Most Popular Colleges for Top Private School Alumni

College Search & Selection
1

<p>The following is a list of the most popular colleges for alumni of top private schools...I took a list of the top 12 most frequently attended colleges for a long list of prep schools and found out which colleges made the top 12 lists most often. </p>

<p>The secondary schools included the following: Roxbury Latin, Brearley, Collegiate, Groton, Dalton, Spence, Horace Mann, Winsor, Milton, Andover, Exeter, Trinity, Chapin, St. Paul's, Saint Ann's, National Cathedral, Brunswick, Deerfield, Belmont Hill, Gilman, Hopkins, Pingry, St. John's in TX, Buckingham Browne and Nichols, Lakeside, Harvard-Westlake, SFUHS, Episcopal Academy, Greenhill, Lawrenceville, Regis High School, Ransom Everglades, Greenwich Academy, St. Andrew's, Fieldston, Germantown Friends, Delbarton, Landon, Choate, College Preparatory School (CPS), Taft, Marlborough, The Bishop's School, Noble and Greenough, Pine Crest, Westminster Schools, Commonwealth, Middlesex, Hockaday, Blake, Convent of the Sacred Heart, Newark Academy, Nightingale-Bamford, Packer Collegiate Institute, Peddie, Princeton Day School, Rye Country Day, Dwight-Englewood, Punahou, Chadwick, Agnes Irwin, Friends Central, Hill, Shipley, Branson, St. Mark's School of TX, John Burroughs, Cate, Thacher, Haverford, Kent Denver, Park, Poly Prep, Harker, University School of Tennessee, Menlo, Shady Side Academy, U Chicago Lab Schools, and Polytechnic School (in Pasadena, CA).</p>

<p>*If two or more colleges had equal matriculation numbers, the smaller college was selected because it reflected a larger percentage of the incoming class at a given undergraduate institution.</p>

<p>**The schools chosen were chosen because they are top private schools with very strong college placement records and of course because their matriculation data is made available. Some excellent secondary schools that did not make the list are not here because I could not find that information (such as Sidwell Friends School) or there was not enough data to come up with a top 12 list (St. Alban's) or the data available was not statistically significant (i.e. matriculation information was provided for only one class and the placement numbers were low like 1, 2, or 3, etc. graduates with several ties). </p>

<p>***If you feel your school deserves to be included in the data or a school you know of please provide the matriculation statistics here so I can add it (but I will first determine if the placement list is strong enough). Be sure to include evidence that your matriculation statistics are real though because if the numbers are dubious they will not be added. </p>

<p>****I tried to ensure geographic diversity here as well although no international schools or public schools are included.</p>

<p>58 – U Pennsylvania
42 – Harvard
41 – Yale
41 – Georgetown
39 – Columbia
39 – Brown<br>
37 – NYU
34 – Cornell
33 – Princeton
25 – Stanford
22 – Dartmouth
22 – Tufts
22 – George Washington U
20 – USC
18 – Washington U in St. Louis
17 – Trinity College
17 – Vanderbilt<br>
16 – Duke
16 – Boston College
15 – Middlebury
12 – Wesleyan
12 – Boston U
12 – UC Berkeley
10 – Amherst
10 – Northwestern
10 – U Virginia
10 – UCLA </p>

<p>If you think there are some notable absences or surprises in terms of the results, please say what they are and why. I was surprised personally that Williams did not make the list.</p>

2

<p>I'm surprised that only Middlebury, Wesleyan and Amherst made it among the LACs.</p>

3

<p>Very few strong tech schools in that list.</p>

<p>Also never knew that Germantown Friends was anything special. When I was growing up it was just the private school the couple of rich kids I knew transferred to after fourth grade or so.</p>

4

<p>I'm not sure I understand the point of this exercise.</p>

<p>Several problems with collecting this sort of data -- Many schools list the universities where their graduates matriculate but not that many list how many of their graduates matriculate to those schools from each graduating class so the data would be skewed to the schools that provide numbers. Also, the largest universities would be overrepresented because they welcome more students (thus few LACs on the list) and the universities that seek the greatest geographic diversity would be underrepresented because they are less likely to take large number of students from any one prep school. I would also think that this data would change with each year. My senior year Dartmouth was the big school and I think 10% of my class ended up there. A couple of years later it was U. Penn. Nothing changed about Dartmouth or U Penn in the intervening years, they just hadn't grabbed the same attention at this one school.</p>

5

<p>^^well, you've made two arguments, one in favor of collecting data on matriculants in general, and another in favor of doing so by graduating class. It would seem to me, that including the data by matriculants as whole would mitigate against wild swings from year to year in favor of any one "big school".</p>

6

<p>

GFS has among the highest SATs and best college placement of any school--private or public--in the Philly area.</p>

<p>For example, see this article and ranking (GFS #12 in the country) from the Wall Street Journal:</p>

<p>WSJ.com</a> - The Price of Admission</p>

<p><a href="http://interactive.wsj.com/documents/wsj_tuition_040104.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://interactive.wsj.com/documents/wsj_tuition_040104.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

7

<p>Wonder what the list looks like adjusted for size of school. I'm sure Amherst, Williams, and other LACs would be much higher up if numbers were accounted for.</p>

8

<p>
[quote]
Very few strong tech schools in that list.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Do tech-oriented private schools exist? If not, I'm not surprised really. I've only seen technology-oriented public schools ( NCSSSMST schools for example ).</p>

9

<p>Most of the top private high schools are in the Northeast, so it doesn't surprise anyone that most would also try to attend colleges and universities in the Northeast.</p>

10

<p>There are several problems with your criticisms sbergman, but they are kind of obvious. One, the fact that a university welcomes more students doesn't mean that the matriculation numbers of smaller schools should automatically be lower -- it just means that people at the prep schools included in the study are more likely to attend certain larger schools than smaller lac's. Also, the inclusion of so many different schools in diverse geographical areas reduces any kind of bias based on the matriculation numbers of one or a couple individual schools in a certain area. Last, the data included different years based on what the schools themselves provided, so the fact that one school was popular in one year would not skew the data.</p>

11

<p>There is no legitimate reason to include class size data as a part of the equation unless you are attempting to find out what percentage of certain colleges are filled with alumni of top private schools, and that is not the aim of the study. The aim of the study is to show which schools are most popular with top private school alumni in terms of matriculation stats.</p>

12

<p>I'm surprised there aren't more LACs, and I'm also very surprised that Michigan and MIT are missing. Michigan get a ton of OOS matriculants from the top NY privates. </p>

<p>Another trend I noticed, although not surprising, is that some of the popular schools for these kids are very expensive schools(BU, GWU, USC, NYU, Vanderbilt,Tufts) and many tend to be more liberal-artsy/humanities or ibanking heavy schools.</p>