FAQ

We recognize that just because one high school has higher matriculation data than another, it does not mean it is necessarily a better school. There are a host of reasons why a high school has more of its graduates matriculate at, for example, Ivy League colleges, than another high school. Many of those reasons have little to do with the quality of the school’s education or extracurricular opportunities. We are not going to delve into these reasons here, but we want to be clear that we are aware of this perceived bias.

Our dataset of schools is a work in progress and more schools will be added over time.

We started with high schools in California and then expanded to other states, focusing on the top high schools for which we could find verifiable data. We included both private and public schools, although very few public high schools publish matriculation data.

For national and state high school rankings, we used Niche.com rankings for Best College Prep High Schools since they are the only source that ranks both public and private high schools. US News & World Report ranks the Best Public High Schools but it does not rank private high schools so we could not use them as an aggregate source.

We are always looking to add matriculation data for additional high schools for which there is publicly available data or verifiable data. If you have access to such data, please contact us at support@insiderpal.com.

To get an accurate representation of which colleges students are attending, we focus on college matriculation not college admissions. College admissions data could lead to a skewed view of a high school because students can be accepted into multiple colleges.