Are you at an ongoing school or does your school end in 8th grade? If the latter, you need to pursue more options, but having just gone through it, I don’t recommend the ‘apply everywhere and see where you get in’ strategy. For city schools, the spots are very limited, Trinity is the only school with significant 9th grade intake and even there it is largely sibling/legacies/ultra wealthy families and very high achieving URM and first generation kids. We have found that you really need to decide which school you want and aggressively pursue it in terms of letting them know you want to go there, through your own letter as well as word from families already there etc. They all seem to care about the yield a lot, with HM maybe the lone exception.
Boarding school is much easier, if you are strong student with strong scores, you will have BS choices as a full paying applicant (this is doubly the case if you are a boy, since the city odds are a lot harder for boys with most boys’ schools ending in 8th/9th grade). The process of doing both city and boarding schools is very time consuming, however, between open houses, interviews, tours, studying for the tests and also still doing well in school and playing sports or any other ECs so I would strongly suggest you go your research and visit some schools in the spring to create a shorter list, keeping in mind you do need a ‘safety’ somewhere if your current school is not a K-12.
@Long4sland I totally understand your concern because while my parents are not doctors or lawyers literally all my parent’s siblings are doctors (ranging from internists to plastic surgeons) so I 100 percent understand the struggle that comes at that income level where you don’t qualify for aid, but it is still a huge financial burden to send one kid to a private school with tuition in the 40k range, let alone assuming that their siblings may also plan to attend the school in the future.
Anyway, to answer your question: I personally do not believe that non-legacy students are disadvantaged by attending NYC private schools when it comes to college, in particular Ivy League, admissions. I believe this for several reasons. First off, IME legacy kids at a school like trinity tend to perform, on average, slightly below the full pay student (who is not necessarily well-connected, but still has a significant amount of resources such as ECs, tutoring, SAT prep, etc) when it comes to standardized testing, GPA, etc. Furthermore, from an outside perspective many, if not all people who are new to the “elite” NYC private school world believe that it is a world where the A-list celebrities’ kids, the hedge fund managers kids, and the billionaire business leaders kids are all thrown into one classroom. It is an understandable assumption that is often taken to an even further extreme in Television and the media. I want to emphasize that while those kids exist they are, in no way, in the majority-- in fact, they aren’t even a large minority. I would say that at trinity, HM, and the like, you will have a group of maybe 5 of these kids in each grade. In addition, a lot of those kids are not necessarily reaching for the Ivy League and if they are, it tends to be the parents doing the pushing. Again, I hate to generalize like this because some of the brightest students I have ever met have had insanely successful parents/connections. I also don’t have a doubt in my mind that they would have been accepted to ivies even without such connections. However, when you already have parents who are incredibly successful and you know will support you financially in life, there tends to be a lack of drive within the student and while some may find this bad, I personally, don’t see a problem with it. To many of these super connected kids, there really isn’t an appeal to attending an ivy, because they already reap many of the benefits that an Ivy League degree would give them (due to their parents status). So, a good portion of those kids may not even apply to ivies because they simply don’t want to take on the academic rigor and stress if they really don’t have to.
Ultimately, I don’t really believe that going to an elite NYC private school will necessarily help you get into ivies, but it will definitely not hurt. The real draw in terms of college placement that comes with attending a school like HM, Riverdale, etc. is that they are VERY good at placing a large portion of their students at the schools right below ivies. (Amherst, Babson, Bowdoin, NYU, Uchicago, Georgetown, etc.) Typically, those are schools that many public and private school valedictorians would dream of being accepted to and Boarding schools and NYC private schools are able to send hoards of students there every year–yes, partly due to legacy status, but mostly due colleges knowing that if they accept a kid from a school like Andover or Regis that student will, most likely have the smallest learning curve that comes with adjusting to college life. A student who takes advanced classes at a decent, yet not nationally acclaimed public school will, IMO, have a harder time adjusting to the rigor of an Ivy League school than someone from a very rigorous private school. That adjustment goes for both social and academic aspects. A lot of students at ivies who come from Local public schools and local private schools are used to being the best at their school or in their area, yet students from those nationally acclaimed private schools are typically competing with a much stronger student body and thus even if they don’t end up at an ivy for the bachelors degree they will probably rank near the top of their class at a school like Georgetown, USC, or NYU and can use that as a springboard for Post grad admissions or admission to graduate schools. Ultimately, its important to remember that the admissions process doesn’t stop when one reaches undergrad/college–whether it be at an ivy or not. Assuming your child plans to go on to earn a masters or doctorate (which, as I’m sure we all know is becoming increasingly common) attending an ivy for undergrad and assuming that they want to attend an ivy or another at the same level for grad school means they will have to rank very highly in their undergrad class because when it comes to grad school, the athletic “hooks” that tend to be very common begin to drastically decrease in importance and you are really left being judged off your academic and extracurricular capabilities within that field. Anyway, sorry for the long post, but if you have any other questions feel free to PM me.
@CC4life
Thanks for your detailed response.
@CC4life
Do you believe that private schools/boarding schools are better preparation than schools like Stuyvesant/Hunter or so-called top public school districts in LI (which is where I live and I often feel are overrated). Thanks again for your comments.
@long4island sorry for the late response, but I honestly don’t have very much experience with Hunter, but I do know a little bit more about Stuy. While I think both top private and top public schools are relatively the same when it comes to academic rigor, the sheer number of opportunities created at a school like Dalton/HM/trinity outweighs the opportunities at Stuy where you have almost 1000 kids in a grade in comparison to Trinity that has 1000 kids in the whole school (from k-12). So, while Stuy and hunter may send a larger number of students to Ivy League/top colleges, it is debatable which school send a larger percentage of their students to ivies. I think another factor to take into account is that a the top public schools still rely very heavily on govt funding even if they have a lot of financial support from alums. Especially, considering the increased controversy over the test based admissions method at the NYC elite publics, I think the top privates offer much more stability in that they are not as easily affected by government decisions or funding problems due to their large endowments.
Thank you.