What boarding schools send the largest percentage of graduates to Ivy League schools? According to the ivyleaguefeeders (dot com) website it’s St. Paul’s, Andover, Lawrenceville, Exeter, and Deerfield in that order. Is the list accurate? I’m wondering how they collected the data. I’m considering transferring to a top boarding school next year and am trying to find accurate data.
Welcome.
A couple of things to consider: The matriculation data includes recruited athletes, legacies, donor’s kids, and at some schools, faculty brats. Those categories tend to be overrepresented at boarding schools.
For the rest, colleges admit applicants, not boarding schools. A BS may allow the student to develop into a stronger applicant, but so can other schools. Choosing a boarding school simply based on matriculation data is folly.
6 Likes
All of those schools do send a lot of kids to the Ivy League, but you aren’t going to improve your chances simply by transferring to one as that isn’t how it works. Many kids among that 30% are legacies, recruited athletes or the children of major donors. The remainder are students among the top at schools where even the average student is outstanding. If you want to go to boarding school because that is something that interests you, great. If you only want to go because you think that is a ticket to the Ivy League you are likely to be disappointed.
5 Likes
Don’t transfer just for college placement. A kid who is smart enough to succeed at an Ivy can get into an Ivy regardless of what school they go to.
2 Likes
You have to apply first and see what happens. Assuming you do very well in school, good SSAT, strong ECs, etc, you still only have a 15% chance of getting in at best.
Plenty of kids that get 99% on SSAT get rejected. Plenty of kids that get 80% on SSAT get in. You have to fill certain holes.
One mistake you’re making is just looking at which schools send the most to the Ivy League. There are several universities, including MIT, Stanford and U. of Chicago, just to name three, that are every bit as prestigious as most of the Ivies. And, of course, there are still more schools that are every bit as “good.”
3 Likes
Seeing as you are a current freshmen, you would have to apply for 11th grade for the 2022-2023 school year. 11th grade admissions are arguably the hardest out of all grades to be admitted for. I suggest looking at the “hidden gems” thread if you want to go to BS. If you want to go for next year, you need to find rolling admissions schools. The schools you listed are not rolling. Some schools are still taking applications for full pay students.
1 Like
The students who get into the ivy league from top schools are the legacies, donors, faculty kids, and the kids at the top of the class. To get into the top boarding schools, you need to be at the top of your class already.
Think about it like this. If you aren’t one of the first three on that list, you gotta be number 4. Say there are 400 students per class at your future school. Those 400 are the best at ~400 schools. You have to be “better than the best” to get into the Ivy League from BS.
Many people on here say that the road to the ivy league is much easier coming from your local public/day school.
1 Like
Do you have a good chance of being accepted to such exclusive boarding schools? Do you have the means of paying for it?
Yes, based upon acceptance statistics, you do have a better chance of being accepted at an Ivy, or T20 school, coming out of the top boarding and top private schools, given the same GPA, same SAT or ACT, and decent class standing, as compared with if you had come out of a public school.
I would suggest that you look at which schools might accept you, and then look at the college admissions statistics for those schools. In addition, consider where students from your current school have gotten in. Yes, you have to consider that there are possibly more recruited athletes for sports that most public school students don’t get to do, such as sailing or crew, and more legacies (but plenty of parents of high achieving public school students are grads of T20 schools), and more big donor admits, but even with all that, your chances of admission to T20 school are higher coming out of a top boarding school/top private school.
But also take a look at your own abilities, your own qualifications. If you are a high achiever in national level competitions, you can get in from a public school. If you’re a mediocre student, you’re not even going to get into the those top boarding/private schools, let alone T20 schools. The kind of student who would be helped by coming from a top boarding/private school, is the student with high GPA and high SAT/ACT, who has nice extracurriculars, but not state or national level extracurricular achievements.
1 Like
The majority of students at Ivy League schools attended public schools. I disagree with the idea that given the same scores and test results, a student from a private "feeder "school has a better chance than a kid from a public school. I think that, separate from donor families, legacies and athletes, that is just not true. I have read an admissions officer at a top school saying that he felt the public school kid can gain more from the opportunity to attend than a well-prepared boarding school kid who does not need the education as much. I cannot cite that, sorry, but it made an impression on me.
8 Likes
About 3.7 million students graduate from high school in the US each year. 0.4 million of them are graduated from private schools, 3.3 million from public schools. So, the ratio of public to private school grads is about 9 to 1.
For the Harvard class of 2023, about 60 percent had attended non-charter public high schools, and about 35% had attended private schools.
So, yes, more than half the class came from public schools; in fact, a ratio of about 1.7 to 1 had attended public vs private. But if the class composition had reflected the public vs private makeup of the US, the class would have had more like 90% coming from public schools, and 10% from private schools.
Now will come the arguments that private school students are better prepared than public school students - and there is no question that the top 10% of private school students in the US, perhaps some 40,000 students of the 400K privately educated students in the US in class of 2023, are probably better educated than the top 10% of the country’s public school students, some 350,000 high-achieving students. But are they better-educated than the top 10% of students from the many excellent public schools all across the country? All the competitive-admission exam schools? All those excellent suburban public high schools? Are they better educated than the top 10% from Boston Latin? Stuyvesant? Bronx Science? I’d say that more likely, the top 25% of the class from schools like that are the equal of the top 10% of leading private schools.
When you look at the average SAT scores for the best private boarding schools, it’s about 1400. I strongly suspect that the SAT scores for the top 25% of students at excellent public school districts, and probably the top 50% or more at competitive public exam schools, are equal to that. We’re probably talking at least 350K public school students with stats equal to, on average, those of that top 10% of privately educated students, about 40K. But the ratio of public to private at Harvard is less than 2:1, when by all measures, it should be more like 8:1.
I cannot find the stats easily for top national academic competitions, but I would be very surprised if the ratio of public school students to private school students were less than 2:1 in that population - in fact, it is probably far higher. And I cannot find the stats for it, but I strongly suspect that far, far more public school students with stellar GPAs and perfect standardized test scores are rejected from tippy-top schools, than identically qualified students from leading boarding/private schools.
So, yes, assuming similar excellent qualifications, it appears that one’s chances of admission to tippy-top schools from leading boarding/private schools are much higher than if one comes with the identical statistics from a good public high school, barring other considerations.
When the vast majority of the applicants are from public schools, but less than twice as many who wind up there are from public schools vs private schools, assuming similar GPAs and SATs, then one has to acknowledge that there most definitely IS a higher likelihood of admission to a T20 school if one is applying from a leading boarding/private school.
3 Likes
If I was only concerned about Ivy admissions I probably would have left my kid at the unimpressive public high school and spent money on other expenses, managing his profile closely all along. He would have been the standout student and might have done even better in admissions. Or we would have chosen 2 or possibly 3 of the other schools he was admitted to with even more impressive matriculation data. But he, and we, are choosing boarding school for everything else it brings.
Everything written above is true but you should not understand those comments to be dismissive of the students. Legacy students are turned away by Ivies ALL the Time. To be admitted you have to be exceptional as well. Athletes are turned away all the time. To be admitted you have to be an excellent student and exceptional athlete. Donors often get nothing. You have to be a huge donor and have a very well qualified kid.
4 Likes
@parentologist , correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t believe you have had a child attend a boarding school, though I seem to remember you saying you had attended one. If my memory is right, you haven’t had experience with boarding schools and their college matriculation as it is currently. Things are very different from 30 years ago.
6 Likes
Interesting topic. I always think a top BS will decrease the chance of a good student (say 20th % at school) going to the top college compared with the same student with the same stats at a top public school. However the same top BS may help an average student (50%) get in a pretty good college compared with the same public school. I have no proof of that.
I did check matriculation data of Stuyvesant and Trinity for comparison purposes. One magnet public school and one top private school. Roughly same geo area and probably similar SAT scores. Trinity sends higher % of students to top colleges. This seems to suggest top private schools do not hurt students chance.
This debate comes up once s month or so?
The notion that boarding schools are Ivy feeders is outdated.
The matriculation data have a ton of noise in them, because of legacy, athletes, the changing views on standardized tests and holistic admissions. Boarding schools are much more economically diverse and offer a lot more financial aid than they used to be.
Getting into bs is functionally a pre-screen for elite colleges- argument goes, elites aren’t admitting bs, they are admitting students. There are simply more high performers per capita in bs than lps. And more of those bs students/families care about elite colleges, so actually apply, compared to lps.
Plunking an lps kid (like mine) into a bs isn’t going to magically get him into an elite college. But bs kids get a lot of educational and developmental opportunities, that if they take advantage of, and if they take the most rigorous courses, and if they have leadership positions, and if they shine in an EC, and if they do better than their classmates, and if they get good SAT scores, and if they get good recs, and if they can afford it/get financial aid, and if they don’t get squeezed out by legacies etc, and if they put together a good application (taking full advantage of the counselors), then I think they have a decent shot at an elite.
6 Likes
There were so many ands 
I’m getting a little scared now.
2 Likes
I realize OP said boarding schools, but because of the northeast orientation suggested by the OP, it may be worth noting Roxbury Latin and Nobles are both at 20%+.