<p>Acerockolla…so you broke the mold…did you love you school??? Was it all good? Are you sick of hear about “their” alma mater???</p>
<p>yea, the schools great. and, actually, it was my sister who pushed me away from exeter. from the stories i’ve heard, the schools just not my type- way too competitive, busy, cold, and stressful from the sounds of it.</p>
<p>I’m still laughing about Miss Porters. The 4 top preps are hard to dispute today. Deerfield is the hardest to get into because it’s so small and so popular for that ideal new england experience. St. Paul’s has the highest per pupil endowment, a history of educating the very rich and now the very smart and very rich. Exeter is indeed the home of the brilliant geek, and my fave, Andover, probably is the most well rounded.</p>
<p>Numbers for schools like Milton are misleading. Any school in a major city that has lots of day students appears harder to get into.</p>
<p>Much more so than college rankings, prep school rankings are way more subjective. I think it’s virtually impossible to accurately rank them. I would say the most prestigious New England schools would have to include:
- Exeter and Andover
- the St. Grottlesex schools - Groton (in my experience academically equal to exeter and andover, the avg sat score of the senior class last year was like high 1400’s), St. Pauls, St. George’s, St. Mark’s and Middlesex
-the larger schools like Deerfield, Taft, Choate</p>
<p>In my opinion these are the best New England boarding schools (now that said you can argue this forever; a school like Milton may be academically excellent, but it has a lot more day students than these schools and so it’s fundamentally slightly different)</p>
<p>What kind of people go to these schools? Is it mainly upper class rich white kids? Or is it filled with kids who are gifted in academics?</p>
<p>It definitely depends on the school, but I know at my school the kids are all smart, yet there is certainly a spectrum within this. Most of the kids are also rich though (although not necessarily snobby). Once again though it depends on the school completely - some schools are very socially elite, others are less so</p>
<p>Larger schools like Deerfield??? It’s a really small school!!! If you’re looking at how hard they are to get into, ivy league placement and clout, there are 4 top schools: Andover, Exeter, St. Paul’s and Deerfield. Andover and Exeter especially are about smart kids and have a history of generous financial aid to have the best students they can get. St. Paul’s and Deerfield are more filled with rich kids and have amazing ivy placements (SPS especially) because parents are all ivy legacies.</p>
<p>Here’s a question for your Suze is Deerfield larger than Groton? I mean relatively compared to the ISL schools (sps, sg, groton, st marks, milton…) Deerfield is larger. I disagree with putting Deerfield over Groton in your top 4 schools…</p>
<p>Exeter is all about top academics. Thirty plus percent of every class in on financial aid. A part of Exeter’s Mission Statement is to seek/admit students from every corner of the world…and they do. Not all students are wealthy or socially connected…it is about academics not social/wealth prestige. There are students who are advantaged but by no means is that a necessary component for having a great social experience at Exeter.</p>
<p>Deerfield has about 603 students, Groton about 335 students. </p>
<p>While the top schools are academically on a par with each other, there are other differences and the school that fits best for any student is an individual choice. Both St. Paul’s and Groton have chapel programs as part of the school, while most of the other top schools are secular. I believe most of the schools have about 30% of the students on financial aid, and the students may not know who is, or is not, on financial aid. (At my daughter’s prep school it is simply not discussed among the students.)</p>
<p>I am in my 4th year of doing Prep school admissions and the applicants to where I work routinely apply to the other Prep schools. I can tell you which Prep Schools are the hardest to get in; this isn’t based on acceptance rates of applicants, but rather, the schools where I routinely see great applicants being denied or wait listed.</p>
<p>The following schools are extremely selective:</p>
<p>Andover, Exeter, Deerfield, Groton, St. Paul’s. Choate, Hotchkiss, Lawrenceville, Milton and St. Andrews. </p>
<p>St. Andrews often gets snubbed because it’s in Delaware, but it’s much harder to get into SAS than Taft or Kent. In fact, I’d say there is no real comparison here, but being hard to get into should not be the primary criteria of an excellent school for an informed and savvy parent. </p>
<p>St. Paul’s does not have the highest IVY placement; this honor would go to Groton, which has close to 100% of it’s class applying Early decision. Milton Academy sends more to Harvard than everyone, but not every kid will thrive in that competitive environment. Personally, I believe it’s a very superficial way to evaluate a school if you limit it to how many kids go to the eight schools in the IVY league football conference; there are outstanding LAC’s that are not a part of the IVY league that often times give you a better undergraduate education.</p>
<p>Support at Prep Schools</p>
<p>Someone said that Prep schools are not the place to go if you want support: that’s malarkey. Some Prep Schools like Westtown School, Westtover, Ethel Walker and dozens of others give you outstanding academics coupled with great support. St. Andrews has outstanding support for such a rigorous academic school with such a high caliber student body.</p>
<p>Prep Schools come in all flavors from emotional growth/therapeutic schools to second chance schools to all ranges of the selectivity spectrum amongst the college prepatory Preps.</p>
<p>Prep Schools have teachers living on campus, so often the support is as good as it gets for a HS, but it depends on the culture of the school.</p>
<p>Personally, I believe that people need to focus on schools that develop the whole child and have happy well adjusted kids. Most of the Prep schools will give you a rigourous education if you want that, but sometimes the most rigorous schools are the ones with the most stress, drugs, alcohol, promiscuity and eating disorders; 14-18 year olds can only handle so much stress before they come up with unhealthy ways of coping with the stress.</p>
<p>My advice is look at the curriculum, college list, etc, but spend as much time on campus interacting with students to see if they are happy, healthy and well adjusted. You will be surprised at how the Quaker schools like Westtown and George will excel by this standard.</p>
<p>Boarding School review is a good place to start, but there is never a substitute for a campus visit and preferrably an overnight before you commit to a school. The Prep schools can be, life changing transformative environments that are the best four years of a kids life.</p>
<p>One of our teachers is an Exeter alum and he said that the worst thing about Exeter is how hard it is to go from there to an IVY league school. The caliber of the student body is so strong and so many apply to IVY’s that they have to limit how many apps each kid gets to an IVY; this is something that many of the rigorous NYC day schools do as well.</p>
<p>He told me that people think it’s easy to go from Exeter to Harvard, but more than 10% of the student body at Exeter has one parent who is a Harvard alum and almost all of the Harvard matriculants had alumni, URM, unique geographical diversity or alumni hooks.</p>
<p>I’ve seen and observed this same scenario over and over. It’s actually easier to go to a Prep School where you can place in the top 10 or 20% of your class and the school doesn’t have 125 kids applying to Brown as one of the elite Preps have a few years ago.</p>
<p>People often make the mistake of looking at the college placment, but what they need to do is to look at how strong the student body is at these schools and investigate how many kids went to elite colleges and universities w/o alumni, geographical, URM, or the biggest hook of all: the recruited athlete. IVY’s love to get their hockey, football, crew and lacrosse programs from these Preps because they are sufficiently rigorous enough that if a kid is getting B’s and B+'s, they can sometimes get around the AI index.</p>
<p>Yes, I think admissionsrep is correct, that it may be harder to get into an Ivy from one of the elite prep schools, than from many other schools. The Ives will only take the very top of the class from any school, and many of the prep school students are also Ivy legacies. The other prep school kids, not in the top 10%, would probably have been the very top of their class “back home.” I know this is true of my daughter. We realized that her chances of getting into her father’s Ivy would probably be greater graduating top of her class from our local rural high school, but chose to send her to prep school for the education she would receive there.
The high school years are important in themselves, not just as a springboard for college. As a rising senior at one of the “Elite Prep Schools” our daughter is now better educated than many college graduates. She has also learned to live and study more independently through boarding school, than she would have living at home. The independence of college life will be a small step, and she will be well prepared, wherever she goes to college.</p>
<p>There is no doubt that what admissionsrep says is true, almost anyone at a top prep would have been at the top of a public school class and an ivy shoo in. But she also tells another truth, a huge percent are ivy legacies. So by the time you place the top students and the legacies, a third of the class is at an ivy. The other two thirds have to settle for schools as low as Wellseley and Middlebury,</p>
<p>Here are some more excellent prep schools:
Blair Academy (NJ)
Germantown Academy ¶
Peddie
McDonogh (MD)
The Haverford School
Va. Episcopal
Norfolk Academy (VA)
St. Christopher’s School (VA)
Woodberry Forest (VA)
Georgetown Prep (DC)
Sidwell Friends
St. Albans (DC)
Westminster Schools (GA)
Bishop Lynch (TX)</p>
<p>Seeker, I have a lot of respect for you; it’s nice to see someone who values the development of their child as a person more than just, what IVY they may eek into. I’m convinced that the person at IVY X who is successful would also have been successful had they gone to Haverford, Davidson, Michigan, Michigan State or whereever; it’s the personal qualities of the individual that lead to opportunities in life.</p>
<p>I love this board, but this board is way to obsessed with status and way to fixated on what an IVY league degree does for someone.</p>
<p>You know I once talked with a successful entrepreneur who, along with his wife were Wharton grads. I asked him what is the best school in the nation for helping someone start a business and he said, Northeastern. Many would say Babson or even Bentley, but these schools are not not even known to the masses.</p>
<p>I thought I’d share another anecdote about how schools cap the number of kids they will take from each school: I had a conversation with one of the admissions folks at U Penn about six weeks ago and we were talking about a local school that has 30-40 kids apply to Penn every year. He said, it gets tiresome seeing so many apps from the same schools; he went on to say, who are we going to take, the 25th kid from school X or a kid from Illinois with 100 pts less on the SAT? He went on to say, it’s a no brainer, we will take the rural kid from Illinois with 100 less points on the SAT. Diversity is defined broadly and it’s just not a diverse learning environment to have so many kids from the same school.</p>
<p>Someone listed a bunch of prep schools such as Germantown Academy, Sidwell Friends, etc. I believe this post was focussing on boarding schools; schools like Sidwell and Germantown Academy, Germantown Friends, etc are private day schools.</p>
<p>In addition to the 10 very selective boarding schools I mentioned a few posts ago, others that are not as selective, but have compelling strengths that often lead to families selecting these schools over the other ten include:</p>
<p>Cate and Thatcher in California</p>
<p>Miss Porters and Madeira amongst the girls schools; Emma Williard would like to make this list, as would Westover, but in terms of selectivity and prestige, Porter’s and Madeira are more elite, but Westtover has one of the best communities in all of New England, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Concord Academy, Taft, St. George’s, Middlesex, Kent, Loomis an St. Mark’s should be mentioned as schools worthy of investigation if someone wants a selective New England school. Now that Northfield Mt. Herman is downsizing, it is going to be an outstanding school and should be considered if someone wants New England.</p>
<p>In the mid-Atlantic, one should look first at the Quaker schools of Westtown school and George school, but one should also look at Hill, Mercersburg and Peddie. It’s tough to beat the Quaker schools when it comes to, having happy kids and having a “whole person” model of child development, but there are many outstanding gems on this list.</p>
<p>In the Southeast one should look at Woodberry Forrest (male) Episcopal, Asheville and MacCallie (Boys school in Tennessee).</p>
<p>There are other outstanding schools as well, but I’ve listed 20+ here and 10 schools that have an even more competitive admissions process a few posts ago; these twenty or so schools are ideal for the A/B student with above average references. The previous ten are good for A+ to B+ in private school or A to A+ in public school kids who test in the 95th percentile or above nationally and in the 80th percentile or above in the independent school pool. Of course, like in college admissions, alumni, URM, unique geographical diversity and recruited athlete are hooks that carry weight. </p>
<p>If someone is a B/C student, straight C or even C/D, there are outstanding preps out there for them as well, but this thread was about prestigious boarding schools, so I thought I’d give my take on the top 30.</p>
<p>There also are day prep schools in local areas that rank with the top boarding schools, i.e. St. Anns -new york, Pinecrest-Ft. Lauderdale, Horace Mann, westchester, etc.</p>
<p>well I would call the “Ivy League” highschools very prestigious. I know, how obnoxious that a bunch of high schools named their sports conference after a more famous sports conference. That’s what you get for NYC private schools I guess…
The league includes:
Horace Mann
Poly Prep
Dalton
The Fieldston School
Riverdale Country Day School
The Hackley School
The Collegiate School</p>
<p>eesh, talk about pretentious!</p>
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<p>The best Prep Schools in the greater DC area are Landon, Gtown Prep, Stalbans, Holton and NCS. Maret comes in close. These schools are better than the NYC Factories in all manners.</p>
<p>Do not even consider a school such as Georgetown Day School, no matter what Jay Mathews states. He is wrong and generally asinine. Their school does not have the sports, academics or the camaraderie to support it as an excellent school.</p>