After witholding statistics for the Class of 2012 last year, the College Counseling Office (CCO) will release matriculation statistics for the Class of 2013 this spring according to Sean Logan, Director of College Counseling. The statistics will include the number of students who matriculate to specific colleges. Though the CCO released specific numbers in previous years, only the names of the colleges that students matriculated to were released in 2012. Logan said that Andover will always be evaluated on college statistics. “I would say right now we have probably gone too far in terms of the extreme of not telling enough [college data],” Logan said. Logan does not anticipate that the CCO will disclose the number of applicants, acceptances, denials, deferrals or students wait-listed for specific schools. Andover has not released these numbers since the directorship of John Anderson, former Director of College Counseling, who retired in 2010. “I do want to represent Andover and not look like we’re hiding anything, because we do have wonderful college statistics, but I want to balance that with making sure we are looking at broad college statistics and not just a specific set of schools,” said Logan. “When it’s all about numbers, we lose a valuable piece of what we think we do in the college admission process,” he continued. The decision to release matriculation numbers this year was made after discussions about careful data management with both the Eastern Independent Secondary School College Admission Professionals (EISSCAP), a consortium that Andover belongs to along with Exeter, St. Paul’s, Milton, NMH, Loomis, Taft, Hotchkiss, The Hill School, Lawrenceville and Deerfield, and the Senior Advisory Council (SAC), a committee of administrators that oversees the management of Andover. Acceptance rates for Andover students at particular schools can vary drastically from year to year, according to Logan. He said that looking at one year of acceptance data isn’t always in context and “often cause[s] more stress that [it] help[s].” “We’re trying to tamp down some of the craze surrounding selectivity and [students] measuring their Andover experience based on where they get into college. That’s a really dangerous thing to do, in my opinion,” Logan said. “Even at a school as big as Andover, my biggest concern is the privacy of students [when] giving out statistics that can sort of pinpoint certain students,” Logan said. In the future, the CCO and the SAC will continue to discuss the possibility of publishing acceptance rate data, said Logan. “We’ve tried to ask ourselves, ‘Where do we go in terms of how we report information?’ … We’re in this flux right now of trying to find the happy medium [in releasing statistics],” said Logan. Even though these statistics are currently not disclosed to the public, Logan said that the CCO still plans to internally compile and analyze acceptances, denials, deferrals and wait-lists to aid students in the college counseling process. “I want to look at trends to see if, over a couple of years, there are certain schools that seem to be turning down some of our really good kids, while similar institutions are taking them,” said Logan. This data is particularly useful for seeing trends with Early Action and Early Decision applicants. Knowing how these application options can influence a student’s chances for admission is extremely beneficial for the college counseling process, said Logan. “For me, numbers are important, but I also want to make sure that students and parents understand that there’s a broader context to them [the numbers],” he said.
