the Sam Jackson College Experience

I was wondering if you ever wrote a post about what life is like at Exeter. All I know (or think I know) about "big" New England prep schools probably comes from Dead Poets' Society.

That is a lot of students applying early, but I would have guessed that there were a lot of smart kids at Exeter who would be ready to take advantage of the early thing.

Not directly, no. I have alluded to it in some places just as I am writing and have written a little bit about it on my personal blog in the past (samjackson.org/blog, not very well updated recently). I hope to address this question more in the future when it comes time for me to matriculate and I will describe more fully my Exeter experience that it might be compared to a hypothetical college one; there is a lot to say. Life at Exeter is what you make of it, generally, and so individual experiences can differ a lot. I don't see 1000 as 'big' although I suppose in comparison to many other private schools it might be seen that way... I spent all my time before 10th grade in public school, including 9th grade with about 1450 people, so it wasn't too striking a difference for me. Exeter feels pretty small in many ways, especially since it is a confined environment (to a point, being residential with nowhere to really go).

We all guessed there'd be a lot, but I never suspected it would be THIS MANY. Then again if we'd had the 58% from last year's numbers, we'd have started guessing higher.

Do you have any specific questions?

By "Big" I meant prestigious.

In terems of specific questions...How's the food?

Dining hall food varies in quality and variety. I'm usually reasonably satisfied, i.e., I don't starve... but I'm always very unhappy because I'm used to having easy access to lots of great ethnic food in the Boston area. None of that here. People might tell you about 'ethnic' places in town but they are either lying or don't know what good food is. Not to be trusted. There are, however, a few very nice soup and sandwich type lunch places in town. But dining hall food, well. There are options of various different sorts--I have a friend who is a vegan but she would starve if she weren't a day student and couldn't eat at home as well. I know vegetarians and I've been playing vegetarian since Thanksgiving break, but it isn't all that fun sometimes. Salad / pasta / deli bar always there if you aren't interested in the stuff on the hot lines. I mean, not bad, not that bad over all. Very manageable, if you're creative. When they make their own stuff it can be very good--they make some very very nice breads sometimes. Survivable. Decent variety.

Check out the list of daily menus: http://www.exeter.edu/student_life/85_705.aspx
it makes things sound better / worse than reality sometimes but it is a decent indication, though it tends to leave things out sometimes.

That's a very complete answer, Sam. Thank you.

Good luck to that 64%!! Do we ever find out how many of that 64% get accepted early?

I don't think that that is traditionally reported. If it comes out publicly, I'll repeat it here. I don't want to post what I know anecdotally (from what we've had so far) because it might be a bad influence. I will say that so far the class of 2007 has done quite well.

My daughter attends a private school in California and the percentages (of applying early) seem to be identical - around 50% last year, and nearly 70% this year. It definitely seems to be a trend. We'll see how it pans out and how it will affect next year's class (80%?). She's a junior now.

A friend of mine at Dalton in NYC reported that they had 10 % points on us. Scary stuff.

72% was reported at my school, a private school in minnesota. it's crazy.

While I don't go to some crazy school where every applies early- most kids need to compare financial aid packages- a decent enough number applied early that I've started to notice a trend. So far, every guy I know who applied early got in, and the girls are the ones getting deferred. All of these people are perfectly qualified for the schools they want to go to.
I think there's probably a connection in there with the rising number of female applicants/students at all US colleges. I've seen a few articles on the topic, most of which conclude that it's even more difficult for females to get in to top schools than for males, because these schools want to keep a gender balance.
I was just wondering- have you seen a similar trend at your school? I don't want to make this assumption based on my own school and friends alone, but with so many members of your class applying early there is a lot more data available there.

funny; at my school all the people who have gotten into top schools early are girls, and most of the boys have gotten deferred. i think we are all looking at too small of numbers to see any significant statistics. but i do believe that, at least at some schools, girls have a disadvantage, although at most tech schools they still have some advantage, even if it is very slight.

Exeter hasn't had any pattern in either direction, at least now that's visible in the data from this year so far. I don't know about Brown / Penn / Cornell since those happened after we were out of school.

I am a new upper at Exeter. Do you know what is the lowest GPA of a non-athlete student accepted into an Ivy?

Hey Cristina! Thanks for visiting and commenting. Hope you are enjoying your time at Exeter! What dorm are you in? Onto your question:

Non-legacy non-URM etc? I don't know. I can't vouch for the entirety of the Ivy stats for the class of 2007, but the point is that unless you're a recruited athlete or there are other situations in place (large sums of $) you should have a good GPA. I can't give better specifics and, of course, things differ from year to year sometimes very significantly. Better to talk to your college counselor or Ms. Dolan for a general opinion, BUT, that isn't really the right kind of thinking you want to go on for your college admissions process... in almost all cases, you don't want to be applying across-the-ivies just because it doesn't make any sense from the perspective of what kind of education YOU want! Etc...