Quote from tradingbug:
Skull and Bones was a movie. Not reality. I hope you do not go through life believeing tv as reality without doing thorough research. You may be in for a suprise.
Prep Schools are aimed at a better education. You only go to school once.
If you had the means, woud you rather send your children to a public school or a private school where the standardized test scores when they graduate show a higher level than publice school.
Your connection between prep schools and Ivy League may just be from those kids in a prep school getting better Standardized test scores and grades than kids at public schools. I hope if you have the means to send your kids to get a better education, you chose too. Remember, you only go to school once. Although, if you believe tv to be reality, you may have gone to school longer than the average joe. Less toking, more studying.
I agree with Tradingbug. Top private schools and prep schools are more demanding that your run of the mill public school. The course offerings are typically more advanced and the competition between students is more intense due to a smaller student body. You also eliminate alot of the remedial students in a private/prep school since there are stringent requirements for acceptance.
On the other hand, I have known quite a few individuals who gained acceptance to Ivy League and top Eastern schoools thru the public school system. Typically, they are required to take all honors and AP classes and graduate in the top 5% of their class. Since there will always be a greater number of slacker students in any public school, the class rank is obviously more important. In a small private or prep school with a good reputation, class rank is nowhere near as important.
One point of emphasis that is very rarely discussed is geographical location. For instance, think of some student in Boise, Idaho or Helena, Montana with good marks at your average public school. What do you think his/her chances of gaining acceptance to Princeton or Yale or Harvard might be compared to that same student in Winnetka, IL at New Trier? Odds are there are thousands of applicants in that region applying to those schools, most with the means to pay for it as well. However, in the more remote areas, you probably have a fraction of those applicants applying to the top Ivy's. Odds are that student will get into at least one Ivy League school just to satisfy the geographical balance for that particular school.
So if I had to give advice to a student with the ambition of going to an Ivy, I would say, play a competitive sport, move to a remote region with little academic competition or ambition and then apply to these Ivy's. If you can somehow attract the attention of a particular coach, you will also enhance your odds of acceptance. Back when I applied to the Ivy's, they had a separate pool for athletes (didnt matter if it was a revenue sport either), so long as you met the minimum standards, you had a better shot at acceptance.
