There is a term that I used daily when I worked in the Admissions Office at the University of Pennsylvania.
I don't use it regularly anymore, but I should. It can be a very informative and emblematic term for families who are trying to understand the complexity of the admissions process, especially at colleges or universities that attract a large number of applications from a particular high school.
The term I am referring to is "school group."
When I worked at Penn, I covered some of the biggest metropolitan areas for the university, including all five boroughs of NYC, parts of New Jersey, and the suburbs of Philadelphia. I had some small high schools in my territory that only sent a few applications (or none at all in some cases) in a given year. But most high schools that I was responsible for sent a ton of applications every single year. For example, Bronx Science, a specialized high school in the Bronx (obviously!) used to send us between 75 and 100 applications a year. Even at a small private school, like one of the all-girls schools in the suburbs of Philadelphia, it wasn't unusual to get a quarter (or more) of the senior class to apply. All of the students who applied from a particular high school were part of their own school group.
Some admissions officers are known to read all of the applications from a high school at the same time to help them contextualize the school group. In fact, in some offices, all of the applications from a school group are finalized together, at the same time, to make more consistent admissions decisions. School groups are like schools of fish in an admissions office—the applications in a school group can sometimes travel through each stage of the admissions process together, from the initial read-through of applications to finalized admissions decisions.
Because admissions officers fundamentally evaluate you first within your high school environment, the school group concept is an important one. You are not only compared to the students in your class in terms of the courses you take, the rigor of your courses, and the grades; you are also compared, in particular, to those classmates who are also applying to the same college. Even if your high school doesn't use class rank, a college is going to stack up your GPA, number of advanced courses (like how many APs you took each year), and your overall strength to the other students from your high school who have also applied to that same college. In fact, when I worked at Penn, we recalculated GPAs based on just the core academic classes and each school group was ordered based on students' GPA (if the high school didn't use class rank).
Why are school groups important? The more students who apply to a certain college from your high school, the more competition you will have even before you are compared regionally, nationally, and internationally. And while colleges don't typically have quotas on the number of students they admit from a certain high school, depending on their selectivity, they have limits. Sometimes the limit is extremely low at a highly selective college and only one or two students get admitted each year—usually those who are at the very top of the school group. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't apply to a college that is popular at your high school. It just means that you should be aware of the school group. In contrast, colleges where few if any students from your high school apply can sometimes yield better results because a college is always trying to create a pipeline of applications (and students) from a particular high school for the future.
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School groups are not based on the size of your senior class; they are based on the number of applications a college gets from your high school. The term speaks volumes with just two simple words. I might just bring the term back into my vernacular once again as a way to demystify this process. School group. It has a nice ring to it as long as you take it to heart.
