The Hunter Daedalus Fall 2019 recruiting class
Now that high school seniors have all committed to their respective colleges I though I'd share some information on Hunter's incoming Daedalus (honors CS) cohort.
I joke about the first cohort saying that nobody applied to the program. That's kind of true. I jointed Hunter a little over three years ago in late January. That was after high school seniors had already applied to college and at that time the program didn't exist. We found the first cohort by looking at students who had already applied to Hunter not expecting Daedalus to exist.
It was 12 kids and we've lost a few since then.
The second cohort consisted of 24 students. We started adding Macaulay students into the mix. Macaulay is a CUNY wide honors scholarship program. Each campus has a cohort and it was part of an effort to bring CUNY back to it's "glory days" before open enrollment. The Macaulay kids saw that Daedalus was the place to be for CS in NYC and Hunter and wanted in.
Third year, we were up to 44 students.
Now, in our fourth year we're up to 50 which is a little over capacity - at least until I can find and hire a partner in crime (and I am looking).
Some other stats:
| Year: | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Size: | 12 | 24 | 44 | 50 |
| Daedalus / Macaulay: | N/A | 75% / 25% | 75%/ 20% | 80% / 20% |
| Approximate Applicants | N/A | ~150 | ~200 | Over 320 |
| Gender M/F % | 80/20 | 75/25 | 50/50 | 75/25 |
| Taken APCS / Beginner | N/A | N/A | 50/50 | 50/50 |
| Number of high schools | 21 | |||
| # students from beyond NYC | 0 | 0 | 0 | 2 |
I also have stats on grades and test scores as well as the number of offers an the percent of acceptances.
Some thoughts on the stats:
I try to spend as much time as I can doing outreach. This is horribly inefficient but it's slowly getting the word out. I might spend most of a day trekking out into the boroughs to talk to a class or a few classes at some school knowing that there will probably be very few fits for my program. I think I'm bringing important information to all of the kids but it's a low yield activity. Right now our biggest feeder schools are Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science. Next is Midwood. This makes sense as they're all large schools and they all have established CS classes. They'll probably continue to be the biggest feeders but I'm delighted by the fact that I'm getting students from 17 other schools including a couple from outside of NYC.
I'm less happy with the gender distribution. Twenty five percent isn't bad compared to the national numbers but we should be doing better. It's a tough nut to crack. When I visit to schools I'm normally sent to the CS classes so I'm already getting a gender skewed audience. Not sure the best approach to work on this.
On the other hand, I'm getting to enough of a general audience to have roughly a 50/50 split of students with APCS-A or beyond or what I would call a beginner.
As I get to know this new group and find out why they applied to Hunter Daedalus and ultimately decided to attend I'm hoping to be able to better fine tune my recruiting approach and outreach.
As a bottom line I'm going to continue to work to make Hunter's Daedalus program the place to be for CS education in NY so that kids can get a top flight experience without paying a quarter of a million dollars.