<p>Here’s the deal.
When you go to a top prep school like Exeter or Andover, you are not competing with the millions of public school seniors in the country. You are competing with the 300 or so seniors at your school, who are the top in the country. A place like Harvard, Yale, Princeton or even UPenn can’t and won’t take all 300 of the seniors from Exeter, even if these are the most qualified for the school. Each of the Ivies only has 14 or 15 spots for kids from Exeter, and then 14 or 15 from Andover and so on and so on. So every student from these prep schools could go to a top university, based on their intelligence, however the colleges can only take a few. Also Exeter has a huge endowment and a huge number of students on financial aid, which means that a lot of the students that go to Exeter end up not being able to go to one of the big colleges based on their current financial situations.</p>
<p>However, going to a prep school does help your chances.
For example, the acceptance rate at Harvard is 7% overall. When you look at only the kids who applied from Exeter, 14 were accepted, 27 waitlisted and 58 rejected. This turns the Exeter acceptance rate into 14%, doubling your chances.
The acceptance rate at Princeton is 10%… turning into a 32% Exeter acceptance rate.</p>