The Postgraduate Year
What exactly is a postgraduate year? In short, it is an extra year of high school (thirteenth grade) before college. Why do a small handful of students decide to spend an extra year in high school? For some, the reason might be that they do not feel academically prepared by their current high school. For others, the reason might be because they are very young for their grade and do not feel psychologically ready for college. In some cases, a late-blooming student might realize that with his very mediocre grades in high school he is not going to qualify for admission to competitive colleges, so he might decide to spend a year at a top prep school to show that he can handle the challenge of college.
Very few, if any, public high schools provide for a PG year (as it is referred to in admissions circles), so in almost every case, students apply to private schools that have PG programs. Many of the top northeastern boarding schools have provisions for PG students and are a popular choice for students seeking a challenging program. Phillips Academy in Andover has about eighteen PG students in each senior class (roughly 5 percent of the class) and the Hotchkiss School has about ten, 8 percent of the senior class, to name two. At the high school where I used to teach, the Putney School in Putney, Vermont, we always had a few PG students. For the most part, private schools reap financial benefits by having PG students. Most of them do not get financial aid (although a few exceptional ones might qualify), so they help to generate income for the schools and to “fill beds,” or spaces in the school, to keep enrollment numbers high.
To fully understand how the PG year is treated, we will have to examine three categories of students: Ivy League recruited athletes who chose a PG year, Ivy League applicants (that is, not recruited athletes) who chose a PG year, and applicants to highly selective colleges (but non-Ivy) who chose a PG year.
IVY LEAGUE-RECRUITED ATHLETES
As it happens, in a given year, many (if not most) of the PG applicants at the Ivies are recruited athletes who realized from talking to coaches that they were not going to qualify for Ivy admission because they were below the AI cutoff Typically, these students will attend a strong private school with good athletic teams so they can continue to develop in their sport while trying to improve their academic record. The private school benefits by having a star athlete on its team and by having a student who has a good chance of getting accepted at a highly selective college as a recruit.
Let's say that a particular recruited athlete was a star ice hockey player with mid-500 scores and a C record in high school. Because of his low third decile ranking, his AI falls below the Ivy League cutoff for athletes. Then the student attends a private school, takes some advanced courses, and earns a 3.7 unweighted GPA. Logic would tell you that the Ivies, for purposes of computing the CRS, would count the PG year as one-fifth of the total CRS and calculate a weighted average so that the four-year high school record counted as four-fifths of the CRS. However, this is not what happens.
In fact, up until 1997 (for the class of 2001), for purposes of calculating the AI, the only year that counted at all for the computation of the CRS was the PG year. That means that up until 1997, a C record was effectively wiped out and replaced by one year of PG course work. Needless to say, this rule was invented to benefit recruited athletes so that more would be eligible for Ivy League admission. The rule was so unbalanced that in 1997 the Ivy League deans and athletic directors voted to change the rule so that CRS would be calculated by taking the CRS from four years of high school (however it might have been generated: rank, GPA, decile) and the CRS from the PG year (again, however it might have been generated), averaging the two CRSs, and then calculating the AI using this average CRS. As you can see, the “solution” is far from ideal, but at least it moved the process in the right direction.
If both CRSs were generated by different systems (that is, a rank-generated CRS from high school and then a GPAgenerated GPA from the PG year), you can see that the average is not going to make much sense, since you are combining apples and oranges, but it still serves the purpose in most cases of raising the AI those few crucial points to qualify for Ivy admission. In short, if a recruited athlete gets good grades in a rigorous program during a PG year, he could stand a much better chance of admission.
IVY LEAGUE APPLICANTS WHO ARE NOT ATHLETES AND OTHER APPLICANTS TO HIGHLY SELECTIVE COLLEGES
Unfortunately, in these two cases, the same philosophy of wiping out or minimizing the damage of four years of high school will not apply. Don't forget that admissions officers at all highly selective colleges, Ivy or non-Ivy, see your four-year high school record and your PG year. If you had a D/C record in high school, usually one strong PG year will not be enough to convince an admissions team to admit you, since the obvious response is something like this: “Okay, the student did absolutely minimal work during four years of high school and then got B's during the PG year—I don't think that one decent year erases such a weak high school record.”
Granted, there could be special cases where a student had a solid record in high school and then showed signs of a real intellectual awakening, attended a strong private school, took five AP classes and got A's in all of them, and garnered incredible recommendations that spoke to his incredible intellectual ability and passion for learning. These cases, however, are not the norm. What usually happens is that the student does solid, but not exceptional, work during the PG year and does not retake some of the tests that might do more to raise the overall academic level than the PG year would in the first place. When all is said and done, the scores are the same; only the grades have changed slightly.
Highly selective non-Ivy colleges do not use an AI at all, so you will not reap the benefit of raising your CRS in a PG year. You would have to rely on factors like those in the example I just cited. For those Ivies that calculate an AI for nonathletes and base their academic ranking directly on the AI, if there was a big disparity between your four years of high school and your PG year, they would see it immediately and manually readjust the stanine assignation. For those Ivies that do not use an AI-based scale, the readjusting of stanines would not be an issue—you would probably not rise very much in the academic rating, because you still have four weak years of high school and only one strong year in a PG program.
As you can see, the PG year has its use in Ivy League athletics and in genuine cases where a student has a good record in high school but wants to add to that before going to college for the reasons I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. What the PG year does not do is salvage a disastrous four-year high school record so that colleges will want to look only at one year and omit the previous four. The process just does not work like that. I do think in many cases the PG year does benefit students and will help them get into a better college. The key part is understanding how the highly selective colleges look at a PG year so that you can make an educated choice (and a sound financial decision) about whether to add another year to your high school career before moving on to college.