Results from the 2022 NYC School Admission Lottery Surveys

Note to applicants for the 2023 admission cycle and beyond: these results are for the Fall 2022 HS entrance admission cycle. Odds of admissions vary year to year, especially with different admission rules such as the changes to screened school admissions for 2023. The results on this page can give you an idea of historical patterns but are in no way a guarantee that the odds will be the same in the future. Results for later admission cycles can be found here: 2023, 2024.

This post reports the results of the crowdsourcing surveys for the 2022 NYC HS and MS School Admission Lottery, as well as some information on the match rate and waitlist process for 2022. To learn more about the lottery and see the results for the 2021 admission cycle you can read the first two posts in the series:
Part 1. Decoding the NYC School Admission Lottery Numbers
Part 2. Gaining Insights from the NYC School Admission Lottery Numbers

I will first report on data on the 2022 match rate and the waitlist process. If you are only interested in the survey results, you can access them here.

2022 HS Admission Cycle Statistics and Processes

(new information as of July 25, 2022)

Match Rate

The DOE Office of Enrollment provided detailed match rate statistics to the Citywide Council on High Schools (CCHS) and District Community Education Councils (CEC). The match rates, shown in the table below, are similar to last year’s: approximately 5,000 students were not matched to any of their choices citywide. Some districts had worse results: like last year, students in D2 received the worst outcome, with 18% being unmatched; many districts also had a high rate of unmatched students in the main HS application round (16% in D3, 14% in D26, 12% in D21, D22, D25, 9% in D15, D20, D24, D25, D30), and 7% of applicants were unmatched citywide. Match rates by race and income status is available here.

While the results are similar to that of last year, it is worth noting that there were about 3,000 fewer applicants this year, a decrease of 4% compared to last year. With fewer students applying, it would be expected that fewer would not get one of their 12 choices, however, over 3,000 fewer students than last year were matched and the number of unmatched students increased slightly (from 4,951 to 5,246).

Changes in Waitlist Process

In July 2022 the DOE confirmed what many parents have suspected based on their waitlist numbers. The process that had been repeated during DOE Zoom admission events, and noted on the DOE website as late as early July 2022, stated that:

For waitlists, each applicant receives a new random number for each waitlist they are on.

In early July 2022, the DOE updated the waitlist information on their website and confirmed that for screened schools without assessment, the original lottery number would be used for waitlists despite what had originally been announced:

Waitlist Positions for SCREENED Programs, NO ASSESSMENTS — High School Only
Students who are automatically on the waitlists for these programs remain positioned in the same order as during the admissions process, by admissions group 1–4 (determined by students’ grades) and within that group, by their application random number.
Students who add themselves to the waitlists of these programs will be positioned in their admissions group (1–4).

The reasons for this change in policy were not given. It is possible it is due to some implementation oversight: before last year screened schools were ranking students on various academic metrics, and waitlists kept the same order. Once the screening process moved to a qualified lottery, the behavior of screened school waitlists should have been changed but was not.

This change in published policy has two major drawbacks.

• Unfairness: Students with bad original random numbers received consistently bad waitlist numbers, while students with good original numbers were at the top of many waitlists. This led to unfair situations where students with good placements in the main round were given multiple waitlist offers to popular schools, while students with no match in the main round had no hope to get an offer. This was an additional blow for students with bad application lottery numbers who had hoped to have better luck in the waitlist process. It also meant many families had wasted some of their choices on false hope.
• Negative effect on DIA initiatives: The DOE has confirmed that, with the notable exception of the Bard schools, high schools do not keep separate waitlists for DIA-eligible and non-eligible students. This would not be a big problem if the lottery number had been redrawn as the students at the top of the waitlist would be a random mix of DIA and non-DIA students. However, because the numbers are not redrawn, there is now a perverse effect where students at the top of the list are all non-DIA-eligible. For instance, consider 02M411 : Baruch College Campus High School: it has a DIA initiative that sets aside 66% of seats for FRL-eligible students. Baruch is a school in high demand; it only admitted Group 1 students, and non-DIA-eligible students needed a lottery number better than ‘36’ (cutoff was between ’16' and ‘36’); because of the set-aside, DIA-eligible students had better odds: a student with lottery number ‘3b’ was given an offer (FRL cutoff was between ‘3b’ and ‘6f’, see screened schools survey results below). Because the waitlist sorts students on the same lottery number as the application and does not differentiate between DIA-eligible and non-eligible students, the students at the top of the Baruch waitlist will be non-DIA students with lottery numbers between the non-DIA cutoff (between ‘16’ and ‘36’), and the DIA cutoff (between ‘3b’ and ‘6f’). This means that schools that admit students from their waitlists are diluting the effect of their DIA initiatives.

Survey Results: Methodology

The data was collected through Google surveys. The data is self-reported by parents, and errors in data entry are possible; the following results should be interpreted with this in mind.

• As of July 25, 2022, there were 253 answers to the HS survey and 102 answers to the MS survey. I manually cleaned the data to remove obvious errors in data entry.
• I extracted the highest (worst) lottery number of all students who received an offer to a school. To identify the lowest (best) lottery number declined, I only looked at schools that were ranked higher in the student’s choice list than the one they matched to, as the algorithm does not consider students for schools lower on their list than the one to which they match.
• Survey answers are not representative of the whole applicant population: respondents are clustered in some geographical areas, skew higher income and higher achieving than the DOE student population. For instance, all answers to the HS survey reported their student being placed in Group 1 for screened school admissions (63% of students citywide were placed in Group 1, from data received by CCHS from DOE). This does not impact the correctness of the cutoff information derived from the surveys, but does impact the completeness of the information.
• Survey participants were asked whether they qualify for FRL (free and reduced lunch, the DOE measure of low-income status) diversity in admissions (DIA) set-asides and whether their student had a student with disability (SWD) designation. Note that SWD are handled through a separate process, and different designations will have access to different programs. The data analysis does not differentiate among SWD statuses.

High School Admissions Results

I will present the results by separating school programs into five different categories based on their admission methods. School admission methods were identified through the publicly available HS Directory, which contains 2021 data. It is possible that some schools/programs that have changed their admission methods are not correctly identified. For ranked screened (essay-based) schools, I used the list available on the NYC DOE website.

Screened High Schools

In 2022, the DOE centralized all screened school admissions in a single process. Students were placed into 4 groups, admissions to screened schools were done in group order, with ties broken by lottery number. With 63% of students being placed in Group 1, screened school admissions were de facto decided by lottery among all Group 1 applicants to a school. As mentioned above, all the answers to the survey were for students in Group 1. The results reported below are therefore only for Group 1 students.
*** October 2022 update: for the 2023 admission cycle, admissions to screened schools will once again be done in group order, but the groups, called “tiers,” will be much smaller. The DOE has stated that Tier 1 is expected to represent about 20% of students. This means that the odds of admission to screened schools for students in “Tier 1” will be higher than last year. It is also likely that several screened schools will accept “Tier 2” students, especially if they accepted students in the second half of lottery numbers last year, but there is no guarantee.***

The following table shows, for each screened school, the highest lottery number that gained admission, the lowest lottery number that was denied admission, and the corresponding odds. For instance, a Gen-Ed, non-DIA applicant with a lottery number starting with ‘0d’ was admitted to 02M416: Eleanor Roosevelt HS, but an applicant with a lottery number starting with ‘14’ did not get an offer, making the odds of having a lottery number good enough for admission to 02M416: Eleanor Roosevelt HS between 5.1% and 8.2% for a Gen-Ed, non-DIA applicants. The school sets aside 50% of seats for low-income students (FRL), making the odds of admission for a FRL Gen-ed student possibly higher (up to 43%, but likely much lower as the dataset does not have enough entries to narrow down the cutoff).

There is one discrepancy in the data: several students were admitted to 02M605 : Humanities Preparatory Academy with lottery numbers as low as ‘f6’, however, one entry reported not getting an offer with a ‘85’ number. This is possibly due to a data entry error, or incorrect FRL or SWD status included in the survey.

Ranked Screened (Essay-based) High Schools

Several schools used both assessments and grades. Students were ranked on a composite score based on their school-specific assessments (typically essays), and grades. The grade component of the score is very coarse: all students in Group 1 were given a score of 100% for grades. The score differentiation is therefore solely based on the assessments. As usual, ties are broken by lottery numbers. Results for these Ranked Screened schools are shown in the table below.

Many students with bad lottery numbers saw these schools as their best hope to get a desirable match, as they could compensate for bad luck in the lottery draw with a strong essay. The results shown below are disheartening: with the notable exception of both Bard HS, the lottery number was still a major factor in admission for these schools.

• To gain admission to 03M479 : Beacon High School, students needed a perfect 400 assessment score AND a lottery number that started by ‘6’ or lower (a 400 score with a ‘6f’ lottery number was not given an offer). For DIA students, the lottery number cutoff is higher, and it is possible that lower scores gained acceptance, but there is not enough data to tell. Similar results are shown for 01M376 : NYC iSchool.
• For 03M541 : Manhattan / Hunter Science High School, students needed a score of 400 and a good lottery number (starting with ‘3’ or lower). The actual cutoff is dependent upon the student priority group. Note that all students who received an essay grade for that school in the survey were given a score of 400. Anecdotal evidence from parent web forums suggests that the school gave the maximum score to all students who submitted the essay (update: this has been confirmed by the DOE), in effect reverting to a lottery process among all Group 1 students.
• Both Bard High Schools: 01M696 : Bard High School Early College and 24Q299 : Bard High School Early College Queens provided fine-grained grading for their assessments, which means that students with bad lottery numbers had a chance at getting an offer if their assessment scores were high enough. For instance, students with a score greater than 376 for 01M696 : Bard High School Early College were admitted regardless of their lottery numbers, students with scores of 376 needed a lottery number starting with a number lower than 7 or 8.

These results highlight how wasteful in terms of time and resources the process is. Because of the coarseness of the grading, students with no chance of gaining admission to 03M479 : Beacon High School and 03M541 : Manhattan / Hunter Science High School because of their bad lottery numbers spent time writing essays, and used a precious choice on their list for the school. Meanwhile, teachers spent time grading these essays (at least at 03M479 : Beacon High School), despite the grades not having any impact on these students’ admission chances.

To further illustrate the wastefulness of the process, consider 01M539 : New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math High School (NEST+m). (Note: updated July 2022 with new information) A look at the school data on MySchools shows that it offers 88 Gen. Ed. and 24 SWD seats, with a 66% DIA set-aside, which means approximately only 30 Gen. Ed. seats are open to non-DIA students (and 8 SWD seats). NEST+m is a K-12 school with priority given to continuing students. Last year, the school made 204 offers, a little less than two offers per seat. According to MySchools, historically 53% of offers are given to continuing students. However, the demographic data of continuing students shows that only 33/136 current 8th graders are economically disadvantaged, and 27/136 are SWD. A coarse approximation suggests that, if the school made the same number of offers as last year, of the 108 (53% of offers) continuing students that are offered priority seats, about 81 will not qualify for DIA; of those 65 will be continuing Gen. Ed. students. The algorithm is then likely to only allocate remaining offers to non-continuing students who qualify for DIA set-asides to get as close to the 66% goal as possible since it has already made over twice as many Gen.Ed. non-DIA offers as the school has seats. What follows logically is that non-DIA non-continuing students have little to no chance of gaining admission to NEST+m. However, students and family are not made aware of this, so hundreds of ineligible students applied, wrote essays, and teachers spent hours grading these essays despite the students having little or no chance of receiving an offer. In fact, I heard from one student whose admission position at NEST+m was in the single digit (ranked in the top-10 based on essay/lottery) and who didn’t get an offer. Based on their waitlist info, I can say with good confidence that no more than 6 Gen. Ed. non-DIA students were given an offer to NEST+m, likely fewer as some of these 6 students may qualify for the DIA set-aside or have been matched to another school higher on their choice list.

Audition High Schools

The audition school process is similar to that of the ranked screened schools above, except that the score is out of 100. Results show that unlike the ranked screened schools, audition schools did take advantage of the whole grading scale, and students with bad lottery numbers had a good chance of getting an offer to an audition school if they received a good audition score.

Open Admission High Schools

These schools are purely lottery-based, all students regardless of grades are placed in the same lottery pool. Some schools have DIA set-asides or SWD seats; when available data for these is separated (Priority column).

Ed. Opt. High Schools

These schools place students into three pools: high-performing, medium-performing, and low-performing. Students were not given their Ed. Opt. classification before applications were due, but it can be inferred from their grades. The survey did not ask for that information, but since all students were in Group 1, they are either in the High or Medium group. Note that the cutoffs reported in the table below do not distinguish between the two groups.

List of High Schools where unmatched students were assigned

Finally, this is a list of schools to which unmatched students have reported being assigned.

Middle School Admission Results

The table below has the results of the MS survey. MS admissions are purely lottery-based (except for a few audition schools) so the results only show the worst lottery number accepted, the best rejected, and the corresponding odds.