Prestigious Boarding School – About
Prestigious boarding Schools are highly selective schools with many more applicants than openings for students. The acceptance rates are 25% or less. Finding the best fit is often the most important part of choosing a school.
Choate Rosemary Hall is a large coed school located in Wallingford, Connecticut just north of New Haven. The school offers superb academics, an I.M. Pei-designed arts center, 32 sports and alumni including such notables as Edward Albee, President John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson.
Deerfield Academy is a small coed school located in central Massachusetts. It is a very selective school offering small classes, 19 AP courses and a strong community environment. Deerfield is also generous with its financial aid. 22 sports and 71 clubs/extracurricular activities will keep you as busy as you want to be.
Georgetown Prep is a Roman Catholic boys school located in just over the DC line in suburban Bethesda, Maryland. Strong academics featuring 24 AP courses together with just about every extracurricular activity you could want make for an appealing program. Georgetown has a high ratio of day students to boarders probably because it is located in the nation’s capitol.
Groton had its beginnings as an Episcopal school for boys. It has always been a small school with a big impact. Most recently Curtis Sittenfeld set her novel Prep at Groton. It admitted its first African American student in 1951 long before integration became fashionable.
If your child has what it takes to get into this very selective boarding school, he or she will be presented with a veritable feast of academic, athletic and extracurricular offerings. The location of the school a mere 2 hours north of New York City makes it easily accessible from all parts of the globe.
The Lawrenceville School is a remarkable institution in so many ways. It was late admitting girls, doing so only in 1987. Now the school has a female Head Master. If you have the right stuff to get into this grand old school, do it. The location midway between Philadelphia and Newark affords several travel options as well. Princeton University is only a few miles up the road too.
Relatively young as New England schools go, Middlesex nonetheless has filled the past almost 110 years with some remarkable achievements. Frederick Winsor conceived of the school as being different from the usual religious schools of its day. The school was non-denominational and still is.
Milton was founded in 1798 as a coeducational day school. That worked fine for 100 years, at which point boys and girls were separated according to the fashions of the times. Things have come circle now as Milton is once again a coeducational institution. Diversity is a vital part of Milton in the 21st century. And a vital part of Milton’s success as a diverse institution is its ability to fulfill the challenge of its motto “Dare to be true”.
Peddie is a very selective school. You will need what the school is looking for in order to be accepted. Once there you will enjoy a state of the art campus, exciting academic courses, a rich arts program together with some of the best sports programs anywhere.
The greatness of Andover in the 21st century springs from the simplicity of its ancient Latin motto Non Sibi which means “Not for self”. Teaching young people to be aware of their obligation to help those near and far speaks volumes to Andover’s awareness of globalism and community service. Andover is one of America’s best prep schools. Admissions standards are incredibly high. But if you have everything they are looking for, apply, visit and impress them.
Phillips Exeter Academy is all about superlatives. The education which your child will get is the best. The philosophy of the school which seeks to link goodness with learning, though it is over two hundred years old, speaks to twenty-first century young people’s hearts and minds with a freshness and relevancy which is simply remarkable. That philosophy permeates the teaching and the famed Harkness table with its interactive teaching style. The faculty are the best. Your child will be exposed to some amazing, creative, enthusiastic and highly qualified teachers.
St. Paul’s was established as a school in a country setting by design. It has benefited from that decision over the years as 2000 acres of land has allowed the school to expand at the same time as it has stayed in harmony with its bucolic surroundings. St. Paul’s began playing ice hockey back in the 1870’s, one of the first schools to do
America’s Best PrepSchools (Based on the news in FORBES)
For some families, the college application process starts early–well before campus visits, entrance exams, or even before a student learns to read. It starts as early as kindergarten, with entrance into the most elite and prestigious college-preparatory schools.
These private educational institutions, colloquially known as “prep schools” in the United States, can be boarding or day schools, affiliated with a particular faith or completely secular. At the high end of the spectrum, they’re known for ultra-competitive admissions, high tuition and top-notch facilities. Their aim is to provide students with education that funnels them into the very best universities.
These institutions all offer high-caliber instruction and uniquely valuable experiences to their students. But in a world where education is so competitive and expensive, and where the name of your high school can open doors for life, it’s worth measuring the best of the best.
The top prep school in the U.S. is the Trinity School, located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City. Founded in 1709, this co-ed day school has an average enrollment of 960 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. There’s one teacher for every six students, more than 80% of the faculty hold an advanced degree and the school’s $40 million endowment helps assure the facilities are first-rate. Tuition for one year of schooling in the Upper School (grades 9-12) is $34,535, though the school offers financial aid.
In order to rank the 20 best prep schools, we started by creating a candidate list of 55 top private educational institutions. We then collected a series of statistics about each school and used them to create the ranking. Half of the ranking was weighed equally between student/faculty ratio, percentage of faculty that possess advanced degrees and size of the school’s endowment. The other half was based on percentage of graduates, over the last five years, that matriculated into 10 top colleges: Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. This list, while arbitrary, reflects the fact that many parents send their kids to prep school specifically so they can get into the most prestigious universities.
So do prep schools really provide a pipeline to elite higher education? It turns out they do. In the past five years Trinity School sent 41% of its graduates to the Ivies, MIT or Stanford. On average our 20 top schools sent nearly one-third of their graduates to those 10 schools. (In contrast, less than 0.01% of all U.S. high school graduates ended up in those schools in 2008, according to the U.S. Department of Education.) Plenty of prep schools that did not make our list–such as Sidwell Friends, a co-educational Quaker day school in Washington, D.C., which President Obama’s daughters attend–also have high matriculation rates, and their exclusion in no way means they are not excellent schools.
“Prep schools are organized to ensure elite college placement–that’s the whole idea,” says Mitchell L. Stevens, associate professor of education at Stanford University and author of Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Stevens worked for a year and a half at the admissions office at an elite liberal arts college, traveling to high schools mainly in the Western U.S. and the East Coast to recruit applicants. “A [big] name high school provides assurance to college admissions. It’s about the reliability of applicants.”
Tiny classes, individualized attention–and in the case of boarding schools, 24 hours access to faculty–certainly help students earn their way into the best colleges. But Stevens stresses it’s not just academics that count. “There’s a much lower likelihood that a student from a boarding school is going to freak out” when they get to an extremely competitive university, he says.
Other benefits of going to a prep school include top-notch facilities and extracurricular activities. St. Paul’s, a boarding school in Concord, N.H., which places No. 8 on our list, has nine athletic fields, two ice rinks, 15 tennis courts and an eight-lane competition swimming pool. The Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, N.J., (No. 14) has a nine-hole regulation golf course. Horace Mann in New York City (No. 2) has a nature laboratory comprising 100 acres in Washington, Conn. And the Phillips Academy Andover (No. 3) houses one of the world’s most important collections of American art in its Addison Gallery.
“Colleges are not only looking for the best, they are looking for a diverse student body,” says Rubén A. Gaztambide-Fernández, assistant professor of education at the University of Toronto and author of The Best of the Best: Becoming Elite at an American Boarding School. “There are lots of different ways to be the best … and prep schools give ample space to be good at something.” Of course those resources don’t come cheap; the most elite prep schools have very high tuitions (typically over $30,000) and endowments that rival many colleges (No. 6 Phillips Exeter Academy‘s is over $840 million).
But in the end, the real value of a prep school education is more than just getting into Harvard. Prep school kids have, as assistant professor at Columbia University Shamus Raham Khan says, “the ability to treat hierarchies as ladders, not ceilings.” Khan, who not only attended St. Paul’s School but later taught there, says small classes and individualized attention gives prep school kids a unique self-confidence and ease in their exchanges with authority figures. That translates to higher wages post-college, compared with their peers. “Prep schools teach students something, or better, provides them with resources, that others do not learn or have,” he says.