dboeger1 wrote: ↑Wed May 18, 2022 9:22 pm
OP, how are you defining "outcomes"? If you're specifically referring to the quality of education, despite being somewhat subjective based on personal preferences, it's also easier to evaluate on an objective basis, because you can directly observe how the school operates. If by "outcomes" you mean college acceptance, I'm not saying school doesn't matter, but be very careful equating higher-ranked school to better chance higher-ranked college.
One big reason for this is that college admissions are generally pretty opaque and subject to change, especially over long time horizons, so everyone's ultimately just guessing what will get them accepted. I was shocked to learn from a coworker with college-aged kids that lots of colleges are no longer requiring SAT/ACT scores for admissions. I understand the reasons, especially given the pandemic's disruptions to education, but it still seems problematic to me, and I imagine there were lots of highly-ranked students who prepared primarily for standardized tests only to find they were no longer as much of a factor.
A related point is that college admission decisions are clearly not based on the same universal criteria for all students. This is not just limited to the usual headline-grabbing issues like race or gender, but they also accept students based on filling various majors and departments, socioeconomic diversity, unique experiences, geography, etc. So you can't really say for sure whether a particular school choice is going to have much of an impact when applying. For example, I got into a top-tier university that was very selective despite many, many applicants being significantly more qualified than me, likely due to the combination of being a mixed-race minority, financially disadvantaged, and graduating valedictorian from a poorly ranked school system that had never sent a student to a top-tier university before. Although it wasn't a condition of my acceptance, I was also invited to a Summer program between my senior year of high school and freshman year of college to help bridge the gap. I didn't know it at the time, but thank goodness I participated because it was very rigorous and intense compared to my high school studies and I most likely would not have been successful at that school if it was not for that initial experience. The point is that I realize I was something of a charity case, so going to a private school (which my parents considered back when we had money) might not have actually helped.
Speaking of graduating valedictorian from high school, I have to imagine that relative student rankings within a school system are as big of a factor, if not bigger, than raw performance (if there is such a thing, especially with the decline of standardized testing). There was a kid in my school system growing up who was notorious for being an overachiever, but not a humble one like me, more like super aggressive about maximizing every opportunity, kind of like the equivalent of a finance nerd who salivates at the opportunity to max out the mega backdoor Roth because they like to stick it to Uncle Sam (I'm kind of poking fun at myself here, so please take no offense). Anyway, when we were in middle school, the district opened up a new school similar to what you described with a STEM focus, and they had a representative promoting this new school and trying to get people to sign up for its first class. We all joked that this particular student would be the first to sign up, and sure enough, he ran right home and gave his parents the pamphlet and they immediately signed him up for it expecting better "outcomes". I didn't see him again until senior year when we happened to bump into each other at the SAT testing center, so we exchanged numbers and agreed to meet up and talk about which universities we would eventually get accepted to. That's when I learned that we had the same dream goal. Eventually, I got in and he didn't. Now, to be clear, I know nothing about his performance, only that he went to this special new school expecting it to increase his chances of getting into his dream school. But it's interesting that I got in and he didn't. He was always a top student, and there's a decent chance he would've graduated valedictorian had he stayed.
Lastly, I know people talk about paying for better education from a private school and all the benefits associated with that, but remember that money can also buy other things like books, certifications, vacations abroad, tutoring, lessons, computers, equipment, etc. If you can afford private school, you can also afford to give your child the most comfortable, rewarding school experience of any student in the public school, so that's really what you should be comparing against, not apples-to-apples average test scores and the other usual metrics.
With all that having been said, do I think private schools improve acceptance rates to top universities? Yes, probably. The vast majority of my university classmates were from private schools or very well-known elite magnet public schools. Of the remainder, a significant portion were foreign students. Only a very small portion came from run-of-the-mill small-town American schools. I just don't know that paying for a private school is the obvious slam dunk it seems like based on those figures, because either public or private could end up being a better fit for your child overall, and academic performance is only one facet of a well-balanced school life.