Do British selective schools underperform?

[justanotherdaduser]

Sorry about the clickbait title but that's exactly the question.

This was triggered after reading about Stuyvesant High School in New York in some other forum. It's a selective state high school in New York. Their list of notable alumni, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stuyvesant_High_School_people , is jaw dropping. Multiple nobel laureates, Field medal and Wolf prize winners, technology pioneers, and pretty much any other field of human endeavour I can think of.

While looking at notable alumni from the most selective British schools, there is nothing like that breadth. Eton for example, after removing the royals and politicians from their list, has a pretty short list of notable alumni given how long they have been around, with a heavy bias towards humanities - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College

Similarly others, in the state sector, say, Queen Elizabeth Boys en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth%27s_School,_Barnet

Same in the girls' schools too, short list of notable alumni mainly in media and humanities. Though with the girls' school I understand that the historical bias against women having careers will naturally limit the numbers.

So the question is -

Given that the top selective British schools are apparently getting around top
5% of the students by abilities in a cohort, and top 5% in either UK and US will have comparable potential when they start their academic career, why do British selective schools produce so few high achievers in a field, espcially outside politics, media and arts?

Possibilities that come to my mind -

The Wikipedia pages of British school are incomplete (probably unlikely, as the schools and their alumni are quite motivated to edit these to fill missing information?)

The British selective schools are not in fact getting top 5% of the students in their cohort. They are just getting children whose parents have prepared them really well for eleven plus. These children "underperform" eventually. They are still high achievers, will go to good universities, have good jobs, but unlikely to make path breaking contributions in their fields compared to their US peers (or elsewhere?)

The school outcomes reflect the nature of British economy and society. There isn't enough incentive in the field of sciences, the economy does not demand much either or at least not as much as the US economy. So the schools do not produce pioneers.

Something else?

The class system is deeply entrenched in the U.K., a working class member of my family had an engineering degree in the 1960's but as he became middle class via his occupation his dc have become lawyers and accountants as he aspired for them to have a better life than he had. Teaching, law, property, finance for dc degree educated in the 1980's and 1990's were aspirational vocations.

It is a US/UK difference - we don't show off int he UK and instead in the USA they are very showy. There are a lot of very rich people in the UK who avoid all publicity for example.

I certainly felt happy in the UK with paying 5 sets of school fees and never had any plan that that would make the children into some kind of celebrity or rich person.

I doubt I’ll read anything more ill-informed for the whole of the rest of this year …

I think there's a discussion to be had about how much value some of these schools add. If you select for the top, say, 5% in Y7 and at the end of A-levels you spit out students still in the top 5%, I'm not sure you can make much of a claim for your academic rigour. You can still make all sorts of claims about ethos and extra-curriculars and peer networks etc etc.

But the lists you've picked up OP, I don't think they are a reflection either way.

I think there are private schools that add value but imo many are performing an immense confidence trick on the public.

You are correct.

You'll get an unpopular reaction here, but the UK system is far less open than the American one. Our 'best schools' attract a tiny portion of our society, the part with wealth and influence, our bursary system is non-existent compared to the American University system. Schools like Stuy are few and far between in the UK, we are changing that.

The Kings Maths school in London is an example of the specialized schools, open for the brightest students regardless of wealth, which is the principle of Stuy.

For centuries, our schools have been geared for the great and the good, and anyone else was simply not educated until relatively recently, even in the early 1900's, in this country if you were poor, you couldn't get a first-class education. The grammar school in the early 1900’s still aped the public schools (our private schools) teaching lots of Greek and Latin and Classics.
STEM has always been a poor cousin in the English school system.

It wasn't until the Education Act 1944, that lots of poor kids over the age 14 could receive free high quality education, but we've never been a country that makes it easy for poor kids to go onto university, compared to America.
Thus, a school like Stuy can act as a wide funnel and receive in brilliant pupils with entrance exams, educated them for free and then fix them into the Ivy League with full scholarship places. We still have nothing like that in the UK.
A poor kid going to Oxford or Cambridge or Imperial has nothing like the scholarship her equivalent gets in Harvard or MIT.

FFS....the reason a free school in New York wipes the floor with our best private schools is because we don't show off....Jesus Christ...

Thanks, you are right, St Paul's look better - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Old_Paulines

Huge skew towards journalists, authors, actors, politicians, judges etc but there few more in the sciences from twentieth century who are still alive.

Maybe also they update this page more often than Eton

Agree, Kings Maths is a brlliant example. We need more of those!
In another 30 years we will probably start hearing about their alumni

I too thought the reaction - "We don't have famous scientists in the alumni who are still alive because we don't like showing off like the Americans" a bit too convenient.

Eton has only been academically selective since the mid/late 90s.

"We don't have famous scientists in the alumni who are still alive because we don't like showing off like the Americans" a bit too convenient.

I would debate whether the list of 'famous scientists' in the US page are actually famous, or merely known in their field.

As I said, they list a hedge fund manager and a political consultant so I think the bar to be listed on their page is far lower than the UK page.

sorry, I meant known in their fields. Not famous as in Newton or Feynman.

Not paying attention to the hedge fund managers there and I didn't even mention those in any of my posts here.

But a public school which has been around for just 100 years, having four nobel laureates, Field medal winner, multiple Wolf and Abel prize recipients, author of BitTorrent, architect of VAX (old operating system), and many more is a pretty big deal in my mind.

I looked at few other well known ones; chose Eton because it had a better list than most. Much smaller (and less diverse) list elsewhere. Another poster pointed out that St Paul's was a better comparison and she was right.

From the school Wikipedia page "Every March, the 800 to 850 applicants with the highest SHSAT scores out of the around 30,000 students who apply to Stuyvesant are accepted."

So it is an exceptionally selective school, only accepting under 3% of the people who even apply there.

In that context, churning out people who do well isn't that remarkable.

Same. High IQ also doesn’t equate to good at academia either.

I think you need to look at the history of education over the past century in England to get some sense of where our most capable pupils were educated and whether those schools still exist to boast about their students.

My dad went to school with a Nobel laureate. It was a grammar school that, like many, has closed and the site is now an unrelated comp. There's no school website to boast about alumni as the school is gone.

The UK has more Nobel prizes per capita than the US, so our schools overall, must be doing ok by the very few pupils who go on to this kind of greatness.

I think you can only make a valid comparison IF you know that the schools have identical criteria for, and diligence in, creating and maintaining Wikipedia.

For a number of reasons, including different cultural approaches and values, a US highly selective urban day school and an ancient UK boarding school, will not be the same in their approach to listing.

Comparison of exhaustive lists of alumni, from day schools with similar selectivity and in similarly urban contexts, and using identical criteria for inclusion of each person in the ‘top alumni list’, would be a less partial and biased comparison.

I found this list quite fascinating: zims-en.kiwix.campusafrica.gos.orange.com/wikipedia_en_all_nopic/A/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_secondary_school_affiliation

Here's a highly selective urban school (much smaller than the American one) which was also founded in 1904.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Paul%27s_Girls%27_School#Old_Paulinas

Rather than relying on the school website or wiki it might be informative to look at a list of people that you think are high flyers--Nobel laureates for example, and see where they went to school and see how that's distributed. If you did a few lists of different kinds of profession I think you'll see a more interesting range of schools and get a better idea comparatively than from just one school in the US as representative of their selective education. As someone's already said, a lot of uk schools don't make a great deal of their alumni as they don't do the kind of fundraising you get in the states, but that doesn't mean that they're not producing high achievers.

Because they're very art and humanities focused?

I do wonder how much of the school success is a result of a selective intake. With parental expectations fostering potential outcomes.

Wouldn't reflect well on the school if they didn't do well! However you define 'do well'.

I looked at my old school. There are a number of my rough contemparies listed as Alumini and again as notable old girls (longer list). They are mainly arts/humanities based (apart from the organiser of a double murder). That reflects how the school was in the early 80s - science was very much the poor relation at that time.

When it comes to 'advertising' well known names. It is much easier to become known as an actor, journalist, lawyer or politician than as a scientist. So when compiling a list of notable names I do think lists will be biased in that direction.

Thanks, someone else mentioned St Paul's and you are both right, that the list is much bigger and more modern.

Yet, the list also highlights the original point in the post - incredible number of journalists, authors, book critiques, some politicians. Minuscule percentage in the sciences or technology.

I have clicked through randomly maybe about 30 wiki entries there, so may have by chance missed all the notable alumni in the fields of science and technology.

But if my (somewhat) random clicks did pick up a representative sample, it illustrates the dominance of humanities in British selective schools in the second half of twentieth century.

Where did the scientists, technologists and engineers go to school? Probably they are just evenly distributed across many schools?

As other posters said, and I agree, my sampling is not good enough. Just picking some school's Wikipedia entry will not work.