<p>Well, I for one don’t think there’s anything wrong with one’s attempt to rank BS per se. US News does it, Newsweek does it, and even the US government tries to do it too… these are more about colleges than high schools, but you get the idea. Boarding schools are as expensive as colleges. People spend decades to pay off college loans. So the stakes are high, and people want to make a wise decision using all the available information and tools.</p>
<p>My concern over OP is somewhat practical. Why these four metrics (SAT, endowment, acceptance, and SSAT) over others? To me, they are just arbitrary selections. I can accept endowment and acceptance rate, but if college matriculation is important, why not look at % seniors going to, say, HYPMS, Ivy colleges, or top (however you define it) colleges, instead of SAT scores? After all, SAT is just one component of college application package. I know that the former data is more difficult to collect than the latter, but that can’t be the reason to settle if you really want to “rank” anything at all for better informed decision.</p>
<p>Furthermore, for the majority of schools listed here, SAT scores merely reflect SSAT scores. I’ve already done this analysis before (<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/prep-school-admissions/1550335-ssat-sat.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/prep-school-admissions/1550335-ssat-sat.html</a>). The conclusion was, smart students tend to have higher SSAT scores, go to top BS, score higher SAT, and go to top colleges. This would be consistent with 7Dad’s argument. Exceptions are like Linden Hall and Lawrenceville, who appear to do particularly better job of helping students achieve higher SAT scores, compared to their baseline SSAT scores. But then, while Lawrenceville is probably a legit elite school, Linden Hall, as I’ve come to learn, looks like an SAT mill populated with certain types of Asian kids. My point is if you use both SAT and SSAT scores to rank schools, you are giving unfair weight to certain schools–sort of double dipping.</p>
<p>My last concern, that is for now, is OP’s overall ranking is ranking of rankings. This kind of methods tend to exaggerate small, nuanced differences, or worse, flip ranks of those from more careful methods. Most ranking systems, including the above-mentioned magazines, do not use ranking of rankings when deriving “overall” rankings. They use weighted scoring methods based on their judgment of what deemed more important than others, and rank only once to produce overall rankings.</p>
<p>In the end, we all live in a busy world and are pressured to make a hasty decision with insufficient information. I guess no one is willing to visit 300+ schools, not even to visit all their websites, to select schools to apply. So there’s the utility of ranking schools. But I feel that a poor attempt to rank schools does not help with one’s desire to make better informed decisions.</p>