Where in the country/world are the colleges most popular with college prep school students? 40 Schools version

Parents Forum
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This is an updated thread from last month’s which commented on the college matriculation rates from some of the country’s most elite/selective prep schools. After receiving some feedback, I’ve now updated the list to 40 prep schools to reflect a broader range of geographical diversity. This time round, I’ve looked at the most recent matriculation lists/school profiles of 40 prep schools (~16,000 matriculations) across the country (Andover, Exeter, Choate, Brearley, Groton, Lakeside, Harvard-Westlake etc.) to identify whether there has been any changes in popularity/feeder school magnets/general observations in geographical distribution. The standardized test scores of the average student at these prep schools typically places them within the top 5 percentile/decile nationwide. Tuition ranges from $35k up to $75k at the boarding schools.

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Around 31% of graduates placed in the one of the twelve from the Ivy League + Stanford, Duke, Chicago and MIT (30 schools version: 37%). 22% went to other USNews top 40 private universities, and a further 13% went to private universities which ranked outside of the top 40. The most popular destinations were NYU, Georgetown, Tufts, USC and WashU. 13% went to public universities with the most popular being UMich, UVA, UC Berkeley, St Andrews (UK), and UW. Finally, 17% to LACs with Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Colby and Amherst being the most common destinations.

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Main observations:

  • Prep school students are heavily concentrated at colleges in the the North East of the United States. Massachusetts - being the home of Harvard, Tufts, Northeastern, BC, BU, MIT, Amherst and Williams - was the most popular destination of prep school students by a long shot (no surprise).

  • On the west coast, California was the next closest with Stanford, USC, UC Berkeley and UCLA amongst the most frequently attended colleges.

  • 21 states saw pretty much no college enrollments from prep school students at all, this includes: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

  • Places which only some enrollment due to one prominent college in the state/country include: Iowa—Grinnell; Louisiana—Tulane; Michigan—UMich; Minnesota—Carleton; Missouri—WUSTL; Tennessee—Vanderbilt; UK/Scotland—St Andrews; Washington—UW; Wisconsin—UW-Madison.

  • Outside of the US, the UK/Scotland saw a fairly large number of matriculants due to St Andrews. Canada saw a few matriculants due to McGill and UToronto. Barely any prep school students went to colleges outside of these two countries. This means no colleges in other countries which offer degrees in English - such as Australia, England, Hong Kong, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore and Switzerland - were popular with prep schoolers.

Would be interested to hear why you guys think some states just aren’t popular, the role of the politics of red/blue state determining college enrollment or whether it’s just because some states don’t have any well regarded colleges for those concerned with prestige.

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P.S. Let me know if you want access to the Google Sheets which has an interactive map and the raw data for the schools.

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What attracts the prep school students to University of Wyoming (#36 in the list)? Is it the default safety (automatic admission with 3.00 HS GPA)?

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Never mind.

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Could you DM me the sheet? I’m very surprised about what was listed for my alma mater.

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Our son was the only student in his class to choose a service academy which, not surprisingly, is not included on any list of favorites. His second and third choices were Georgia Tech and Michigan.

LACs are popular with many of these students because they mirror their prep school experience with smaller classes and student bodies. (Wesleyan is known locally as “Choate North.”)

Also, the prep communities are heavily represented by eastern states (and CA) and many prefer to stay on their respective coasts. Not many students from flyover states apply to these high schools. Our son’s application from AZ was attractive partly for its demographic diversity. He was the only male student from AZ his freshman year, and the only student from AZ his remaining three years.

No prep school is a “feeder” to any college. To beat @skieurope’s drum, colleges choose students, not high schools. For example, Choate is not a feeder to Yale. It’s just that many highly-qualified faculty kids attend due to proximity, so no one should look at this data and think that any student has a better chance of admission to Yale from Choate than from any other prep school.

The prep schools comprise a cherry-picked population with most seniors being stat and profile competitive for any college. Matriculation is more a reflection of self-selection than anything else.

I don’t see anything unusual or particularly surprising about the list.

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I believe UW refers to the University of Washington.

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That was my first thought as well (UW = U Washington), but it may mean University of Wisconsin.

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I have received more DMs than expected so here is the link to the Google Sheets dataset: [Moderator Note: Link Deleted]. When you hover over a dot on the map, the name of the college will be provided.

Re: Yes, UW refers to University of Washington rather than University of Wyoming. UW-Madison refers to University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Re: the point about feeder schools, the concept of “pipeline schools” has been heavily debated recently with suggestions that this is more a reflection of the number of legacies/athletes/children of donors/faculty at the prep school rather than the prep school having a better chance of getting the student into a specific college. I also define it differently for this analysis as a “Prep school(s) which disproportionately sent its alumni to a college relative to acceptance rate/student body/other prep schools” so it is not necessarily the college in which most students from that prep school ends up at.

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Links containing a URL shortener are not allowed. Nor us spelling around the filter.

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So this dovetails with the well-observed fact that there is still quite a bit of regionalism in college choice. This has been undermined over time a bit, meaning a higher percentage of kids have gone outside their region, and conversely the top “national” schools have enrolled more kids from outside their region. But still, at least a plurality of kids still go to colleges in their home region, and then when going outside their region it is usually to either an adjacent region, or one of just a small handful of other colleges truly distant from their home region (including the ones you noted in Canada and the UK!).

In terms of politics, I see a few people concerned about state-level politics, usually people particularly concerned about abortion rights. But I think for the most part this is more an indirect effect than a direct one.

Like, not to get off on a long tangent, but the current shape of higher education in the US started to form way back in the mid-1800s, when what were originally the Northern Whigs, eventually the Republicans, believed in making charitable and public investments in higher education (this was consistent with a general policy of supporting the industrialization/urbanization/modernization of the United States). They quickly spread these notions out to the West Coast, but there were other parts of the country that were still much more focused on labor-intensive (ahem) agricultural economies, and there usually the Democrats were dominant politically. There were also other reasons for industrialization and urbanization to more take off in certain areas and not others, not least the lack of air conditioning, but this all tended to align politically as well.

Then a lot changed in the 1900s, including toward the end of the century an essential swap of positions of Republicans and Democrats, where today the Democrats have more of the people who would have been Northern Whiggish types back in the day, and Republicans have more of the people who would have been Jacksonian Democrats back in the day, and the Democrats are thus more the higher-education/urbanization/modernization party, and the Republicans are more aligned against all that.

Long story short, for fairly obvious reasons many (not all) of the best-funded higher education institutions are located where Northern Whiggish types live and dominate politics, and that today means “blue” areas and states, and the more Jacksonian areas and states are today “red”.

Understanding that in many states, there are in fact Northern Whiggish metro areas and Jacksonian rural areas, and state politics is a function of relative percentages, sometimes some structural issues like gerrymandered state legislatures, and so on. And where the balance of power between the blue metro areas and red rural areas is relatively close at the state level, these are your typical “purple” states. And there is not usually the same density of highly competitive universities in purple states, but there are often some.

And in fact, in some traditionally “red” states the Northern Whiggish metro areas are of sufficient scale to support Northern Whiggish colleges and universities notwithstanding the nature of state politics. Although actually, that is changing the politics of these states too, but not too long ago at least, states like Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas were all safely “red”, but also had the sorts of Whiggish metro-based populations necessary to support highly competitive colleges and universities.

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I am not sure this would be specific to prep schools, though? That said this plays a factor in some people’s lists… I have seen numerous people on this and other groups looking for schools in certain states only…I for one, would be VERY hard pressed (I don’t like to say “never” but close) to pay for my kids to live states with the deep red/dark orange on this map: Interactive Map: US Abortion Policies and Access After Roe | Guttmacher Institute

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There is a simple answer to your question of why some states are less popular.

The Northeast had a “first mover advantage” in terms of being the first to establish colleges and universities. So many top private schools come from the pre-1830 era and specifically from the original 13 colonies with larger populations.

The next phase of college development in the US consisted of the rise of larger public universities. These schools tended to enroll people from their own state at a low cost. Not a recipe for “prestige” that the Choates of the world would flock to.

Taken together, these two trends may have choked off the development of prestigious private schools in US states that were added to the union later.

In fact, if you look at the origins of Stanford, you can see what an oddball Stanford really was. Stanford’s founders were annoyed that the “Western elite” were going back east for their education. They were even more annoyed that some of them chose to stay in the east. So they formed a competitor to the Ivies.

But this is INCREDIBLY risky. You want to found a school to out-Harvard Harvard? Good luck with that.

First mover advantage creates barriers to entry to those who would follow and is a real thing.

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I note in terms of practical access, it can make a difference whether you live near a border.

For example, this came up in a discussion of St Louis colleges. Missouri is a “deep red” state on that map, but then Illinois is “teal”, and of course right across the river. And one of the reasons it is “teal” is it has shield laws.

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Agreed. In earlier iterations of this topic (it’s not new), the supposition was, “These are the preppiest colleges”. IOW, if you prefer that sort of “milieu” - even if you/yourself never attended a prep school - these colleges were your metaphorical bite at the apple.

Nowadays, it seems to be popular to use prep school enrollment as a surrogate-marker for colleges that compete successfully with the Ivy League for the same students. Same thing, different day.

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Certainly some students at prep schools chase prestige, same as students at other high schools, but the prep schools themselves work hard to disabuse students of this limiting pursuit. By the second half of junior year, when college application planning starts, counselors work with their students to craft short but highly-curated lists of colleges that would be good fits for the goals of their applicants whom they know well. When our son was at Choate, unless FA was a significant factor, students applied to ten colleges: three reaches, three matches, three likelies, and their state flagship. Many state flagships and large publics are excellent choices, and many prep students do attend. When our son was at Choate, the largest number of students matriculated to NYU mainly because Choate has a large number of students from NY who prefer to stay there. Also during his years, the data from Exeter showed that Michigan was quite popular (although Michigan has a love-hate relationship with some of the boarding schools, but that is a different topic). The bottom line is that prep students are competing for colleges from very strong pools and understand that there are MANY excellent colleges outside the usual suspects. The more interesting list is the range of colleges from each prep school, not the most popular.

It’s always interesting to me to listen to conversations about prep schools on this side of board. Topics like prestige and feeders have been done to death on the Prep forums by prep parents and participants, but the suppositions and conclusions differ based on the firsthand experience of that crowd.

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So I would suggest some complications to that narrative.

It is true that starting in the 1860s, a little earlier in some states, the “land grant” movement kicked off a critical wave of university formation, and most of those universities became publics. However, there were a couple notable exceptions, MIT and Cornell (respectively private and mostly-private land grant universities).

Anyway, the rise of land-grant universities was not in fact the end of private university formation in the US, with MIT, Cornell, and Stanford as lone exceptions (side note, Stanford was consciously modeled on Cornell, which itself was consciously modeled on Michigan). Indeed, specifically the “Gilded Age”/“Progressive Era” period saw many new university formations in many prominent growing cities, or sometimes transformative reinvestments.

So, among others, on that chart above, in addition to Stanford (1885), you have Chicago (1891), USC (1880), WUSTL (originally 1853, transformed in part circa 1900, and actually kinda retransformed in the 1980s through present from major new donations), Northwestern (founded 1850, also transformed in the late 1800s), Emory (originally 1836, but transformed in 1915 thanks to the Coca-Cola families), Carnegie-Mellon (Carnegie side 1900, Mellon side 1913, and you don’t get much more Gilded Age than that, except for maybe . . .), and Vanderbilt (1873).

I suspect not too much farther off you would also have Rice (1912–and a totally crazy foundation story involving murder!).

There is a complex story here involving how the older prominent colleges were actually mostly on what was at one time known as the Classical Model, and the newer one were usually founded on what was known as the Modern Model, which had sort of taken off in Prussia and Scotland, got imported to the US in various land grant universities like Michigan and Cornell. And so these various industrialists and such in various cities wanted their own “Modern” universities and were not really trying to compete directly with the “Classical” colleges. And this worked so well the Classical colleges had to sort of reinvest themselves as “Modern” universities to compete.

And even today, this is with varying degrees of success. Like, Cornell, the one originally Modern university in the Ivy League, founded much later, still has by far the most robust Engineering program in that group, whereas Yale, say, nearly abandoned it in the 1990s. That sort of thing.

Anyway, obviously that chart demonstrates that Stanford was not in fact alone in succeeding as a “new” private university. That doesn’t mean the Northeast does not still have a demonstrable “first mover” advantage, but there are many exceptions (more in fact if you go into LACs, but that is a whole other subject).

Yes, there has long been a subset of public universities which are competitive for students from these sorts of secondary schools, including out of state. Michigan is one of those, and the others on the chart are mostly no surprise (UVA, Cal, and UCLA, plus St Andrews is a whole other thing). Washington I kinda assume is a California/West Coast thing–where we live I think more people would next be looking at Wisconsin and such.

But one thing I did learn in association with helping S24 was that UNC has apparently become a little less like this than back when I was applying to colleges in the late 1980s. I don’t know that history well but I find it interesting.

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I would never say that NYU or UM are representative of the typical American public university. Nor would UC Berkley, UCLA or UVA be considered typical. We must also recognize that even elite boarding schools make admission mistakes and that there are certainly going to be people who don’t do well academically and fall to less pretigious schools. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t chasing prestigious schools. They just couldn’t get into them.

I knew lots of people from the elite boarding schools. I simultaneously respected how well prepared they were while also resenting how much easier their path was than mine. So many opportunities that I simply had zero access to.

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The highly qualified kids I know who choose places like Michigan or Cal OOS are usually not doing it because they didn’t do well academically!

I’d say it is more or less evenly divided between kids looking for an engineering powerhouse, and kids who just want the big sports sort of experience.

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I wouldn’t say there are many admissions mistakes – but somebody has to be in the bottom half of the class!

And also: education is wildly unequal in this country, and the advantages boarding school kids have (in life) shouldn’t be underestimated. Knowing that substantial proportions of the students are on financial aid, so the advantages stem from the school and not from the fact that the kid comes from a family in the top 1%.

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Yes, when the “bottom half” of your class is at least going to a Wisconsin or Washington, this is a very different world from most US secondary schools!

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