We took our kids OUT of a great private school (with an Ivy admission rate not dissimilar to those in the article) and sent them to a public academic magnet. There were a bunch of reasons for that, some very specific to our family and our children, but saving money for college was definitely on the list.
The best kids at both schools were very, very similar. And similar kids had similar outcomes in terms of college admissions. One public school classmate of my younger child had two older siblings who had gone to private schools and Ivy League colleges. She had gone to private school through grade 8, and had been accepted for grade 9 at the school my kids left. Her parents offered her a choice between that or the public school and a generous summer travel budget (but nowhere near as much as private school tuition), and she took the deal. Her Ivy League college was a notch more exclusive than her siblings’. At the end of the day, my kids thought they pretty much had the same college outcome they would have had if they had stayed at the private school, although they had to take responsibility for their own strategies and got nowhere near the handholding they would have gotten at the private school.
I have lots of friends in suburban districts. Some have sent kids to great private schools, some to great public schools. The educational experiences are different, but the college outcomes pretty much follow the kid, not the school.
The public schools are much, much more diverse in every respect than the private schools, so the essential similarity of college outcome for similar kids can get lost in the noise created by large numbers of kids who aren’t similar at all.
That’s not to say I am anti private school. Good private schools provide a magnificent education. I went to private school, and had a flexible curriculum that would have been very difficult to get in a public school, at least back then. I arrived at college very confident and certain of my ability to handle things. My wife went to a frankly terrible public school in an exurban backwater, and she spent much of her college career (at the same college) frightened to death that her poor education in high school would tank her college career. It didn’t. She was summa cum laude and elected to PBK as a junior.
Whatever you do, don’t choose a high school based on what you think it will do for college admissions. There are too many variables there, and too many ways to be disappointed. Choose a high school based on what, within the bounds of affordability, will make your child a better person, more engaged, more excited about learning, more intellectually curious, happy, and comfortable in the world. Those are qualities that will stay with him through college and through adulthood. They will make him successful at whichever college he attends, and they will make him successful and fulfilled in life after college. That’s the real goal, right?