Matriculation Stats College matriculation statistics with a twist

For those students living in NYC, there are a few excellent public school options available to the many excellent independent schools. One of those is Stuyvesant whose statistics have been missing from these pages simply because I have not been able to gain access to them. And that’s only changed slightly as I now have access to some information, though not really appropriate to add to the NYC page.

Based on data for the classes of 2008-2010, I have been able to estimate the HYPMS statistic at 6.5% +/- 0.5%. Unfortunately, the data I have does not allow me to estimate any of the other statistics that are shown in these tables.

So, why does Stuy’s HYPMS statistic seem so poor compared to the schools like Trinity, Collegiate and Brearley? Its HYPMS is more like that of a Riverdale or ECFS. I surmise that there are a few factors at work here that supress Stuy’s stat compared to the independent schools:

1) Size of school At over 800 students students per grade, Stuy is more than four times the size of Horace Mann, which has the largest class size of the NYC independent schools. I’ve noticed before that size does matter and the smaller the better. I believe that having fewer students makes it easier for Collegiate to place its students than it is for Horace Mann. When it comes time for Collegiate’s college advisor to whisper in the ear of the director of admissions at a particular school, he/she is probably only trying to make a case for one or two particular students who are sitting “on the bubble”. The Horace Mann counterpart is probably working on behalf of three to five (numbers made up, but you get the idea). The Stuyvesant students are getting in each other’s way. How many students from any one school is Yale going to take in a given year? They take more actual students from Stuy each year than from HM, but not on a percentage basis. If they were going to do that, they’d have to take twice as many and that’s just too many with respect to the size of the incoming Yale freshman class.

2) Legacy Effect I don’t have any hard stats on this factor, but I feel confident that there are more Harvard legacies, for example, applying from Trinity than from Stuyvesant each year. Many Stuyvesant students are first generation Americans, not so at Trinity. And although it’s debatable how valuable the legacy effect is, it certainly has some value.

3) Ethnicity You might like to think that affirmative action programs favor the public school, Stuyvesant, over an independent school. Surprisingly, not so. Of the 958 students who were offered admission to Stuyvesant last year, only 7 (Yes, 7!) were African-American. Only 17 were Hispanic. I don’t know how many actually chose to attend, but the typical independent school has MORE under-represented minorities for several reasons. And colleges still give them some advantage in admission.
In addition, there’s the reputed “Asian penalty”. With Stuyvesant currently being approximately 2/3 Asian students, that effect would be more pronounced on Stuyvesant than on any of the independent schools.

4) Athletics Sure, there are some good athletes in the Stuy student body, but their athletic ability played absolutely no role in their being admitted to the school. Admission is based solely on performance on the SHSAT, 2 1/2 hour SAT-type test given in November each year. The independent schools certainly do factor athletic prowess into admissions decisions as do the colleges. There have to be some students who get into HYPMS schools because their athletic ability makes them stand out, and an independent school is more likely than Stuy to have such a student because they also take that into account in their admissions process.

5) Parental Finances It seems sort of obvious that the parental body at any of these schools is wealthier than that of Stuyvesant, on average. And it also seems likely that there will be more at an independent school than Stuy that have so much money that no college can afford to turn down their offspring. Colleges need to raise money, and if they admit a few uber-rich kids in the hopes that mommy and daddy will give a building, who can blame them? For example, do you really think that any school is going to turn down Bill & Melinda Gates’ kids? I’m just saying that you’re less likely to find such kids at Stuy. Just a few of them a year can have a noticeable effect on a school’s statistics.

So, with all of these factors working against Stuyvesant students, I’m actually quite impressed with a 6.5% or so HYPMS statistic.

Yes, I am in the midst of the time-consuming processing of updating for 2010 results where available. In general, you can tell if 2010 results are included by looking at the “Years” column and seeing if it includes the year 2010. If not, or if it just shows a number of years, then 2010 has not been included. I’m engaged in this process at a reasonable pace. It’s going to take awhile. I’ve started with the NYC schools and then will most likely move on to boarding schools.

As I mentioned in my last post here, the latest US News and World Report Rankings are now out. I am using a revised college rankings list to analyze any school that has 2010 matriculation results included. The rankings didn’t change all that much, but I will post what I’m doing soon.

Today the 2011 US News & World Report rankings were released. Although there are a few changes, as expected nothing dramatic seems to have happened. When I have some time, I’ll figure out it there will be any changes to the weightings that are placed on colleges for the MATRIC ratings. In any event, I wouldn’t expect any substantial changes to the results shown on this web site.

On April 29th, Forbes published their list of Top 20 Prep schools (which included day schools). Their rankings were based 50% on matriculation statistics though they used a statistic which we have already described as a bit of a mixture of an image and historical category with the current reality (the Ivies + MIT + Stanford). The other 50% was based equally on endowment, student/faculty ratio and faculty with advanced degrees. Unfortunately, Forbes does not fully disclose their methodology (unlike us), so it’s difficult to comment in detail about exactly what they did. Even though they claim that half their ranking is determined by matriculation statistics, what does that really mean? How do they compare the apples and oranges of the four disparate measures that they use? Depending on exactly what they do (and their are a variety of seemingly reasonable ways to do so), the results can vary significantly.

Anyway, we present on a new page our list of top 25 matriculation statistics across our 3 pages, NYC day schools, other city day schools and boarding schools. We base the ranking on our preferred statistic, the MATRIC TOP Index. This index analyzes schools’ matriculation records to the top 25 national university and top 15 liberal arts colleges from the US News & World Report rankings. (Though in fact, we also include 2 additional liberal arts colleges because of ties and 5 international universities which pop up too often to ignore). More details about our methodology can be read on our home page with supporting data on the the college rankings page.

We have a few insights on the rankings. The NYC day schools dominate as they do the Forbes rankings with 8 schools (the same 7 plus St. Ann’s) present all in the top 20. Boarding schools have 6 present instead of 7 though Deerfield is not in the Top 20 like it was on the Forbes list and Milton dropped down to #26 and thus is not shown. And the Boston area day schools added a 4th school in addition to the 3 on the Forbes list (Buckingham Browne & Nichols). And the other 7 are spread around with 2 each in California (though 1 in the north and 1 in the south), Connecticut and Washington, DC. And finally one from Texas shows up.

And in the gender game, 15 of the schools are coed but the girls outdo the boys by 6 to 4 amongst the single sex schools.

It must be noted that there are a few potential candidates around the country which simply don’t make their data available (Sidwelll Friends in DC and Hockaday in Dallas, for example). We apologize for that, but we are limited by the data we can obtain. If anyone feels they have a school that is not already listed on one of our pages which should make this list, please bring it to our attention (via a contact email or the comments page) and we will be happy to analyze the data to determine if this page should be amended.

As stated on our home page, we definitively do NOT believe that better matriculation statistics imply that one school is better than another. But they are fun to look at, aren’t they?

Because my parents recently moved from the house that I grew up in, I went back and cleaned out my old room. In a stack of papers I found the matriculation list from my Lawrenceville class back in the late 1970s. Since I don’t think the US News rankings had started back then and would have been somewhat different even if they had, I didn’t bother doing a full analysis of the data. I did, however, check the HYPMS and Ivy statistics. My class had a HYPMS percentage of 13.9% (no M’s since I was the only one to get in and I chose one of the HYP’s) and an Ivy percentage of 23.4%. These percentages compare with Lawrenceville’s current ones of 13.4% and 23.3%. Amazing!

It’s obvious that some of the schools shown on these pages have absolutely incredibly matriculation statistics. As it turns out, even the schools which don’t seem to compare favorably to the other schools shown here also have very impressive results when viewed in the proper context. For example, Collegiate in NYC and Roxbury Latin in Boston have the highest HYPMS percentage with approximately 25% of each year’s graduating class attending one of those five fine universities. On a nationwide basis, approximately only one quarter of one percent, 0.25%, attend those universities. So, on a percentage basis, about 100 times as many students from those schools go HYPMS as do on a national basis! But if we look at the schools shown on these pages with the lowest HYPMS percentages, we still see levels solidly above 0.25%. So, it’s important to keep in mind that even if a school looks like it’s at the bottom of a list after you’ve done the “sort” of your choice, it still has very impressive results.

I also estimated the Ivy percentage on a nationwide basis. It was approximately one half of one percent. Again, the schools with highest Ivy percentages dwarf that percentage, though not quite by the 100 to 1 ratio we saw with the HYPMS ratio. The maximum ratio we’ve seen so far is about 80 to 1. In any event, the schools that do not appear so favorably compared to the other schools here, still have impressive results when viewed in a national context.

I know that what has drawn you here is most likely that very human fascination with rankings in general and with the rankings of either NYC day schools or boarding schools specifically (day schools in other cities hasn’t gotten much traction yet). But I realized that in addition to producing those rankings for your use and/or entertainment, I had a few things to say about them.

Some of those things will be about how the process of finding and analyzing more data is going (of course, this can never finish – new data comes out every year). And some will be about interpreting tidbits that I’ve noticed in the data.

For today, I have something very simple to mention, but it was exciting to me. I had thought I had found all the data I was going to find for NYC schools. But yesterday evening, I found that I had missed information for Nightingale-Bamford, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side. The information is publicly available on the school’s website, but not in an obvious place. Just some dumb luck led me to stumble upon it, and it has now been added to the NYC page.