I always believed that going to a poorly rated school was bad for a student's admissions chances as they likely weren't as well prepared and a high class rank was less impressive because the competition wasn't as stiff. Now that's being flipped?
It may never have been true, according to a 2005 paper
The Frog Pond Revisited: High School Academic Context, Class Rank, and Elite College Admission
Abstract
In this article, the authors test a “frog-pond” model of elite college admission proposed by Attewell, operationalizing high school academic context as the secondary school-average SAT score and number of Advanced Placement tests per high school senior. Data on more than 45,000 applications to three elite universities show that a high school's academic environment has a negative effect on college admission, controlling for individual students' scholastic ability. A given applicant's chances of being accepted are reduced if he or she comes from a high school with relatively more highly talented students, that is, if the applicant is a small frog in a big pond. Direct evidence on high school class rank produces similar findings. A school's reputation or prestige has a counterbalancing positive effect on college admission. Institutional gatekeepers are susceptible to context effects, but the influence of school variables is small relative to the characteristics of individual students. The authors tie the findings to prior work on meritocracy in college admission and to the role played by elite education in promoting opportunity or reproducing inequality, and they speculate on the applicability of frog-pond models in areas beyond elite college admission.
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One must of course weigh how much a child learns in high school and earlier and how happy and challenged he or she is with what affects selective college admissions chances. Even from a mercenary point of view, not graduating from college or being forced to shift to a less demanding major because of poor preparation is a bigger financial loss than attending a less prestigious college.
