Tiers and Rankings

Prep School Admissions Prep School Cafe
1

<p>Just going to clear some minds on the tiers and ranking, I retrieved all of this information from prep review, school admission organization, USA Today, and of course, College Confidential</p>

<p>TIER 1
1. Phillips Exeter Academy, NH
2. Phillips Academy, MA
3. Groton School, MA
4. The Hotchkiss School, CT
5. Deerfield Academy, MA
6. St. Paul’s School, NH
7. The Lawrenceville School, NJ
8. The Taft School, CT
9. Choate Rosemary Hall, CT</p>

<p>TIER 2
10. Milton Academy, MA
11. St. Andrew’s School, DE
12. St. Mark’s School, MA
13. Woodberry Forest School, VA
14. Episcopal High School, VA
15. The Thacher School. CA
16. Middlesex School. MA
17. St. George’s School, RI
18. Cate School, CA
19. Mercersburg Academy, PA</p>

<p>TIER 3
20. Georgetown Preparatory School, MD
21. Peddie School, NJ
22. Western Reserve Academy, OH
23. Concord Academy, MA
24. Miss Porter’s School, CT
25. The Hill School, PA
26. Emma Willard School, NY
27. The Loomis Chaffee School, CT
28. Northfield Mount Hermon School, MA
29. Westminster School, CT
and below</p>

<p>I have also collected information from many websites regarding the best all boy's and best all girl's schools in the U.S., and each website unanymously voted for the following</p>

<p>Best All Boy's School - Woodberry Forest School, VA
Best All Girl's School- Miss Porter's School, CT</p>

2

<p>Mercersburg is ranked at “tier 2” while The Hill and Loomis are ranked at “tier 3”. Interesting, especially considering The Hill and Loomis being a part of the TSAO.</p>

3

<p>I strongly doubt the best all boys category.</p>

4

<p>even from your own list, at least Georgetown Prep should be better than Woodbery</p>

5

<p>Please, let us not do this.</p>

<p>Absolute, tiered rankings do not exist as a real thing any more than HADES exists. Please do not try to rank schools as if it is some ordained natural order. Data and various lists are out there and exist so intelligent people can then use them to glean information and build their own list, but where some school lands on a given list is really not that helpful, and actually bad in the sense that it excludes other equally good schools and shuts down the whole process. Loomis is “worse” than Taft? Hardly. St. George’s is “better” than NMH? Nope. I can, without even using my forebrain, come up with at least 2 unmentioned schools which easily “surpass” most on your 2nd & 3rd tiers.</p>

<p>Trying to submit the final word in rankings in order “to clear some minds” does anything but.</p>

<p>Look at the top 30 school on Find the Best (boarding-schools.findthebest.com). I do not particularly agree with that site all the time, but find it less biased than many lists. Groton is #30 on that list. Loomis is #13. Accurate? Not exactly. Helpful? Yes, if you go beyond the ranking and look into what got it into that position. Loomis suffer because its endowment is not quite as high, its SSAT scores are slightly lower, and its admission rate is higher. So what? How much of this becomes a self fulfilling cycle?</p>

<p>My advice is to take all these lists with a grain of salt, but then go to Find the Best or Boarding School Review or TABS and sort for the characteristics that are important to you. Then you will have a ranking that is truly helpful to you. This is partially how my family came to focus on Proctor, which is tied with Taft on Find the Best for reasons that become clear only after you actually start engaging the forebrain.</p>

<p>As a full disclosure, much as it pains me to recognize the fact, the first 5 schools on Find the Best are ASDEH, so there is maybe a little bit of something hidden in all the data after all that the HADES junkies can cling to.</p>

<p>Wait a minute…why am I even on this thread?</p>

6

<p>Could you please explain your system of ranking? I feel like this is just a way for you to “justify” your decision of going to Woodberry Forest.</p>

7

<p>Yes, I’ve actually never heard of Woodberry Forest before you posting about it. Salisbury would be, IMO, one of the best all boy’s schools.</p>

<p>The websites “unanimously” said that Woodberry Forest is the best? Which ones?</p>

8

<p>@needtoboard @prepschoolwannab I didn’t think it would be either, and I still don’t think its right, I definitely thought it would a NE school, but this is just what I found.</p>

<p>And @needtoboard , the reason I chose Woodberry is because I feel like I will fit in there, not because of the academics one bit, ad @prepschoolwannab , youre obviously lying because if you applied to Christchurch much less have heard of Christchurch than you have definetly heard of Woodberry.</p>

9

<p>I heard of Christchurch because of a family member. I’m a girl and I’m not from Virginia so I’ve never heard of it…</p>

10

<p>Lol, Taft as a tier 1 school</p>

11

<p>I spent the first part of my life in Philadelphia. The city, like others, has a magazine, Philadelphia Magazine. Every year, they publish a Best Of issue. It is their biggest seller. It never ceases to amaze me how important it is for such a large population of people to have third party validation of their personal preferences. Whether or not their school, or local restaurant, or doctor, or neighborhood etc makes the Best Of list either puffs them up with pride or sends them into a funk. And to make matters worse, the Best Of list often changes peoples’ minds! Someone might like their school very much, but they like other peoples’ approval even more and will frequently change their allegiance for that reason, although never admit it. I’ve often wondered if the kids and parents on this site would choose their boarding schools differently in the absence of rankings and acronyms. </p>

12

<p>You’re doing no one any favors by grouping schools into arbitrary tiers. It discourages kids from applying to wonderful schools that would be a good fit. </p>

13

<p>Middlesex is higher ranked than choate bud</p>

14

<p>@MIddlesexMan Let it go, no one (should) care about rankings anyway.</p>

15

<p>Thacher and Middlesex are both first tier schools.</p>

16

<p>These types of threads are usually nonsense and are heavily biased. If you don’t agree with something, know that you aren’t alone.</p>