Private prep schools and "hot" colleges

@tk21769 Thank you for your analysis. For others reading this thread, I wanted to mention that the top prep schools you used in your illustration are not really representative of prep schools in general since there are hundreds of other non-Tippity Top prep schools that enroll so many more kids than the small pool of kids represented by your analysis. Most prep schools do not have such a larger representation of ivy league schools, as the ones in your illustration. There is a lot more representation of the top 20-50 schools and state Uni’s at most prep schools than Ivy League schools. I wouldn’t consider the Ivy Leagues schools as “Hot” from an acceptance perspective at most prep schools.

Stereotypes much? Would such bigotry be acceptable for any other group in society?

It’s more likely tech-inclined preps want a strong humanities program as well.

Bigotry? That’s a little extreme. Did anyone say that being preppy was bad? Not me. I love preppy lifestyles even though I am a product of public schools and don’t have a WASP bone in my body.

If it’s humorous, specify such.

The modern prep school is much more heterogeneous than in the past, especially the financial aid giants such as Exeter and Andover. The local upscale public high schools are more WASPy.

The “preppy lifestyle” went out of fashion with pink & green and bermuda baskets. Today’s prep student is more likely to be the sporty child of an immigrant doctor or immigrant investment banker.

I think you should read Alumother’s excellent blog (amid privilege) for a great description of High WASP vs prep.

Btw the pink and green Lilly Pulitzer is still in fashion among southern preps, which are a different sub species compared to classic Northeast / New England prep.

I have read her blog. She’s on the West Coast.

“Private prep schools” covers a wide range. Many of the leading prep schools are located in large cities.

I love @tk21769 's analysis, but I have some questions:

– What was the fifth non-NE prep school? I only saw four: Harvard Westlake, SFU Prep, Lakeside, and Ransom.

– The five NE schools are very, very closely bunched – three NYC, one southern Connecticut closely associated with Yale, and Exeter, which draws a ton of kids from NYC. It’s not that surprising that Yale and Columbia would get a lot of kids. The non-NE schools are very dispersed: three on the West Coast many hundreds of miles apart (and all day schools, so they don’t draw at all from each other’s markets), and one school in Florida. I am not certain the second group’s aggregate numbers tell you anything about preferences in Florida. It looks more like generic West Coast. I wonder what the results would have been if you included St. Mark’s in Dallas, or John Burroughs, or the Chicago Lab School?

– Also, the five NE schools are radically different sizes. Exeter’s class is bigger than the three NYC schools combined, and probably represents close to 50% of the entire pool. (Which at least tells you that the NE results aren’t completely effectively a representation of Manhattan tastes.) The four non-NE schools are much closer in size, I think. Why were these 9 (or 10) schools chosen to represent something?

D1 got Caltech’s marketing email because of her high math scores. In the email it said for fun students went hiking and that was it. D1 just said, “Not for me. I am not going hiking for fun.” I think they could do better with their marketing. MIT is a hot school.

I would note that Oberlin is certainly the most popular non-northeastern LAC at Philadelphia-area private schools, but Carleton, Kenyon, and Pomona are not that far behind. Earlham, too, perhaps due to the large number of Quaker schools here. And I have seen multiple kids go to Claremont-McKenna, Reed, Beloit, Lawrence, Macalaster, Davidson, Colorado College, and Eckerd.

Re Swarthmore vs. Colby. I have trouble believing those colleges have any substantial overlap in their applicants, they appeal to such different groups of kids.

@JHS,

For my basket of elite prep schools, I used Business Insider’s list of top private high schools at:
http://www.businessinsider.com/best-private-high-schools-america-2014-11
I wanted to go with their top 10, which would break down into 5 from the Northeast and 5 from elsewhere.
However, I could not find matriculation data for Castilleja (Palo Alto CA) so I substituted #16 Harvard-Westlake (Los Angeles CA).

So the 5 non-NE schools I used were: Harvard Westlake (CA), SFU Prep (CA), Lakeside (WA), Ransom (FL) … and the College Preparatory School (Oakland, CA).

I was not trying to achieve a representative cross-section of private schools across America. I wanted somebody’s idea of “top” high schools, because I am trying to operationalize the fuzzy concept of “prestige”. So I’m looking for a population of decision-makers (different from the US News “peers”) who presumably are good arbiters of what’s “prestigious”. I thought a sampling of “top” high schools would give me a good representation of relatively well-informed, prestige-conscious high schoolers who are not overly bound either by geography or cost. However, I did like the fact that the Business Insider T10 breaks cleanly into 5 Northeastern and 5 non-Northeastern. That is interesting to me because I’d like some basis to evaluate the charge that US News has a Northeastern bias … or that (as our friend Pizzagirl often asserts) “prestige” is all regional.

@tk21769 An East Coast preppie Mom & Dad can load up the Volvo and drive Chip or Buffy out to Ann Arbor in one long day (or have one of their people do it).
Dalton is not an ultra preppy school and you’re not going to find any Buffy’s at Horace Mann!

@JHS Exeter’s class is bigger than the three NYC schools combined.
While Exeter is bigger than the 3 NYC schools, it is not bigger than all 3 combined as Horace Mann graduates nearly 200 kids per yr

^ I do understand the world has changed since Preppy Handbook days (if it was ever that way at all at some of the schools we’re mentioning). At my own kids’ private schools, nobody would be caught dead in the Lisa Birnbach / Lilly Pulitzer get-up. They favored non-descript generic garb like T-shirts and sweats.

@wisteria100 : My bad. I knew Horace Mann was that big, but I thought Dalton and Trinity were a little smaller, and I thought Exeter was a little larger. Still, looking at more precise numbers, Exeter graduates more than 1/3 of the total combined NE group.

Also on the non-NE side, all the schools but one are about the same size, and Harvard-Westlake is much bigger. It actually represents a slightly larger share of the non-NE group than Exeter represents of the NE group.

@tk21769 : Next time you do this (ha ha), I urge you to think more about your school groupings and what you want to know. A school grouping with 600 kids in the three largest West Coast cities and 100 kids in Miami works in a sense as clearly being “not the Northeast,” but winds up giving you a picture that I would describe as “fuzzy California.” (And, just to fuzz it up a little more, and without any way to prove it, I would suggest that Harvard-Westlake has a relatively large percentage of families where at least one parent went to high school or college in the Northeast. If you are a member of Skull & Bones, or Porcellian, or Ivy, and you live in the western half of Los Angeles County, your children probably go to school there. If they’re not at Exeter.) Your NE group is similarly “fuzzy New York”: about 2/3 kids from the New York metropolitan area, maybe 1/4 New England, and the rest a mix of international and other regions. Exeter and Hotchkiss both have significant numbers of students not from the Northeast, and indeed not from the U.S.

Also – and I understand it would be hard to get around this – it may matter that about 20% of the Niche ranking that gave you your list is based on what colleges the kids from those schools go to.

It would be relatively easy to get a cleaner, more representative cross-cut of the Northeast by dropping the boarding schools and substituting a day school from each of the Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington areas. It would be hard to get a good sense of “everything but the Northeast” with only five or six schools – your sample would always be distorted by preferences specific to one school – but you could probably do reasonable West Coast, Southeast, and Midwest groupings.

For the midwest, certainly U Chicago Lab Schools, maybe the Latin School of Chicago, and John Burroughs is a nice add. What are the comparable moneyed prep schools in other major midwestern cities? I have to believe Minneapolis has something similar to John Burroughs.

Minneapolis has Breck and Blake. Cleveland has Hathaway Brown. Boston has Roxbury Latin which feeds a lot to Harvard

@JHS we visited Amherst, bowdoin, Colby, Haverford and swarthmore over the summer with D. On the basis of the tour and info session, it was hard to differentiate the schools. We basically came to think of Colby as a match and the others as reaches, but all offering the same sort of small lac experience.

Why do you say Colby and Swat don’t have a substantial overlap in applicants?

Much appreciated,

I was going to suggest Buckingham Browne & Nichols or Noble & Greenough for Boston, Germantown Friends or Episcopal for Philadelphia, and Sidwell Friends for DC. I think those, plus the New York schools, would give you a pretty good idea of what “prestige” means in the Amtrak Corridor.

@quietdesperation, based on reputation and the folks I know who have gone there (including family), Colby is much jockier and has more of a reputation as a party school. As a friend of my son’s, who is at Swat, said “one of the things I like about this school is that if you are working until 10 or 11 o’clock on a Friday night, you won’t be distracted by kids in the hall who are partying or getting ready to go out and party.”. (This young man, btw, is an athlete.) Colby is truly in the middle of nowhere (not even in the town of Waterville, as I’m sure you noticed!), whereas Swarthmore is accessible to Philly. I’m sure someone is going to slam me for this, but I think that Swarthmore’s offering engineering as a major also results in a different type of student body. Of that list, I’d say that Colby and Bowdoin are the closest with Amherst being not far off. Haverford is a bit more eclectic, perhaps, but more “fun” than Haverford (without requiring it.) Huge generalizations for sure, but I agree with @JHS that Colby and Swat are unlikely to have much of an overlap in applicants.

In some major metros many educated people are not familiar with Rice, Emory, Lehigh, WashU, etc.