Wall Street Journal ranking of best prep schools

Prep School Admissions Prep School Parents
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<p>A few days ago I read a WSJ article which ranked U.S. prep schools based on what percentage of the student body attends a selection of six top colleges and universities, including Harvard, Swarthmore, Stanford and Pomona. You'd think I wouldn't complain, as my school (Andover) was the highest ranked BS (Collegiate came out #1 overall). However, I think this is a rather daft way to rank prep schools. Where are the rankings based on student satisfaction, after school access to teachers, breadth and depth of curriculum, parental involvement in the school, etc.? I know it's more difficult to rank schools based on more holistic criteria, but I thought the choice of colleges was a bit random, and I am tired of seeing schools ranked based on which colleges the students matriculate to, anyway.</p>

<p>Any thoughts? I can't remember how old this article was, BTW.</p>

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<p>It was a 2007 WSJ article:
<a href=“WSJ.com”>http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/info-COLLEGE0711-sort.html&lt;/a&gt;

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<p>Thanks. I couldn’t remember what all of the colleges were offhand.</p>

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<p>Wow Collegiate School (26%) looks almost twice as good as Andover (15.9%) in college placements.</p>

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<p>^^I bet either is better than YOUR school</p>

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<p>College placements in these 8 colleges, that is. But Collegiate does send a ridiculously high number of its graduates to top tier schools (especially Ivies). Still, my point is: is this the best way to rank prep schools? And why choose these particular colleges?</p>

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<p>You wish… You don’t have a clue which school I go to.</p>

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<p>But YOU know which school you go to, and that gotta be good enough.</p>

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<p>True. My school produces good results minus the 200K pricetag.</p>

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<p>pwalsh and benley…are you both kids? this kind of back and forth is better taken off line.</p>

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<p>Pwalsh: Andover’s tuition is far from unusual. Most BS cost between $40,000-$50,000/year. What does make PA unique is its need-blind admissions. For what it’s worth, I was on financial aid when I was there.</p>

<p>Anyway, enough arguing. Does anyone have any thoughts about my original post?</p>

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<p>pwalsh: Andover’s tuition is far from unusual. Most BS cost around $200K for four years. What does make PA unique is its needs-blind admissions policy. And for what it’s worth, I was on FA when I was there.</p>

<p>Now…back to the original post?</p>

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<p>@agent, all the prep schools listed are superb; however, how they are ranked by the WSJ is indeed daft. Admission into those colleges has a high component of legacy & bling admits. You really think famous-lastname kids go on to Ivy colleges all because of the prep school they attended?</p>

<p>FYI
<a href=“http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/Polk_Groton_Grads.htm[/url]”>http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/Polk_Groton_Grads.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>On the separate topic of why would one bother to pay 200k for an education that can be had for free: one can also lead a full life subsisting on lentils and rice.</p>

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<p>DS attends a well regarded prep school. He has a friend whose dad is an Ivy alum & president of a Wall Street investment bank. Both the friend and his older sibling have a big-guns private educational consultant, despite the prep school offering excellent college counseling. Last year, the older sib was accepted to dad’s school. Was it attending the prep school that got him admitted?</p>

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<p>Interesting article. Thanks, GMT.</p>

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<p>Agree with first gen. Picture your teen in his/her most irritating stage of life, spinning off comments at the dinner table with nothing behind them other than the attempt to bug the heck out of his/her parents. Just give him a gentle virtual smile, say “Hmmm…is that so sweetie?” and move on.</p>

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<p>I made a similar suggestion on a different thread yesterday. Seems we are mostly of like mind on this…</p>

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<p>I think the rankings based on college matriculation are rankings with very limited scope. While college placement is one measure of the “output”, it’s giving far less than a whole picture of the strengths of a school that have short and long term impact to its students. Besides, at a certain point, a school’s matriculation stats are not a major concern to many families and students that don’t necessarily expect to attend the top few highly selective colleges when the majority of the graduating class go on to colleges of at least descent quality, which is true at many private schools. It’s those things OP mentioned that matter most although they are hard to measure and even harder to rank. I know Andover has started a program recently where they will follow their alumni to research into the long term impact of the education they received at Andover, which I don’t know how effective could be but think is a good move.</p>

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<p>I like how this list ranks prep schools, not just by matriculation into HYPMS, but into ‘strong’ schools (i.e. top 50 colleges/universities):
<a href=“http://matriculationstats.org/boarding-school-stats[/url]”>http://matriculationstats.org/boarding-school-stats&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The list also breaks out boarding schools from NYC day schools (skewed demographics of celeb parents) and day schools elsewhere.</p>

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<p>GMT, that is a much better ranking system than the WSJ one, but it still uses the USN&WR college rankings, which should be taken with a grain of salt as a large part of the score is subjectively based on what colleges think of each other (22.5% of the total score is based on “peer assessments”), rather than on academic quality. There are other flaws in its methodology, as well.</p>