmates say that they were not impressed by Harvard, Yale, etc., because their high schools, e.g. Andover, Exeter, etc. were much more demanding in terms of academics and they learned much more in high school. This could be due to the fact that the mid-teen years are more formative years for one's growth. It's not surprising to them that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to focus on his company named "Facebook" because there was a facebook in Exeter.

I don't think secondary schools are stepping stones for colleges. In my view they are super important if not more important to my children's growth than college.

[blakely]

Originally Posted by EDS_

I have several counterpoints to your thesis.

I've got an ancient axe to grind with Saint Marks...........not a fan particularly etc. That said every time I read a post like yours I can't help but ask do people simply not understand or maybe refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming geographical biases that, "elite" schools employ? Harvard will accept more kids from MA. this year than Texas over the next 8-9yrs. Harvard's acceptance map was so NE US and CA heavy they stopped publishing acceptances by state.

Not sure this is an evidence of bias, but rather that the proportion of applications and yield coming from MA (& the Northeast) is relatively higher due to geographical pull. Geographic pull (closer to home) is found in any applicant pool, even in the most "elite" schools that draw students from all over the world. I don't think the numbers are published any more, but when they were, one could see for example, that applications per capita from MA to Harvard were significantly higher than those from Texas per capita. [Insert any geographically distant state for comparison.] Reverse is true with Stanford & Californians, Dartmouth & northeasterners, etc.

Same trends are seen at all of these schools:
Stanford/California
UChicago/midwest
Yale/Northeast
Duke/South
Rice/Texas
Princeton/Northeast

[walker1977]

Originally Posted by JTC Mom

I have two high schoolers (and a middle schooler) at "top" privates. My high schoolers take almost all AP and honors but are not at the top of their class. We have spent a lot of time recently looking at colleges and what we have heard from the most selective schools (those with single digit admit rates) is this: They are looking for kids in the top 5-10 percent of their high school class (Val/Sal doesn't matter much), who have taken the most rigorous coursework available to them at their school, and who have been continuously dedicated one or two extracurricular activities where they have achieved a high level of mastery and or leadership. As long as your kid is near the top of their class, I wouldn't worry too much about the GPA to the hundredth of a point. Most schools recalculate the GPA anyway. Almost all unweight it and some colleges explicitly drop certain courses from the calculation. The most important thing academically (we've been told) is to take rigorous courses and do well in them. IF you do all this (including excel at extracurriculars) you can increase your likelihood of acceptance, but definitely can't guarantee it. So if a school has an overall 5 percent acceptance rate, and you do everything right, you may be able to improve your odds to...say...15-25 percent. So having great grades, rigorous courses, high test scores (test optional - ha!), and high caliber extracurriculars is all important. Even if you do it all right, it's still not "likely" that you'll get in to any top-level school. But...you might!

I'm sure that sounds negative (believe me...we are living it!) but honestly there are a lot of "very selective" "impressive" schools that aren't necessarily Ivy/Stanford/MIT. And high achieving students will have plenty of options if they are willing to apply to a range of schools. I think I'm saying this mostly to assuage my own fears so remind me of that when I'm stressing out next spring about college acceptances.

I have a couple of kids at top privates as well. If you think sending your kids to one of these schools guarantees them getting into an ivy or top 20, you couldn’t be more incorrect. Just look at the colleges these kids go to. You can find them on places like instagram for the schools. There are quite a few Ivy/top 20s but hardly the whole class or even half the class. However, these schools will no doubt prepare them to do well no matter what college they go to, which will help them get into med/law/ graduate schools, etc easier than kids who don’t have such rigorous academics in high school. Also, the connections they likely will make can help them down the road which likely doesn’t happen at most other high schools.

[EDS_]

Originally Posted by blakely

Not sure this is an evidence of bias, but rather that the proportion of applications and yield coming from MA (& the Northeast) is relatively higher due to geographical pull. Geographic pull (closer to home) is found in any applicant pool, even in the most "elite" schools that draw students from all over the world. I don't think the numbers are published any more, but when they were, one could see for example, that applications per capita from MA to Harvard were significantly higher than those from Texas per capita. [Insert any geographically distant state for comparison.] Reverse is true with Stanford & Californians, Dartmouth & northeasterners, etc.

Same trends are seen at all of these schools:
Stanford/California
UChicago/midwest
Yale/Northeast
Duke/South
Rice/Texas
Princeton/Northeast

I'm talking about a play on statistical bias. If numbers don't break near proportionally over a long period of time something is up. And certainly we'd expect more Harvard admits to come from MA and NY due to proximity. Why then per College Factual for 2023 (I think, the year isn't 100% clear) did Harvard accept 213 from NY and 213 from CA, 75 from TX, 61 from FL? CA is farther from Harvard than TX or FL, the numbers are strongly disproportionate to population and the numbers have been similar for many years. Further, there is no academic preparedness metric that explains why Harvard loves CA so much.......more from CA than the last 31 states on their list. Proportionally that makes absolutely no sense. Harvard yammers on and on about diversity, they don't mean it or maybe only certain types of diversity matter?

Harvard is a nominally private school and may practice whatever geographical biases they'd like. That said kids from TX and several other states need to know what they are up against.

[platon20]

Originally Posted by TurtleCreek80

About 1 in 5 applicants are admitted, maybe closer to 1 in 6 as of this year.

1 in 5? That's pretty high accept rate for such an "elite" high school.

For comparison, my med school acceptance rate was 2% and Harvard's undergrad accept rate is 4%

[debtex]

Originally Posted by platon20

1 in 5? That's pretty high accept rate for such an "elite" high school.

For comparison, my med school acceptance rate was 2% and Harvard's undergrad accept rate is 4%

Unlike the colleges and med/law/biz schools, there isn't an incentive for these private schools to goose their applications to drive down admission rates.

That said, I doubt this number is correct tbh. They've been using this same rate in their public material for 10 years. I know when my oldest was admitted to 9th, we later found out the admission rate for that grade was 10%. That was precovid, things have definitely gotten more competitive since then. I suspect they don't change it because they don't want to discourage people.

[aggie972]

Originally Posted by platon20

1 in 5? That's pretty high accept rate for such an "elite" high school.

For comparison, my med school acceptance rate was 2% and Harvard's undergrad accept rate is 4%

Universities get applications from all over the world, so this isn't surprising.

[TurtleCreek80]

Originally Posted by platon20

1 in 5? That's pretty high accept rate for such an "elite" high school.

For comparison, my med school acceptance rate was 2% and Harvard's undergrad accept rate is 4%

It’s closer a 10-15% acceptance rate as of this year for the whole school, exact % varies by grade of course. Also you cannot seriously compare Harvard or med school to a local 1-12 independent school. Any high school senior in the entire WORLD can apply to Harvard. There is a finite number of 1) boys, 2) in the Dallas area, 3) who are academically / socially-emotionally qualified to meet SM admissions criteria, 4) and who have upwards of $35-40k per year per boy for tuition & expenses.

It’s never going to get to a point where there are 800-1600 boys applying for 1st grade admissions at SM to get to a 2-4% acceptance rate. Between Greenhill, St Marks, Parish, ESD, Alcuin, Lamplighter & Good Shepherd, there are a a grand total of approximately 210 first grade boys enrolled in the better private schools.
Total. You can throw in another 100 boys if you want to include the Catholic & Jewish day schools. And another 300 if you want to include every single first grade boy enrolled in HPISD. And another 100 for DISD magnets / choice. That’s still only 700 boys….there are not another 900 first grade boys in the rest of Dallas & Collin counties who are applying for elite privates. The population just isn’t here.