if you dont know what schools are highly ranked feeders, how do you know you didn't go to one yourself?

fwiw there are no 'feeder schools' like in law or business b.c. your application rests largely on the strength of your portfolio, and that is a derivative of your skill+ability to work hard.  whereas HBS ranks a 4.0 from yale above a 4.0 from chico state, the GSD gives zero fucks as long as your sauce is good.  

that said...

sci-arc lets anyone in.  not exactly elite

for everyone else its a combo of portfolio/SOP and their alignment with the schools pedagogy

This is hard to pin down as it changes moment to moment and can change suddenly when for example a new hot shot award winning dean or program director shows up for a few years. 

I must have said this many times but always look for programs doing the type of work you want to do. the portfolio of work from the students is less likely to change or even allow for a wide degree of flexibility. If you want to do tall buildings seek out a program that has  lots of tall buildings in their portfolio, if you got to some school that doesn't even touch on the area of interest you have or the style is not who you are as a designer you will have a hard time.

Best of Luck

Peter N

^ Informative comment is informative.

When I was teaching I saw more the reverse of "feeder schools" - meaning schools that were informally blacklisted, usually because they'd been very sparsely represented (one or two students from that school attending our M.Arch at any given moment) and those particular students had fucked up badly.  A school that's more widely represented - say University of Virginia, or Princeton - wouldn't be as hurt in our admissions committee by a bad apple every now and then, but when the problem child came from, say, Pratt or University of Idaho, then they were the only one, with no good examples to balance them out, and the faculty would get all skittish about letting in another of their kind for years afterward.  Eventually this would turn around and work in favor of some applicant, when not a single grad of a particular school had been admitted in 8 years and they began to seem more unique, and by then everybody had forgotten the reason we stopped taking people from there before.
 

Thank you for your informative comments. I did apply to schools that align with my interests but wasn't sure if they favored students from a specific school/program. I hope my portfolio is good enough to get me in.

 Dangermouse I dont think I am from a feeder school because I know where people have gone to grad school in the past. And not a lot of people went/go to grad school from my program.