Which High Schools Send the Most Students to T25 Colleges? Data Revealed!

Which high schools best prepare students to get into a top 25 college in the United States? That’s a question that sometimes I’ve discussed with parents and students who I’m working with in the college consulting process. And I know I don’t know all the answers, but as somebody who has been through this process with a lot of families over the last 20 years—both public school students and private school students—there are a few things that I have noticed from a qualitative point of view that I want to share with you guys. And there are some tools that I’ve come across, data-wise, that could be really helpful if you’re trying to answer these questions yourself.

My name is Brooke. I’ve been coaching students through the college admissions process for over two decades. I also do SAT and ACT prep. And in particular, I work with students on building their narrative and story and coaching them through the college essay writing process. You can find out more about us at SuperTutorTV.com.

One quick note in terms of bifurcation when we talk about these kinds of schools is that not all of these schools play by the same rules. You have your big state schools that are top ranked: UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of Michigan are currently in the top 25, and the University of Virginia and UNC Chapel Hill are around 27 right now. And sometimes they’re in the top 25, and they just kind of fluctuate, depending on the year. But in any case, admission to those five public schools tends to be a different game than admission to the private schools.

So, a few quick notes about public schools. First, for public schools generally, your letters of recommendation either don’t count at all, like in the case of UCs, or they’re less important or de-emphasized. Public schools tend to be more about metrics, like what your grades are or how you performed. They also tend to be less interested in crazy wow factors and esoteric exceptional situations. Something that might impress Harvard as exceptional leadership may not be as exciting or impressive to a state school that really wants you to have good grades and just be performing well. The other thing about these state schools is that residency vastly changes the landscape in terms of your admissions chances. In-state residency generally increases your probability of admission at UC Berkeley, University of Virginia, UNC Chapel Hill, and University of Michigan.

In-State vs Out-of-State Admissions Rates for Students in the US

Number one, the first thing that I always like to say with college admissions is that you are being directly compared to the other people at the high school that you go to. It is absolutely true that if you go to a high school where there are 30 kids that are legacies applying REA to Harvard, your chance of getting into Harvard just shrinks a lot because of the competition and because there are so many darn legacies. If they are identical to you and they’re a legacy, they will get in over you. That’s 100% true. I’ve seen it happen before. I’ve seen kids get heartbroken because they go to some school where there are way too many legacies and they’re not legacy and they don’t get a piece of the pie. It doesn’t mean they don’t get into an amazing school. It just means that they don’t necessarily get to go to that school if they really wanted to. And that effect is super real. Yes, if you go to a hyper-competitive high school, you could get jostled a bit.

In the case of UCs, this effect is being mega-amplified at highly competitive schools. UCs generally do not have super high admission rates at hyper-competitive private or public schools if you are in-state in California. Once you get out of state, UCs play by much more normative rules when you get out of state. If you’re out of state and you go to a super rigorous high school, that’s awesome. But if you’re in-state, it can hurt you. The admission rates for the most famous high schools in California—I think of Whitney or University High and Irvine or Harvard Westlake or Harker or Palo Alto Gunn—are not seeing the highest admin rates at UCs. And here’s why. They have over 100 kids applying to UCs. And a huge portion of those hundred kids are 100% qualified to attend those schools. But they will not all get in. They will only accept maybe 19 of them, or 16, or 22. And that’s not going to be a very big percentage of the total. And a lot of those 22 students that got in will also get into Harvard and Yale and Princeton. And so they’ll go there.

So when it comes to UCs—and again, we have a whole other video where I talk about UCs—here’s the game. You want to look for schools that have no more than about 70 students applying to whichever UC it is that you want to get into, or you could very well get shut out with a crazy brutal admission rate. And you want to go to a school that’s good enough where you’ll actually learn and be able to perform and know algebra and not end up on the remedial list, but that is not so competitive that you’ve got hundreds of kids vying for a limited number of spots. So you want to go to a strong school that’s not super strong, and that’s kind of the sweet spot for UC admissions. There are also some schools that are kind of like feeders to UCLA and UC Berkeley. We have some short videos where I highlight some of those schools that you can check out on our channel.

Finally, if you’re really looking for that UC admissions data and you want to know which schools in particular admit at a higher rate to UCs, there is a document online that tracks all of that too, called Admissions by source school.

Number two: the next point that I make to families, though, is that the best high schools often prepare you immensely well. When it comes to my students that go to the most famous, best private school in LA—and even one of the top private schools in the Bay Area, I’ve had students from there too—there are several things that happen when I have those students that make this entire admissions process so much easier.

The first part is that SAT/ACT prep is often a really light lift. When I have students who go to the best schools, they usually don’t need that much SAT or ACT prep since they’re already in really good shape because their teachers have been whipping them for the last several years to the point where they have amazing vocabularies. They already know how to do incredibly complex math problems. So, for instance, I had one kid, and he’s starting the SAT at 1500, so he can prep to 1600. I had another kid who I had actually tutored for the ISEE and the SSAT when he was applying to private schools. He ended up going to boarding school on the East Coast and naturally scored a 35 on his ACT first shot. And he got into a great top 10 college, and he’s totally fine. But basically, that test prep is no longer a heavy lift because you already did it in middle school, those seeds were planted, and then those seeds grow because you go to a super hard high school.

And the second thing that I’ll say about going to a really amazing high school is don’t underestimate the power of being able to write well. There are very few high schools, I think, in the United States that teach students to really write well, but there are a few. And when you have that ability, it is game-changing in the college admissions process because it’s much easier for you to write a really amazing essay and to build in self-reflection and to know how to express yourself in a way that really commands other people’s attention. So having that ability also is going to help you in your applications; it’s going to help you stand out.

Third, competition also brings more likelihood for independent research, independent work, independent projects, and all these things that tend to be the wow factor pieces in an admissions portfolio where you are trying to get into a top 10, top 15, or top 20 school. I find that when I have kids at more elite high schools, it is easier for us to build a profile that is going to be HYPS-ready (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford), as well as MIT.

That being said, we also have data. And so now we’re going to jump into the quantitative part of this video. So there’s a cool tool that I recently discovered that’s my new favorite thing. It’s called the Chicardgo School Elite College Placement Index. The ECPI focuses on one key metric, a school’s track record in placing students into elite universities. So, the methodology here is that 45% of their index score comes from how many kids are going to top 25 universities. The top 15 liberal arts colleges also work into this, and that’s 25%. Then, it’s your state’s flagship pipeline. If you’re in Florida, that’s the University of Florida system. If you’re in California, it’s the UC system, but they omit schools that were already in the top 25. So they’re not going to look at Berkeley and UCLA; they’re going to look at UCSB, UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, etc. How many kids are going to those schools? And then college readiness, which is, are you ready for college? And that’s based on standardized testing and academic rigor, which they’re sourcing from some other data sources, which you guys can get into if you really want to.

Here’s the first thing that I want to show you. One of the analyses that they’ve done is they’ve looked across the country to see if you get into the top 25 schools, or if you score higher on their index, if you’re at a private school versus a public school. And what they found is that it totally varies by geography. The Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, DC, and Boston are places that are very competitive, so the answer is yes. In other parts of the country, the answer is no. And what they account for in that is specialized public schools closing the gap. By that, what I mean are two kinds of public schools that tend to be closing the gap. One is magnet schools, and the other is charter schools. So high-performing magnets and high-performing charters right now are really good feeders to a lot of top 25 colleges. So that’s something to keep in mind, especially if you’re in the middle and you’re not in these big coastal cities.

The second thing that’s really cool is the National Analysis. So if you are in a city, let’s say you’re in New York City, we can go to New York City, and you can look at the public school landscape. So, if you’re planning to send your kid to a public school in New York and you’re not sure if you want to send them to Bronx Science or Stuyvesant, you can go in here and see that Stuyvesant is number one. It’s got a higher index than Bronx Science does, which is ranked 7. It’s not as high. Here’s what’s even cooler. You can go to school profiles, and you can see exactly which schools it’s feeding into. So you know where Stuyvesant is feeding into: Cornell. And I can compare schools as well. Comparing Stuyvesant to Bronx Science, you can see we’ve got more at top 25 universities, but we can look at the feeder schools and look at who else has Cornell. And actually, I had a Bronx Science student go to Cornell. So there you go. If your goal is Cornell, it looks like either is a good choice. But if your goal is UPenn, maybe Bronx Science is looking pretty good. If your goal is MIT, maybe Stuyvesant’s looking good. But you can see more granularly what the differences are between the high schools.

You can also go into private schools by region. So really quickly, I can go over here to private schools, and let’s go to LA, my hometown. And you can see the LA private school landscape. Marlborough School is number four, Brentwood is 10, and Harvard-Westlake is number two, second only to Polytechnic, which is one of my favorite schools in the LA area. So you can look at these, and then you can go into a school profile, and you can see where Polytechnic is sending in students: USC, University of Chicago, and Stanford. Polytechnic has a real relationship with Stanford because they sent six students, which is a lot. So you can kind of see what’s going on, and where kids are going.

So, there you go. That’s an awesome tool that you can use to track where schools are actually feeding their students and what feeder schools are out there. Really fun, really cool data. Not every high school is in there. There are some high schools that don’t publish data, and if you get into the website, it’ll explain all of the things that it’s able to access and not able to access. But in any case, hopefully this is helpful for you if you’re trying to figure out what school to send your kid to and you want to know what pathway you’re putting them on!