<p>I personally LOVE groton school.....i went to see Brooks School today and did NOT like it at all.........Exeter and Andover are supposebly the two best BS in the country........</p>
<p>"i mean, "andover warrior?" you have got to be kidding me."</p>
<p>artsmart: I believe the mascot of the public high school in Andover, MA is the Golden Warrior.</p>
<p>The best prep school is the school that allows your child to grow in a positive fashion. For those who like ratings & rankings (including me), it is best to do so based on specific factors such as those used by USNews for its college ratings and subsequent rankings, in addition to college placement success.
Ratings can be important for those wishing to learn & study in an intellectually challenging & stimulating environment which, it can be reasonably argued, occurs best when students are challenged in an environment of other similarly motivated & intellectually capable classmates.
In response to Post #19: It depends. Mercersburg Academy is the best school for some students, while other students' abilities & motivation may require a more intense academic environment found at schools like Andover, St. Paul's, Groton, Hotchkiss, Exeter, Milton....
Other students thrive at one of the several United World Colleges that start in the 11th grade.
Also to Post #19: A couple of the schools on your list are day schools (for example, Boston University). But traditionally speaking & reaffirmed in several recent studies, the top academic boarding schools remain the same due to a self perpetuating system & very healthy endowments. St. Paul's heads most studies, closely followed by Phillips Academy (Andover). Then a grouping of Hotchkiss, Groton, Milton, Deerfield, Exeter. The next group starts with Lawrenceville and includes several others depending upon your particular needs & interests. For the most part, these eight named schools are the Ivy League of boarding schools.</p>
<p>You really can't rank schools since each is unique as is each child. What you need to figure out our are your child's strengths and weaknesses and the right school to address these. The best you can do is try to categorize schools. Even then, the top schools for Ivy admissions (probably the most popular way to categorize) are so different (size, course offerings, formality, etc.) that it is really dangerous to compare generically. If you want the most accurate college placement information (Ivy plus MIT and Stanford), you can subsribe to prepreview.com's rankings. They generally list SPS or Deerfield at the top (SPS for the last several years), closely followed by Milton, Groton, Middlesex, Andover and Exeter, in that order. Noble has really become a strong contender in that category. Lawrenceville, Hotchkiss and Choate are in a group a little lower.</p>
<p>I'm new to this forum, so if this is Old or Irrelevant information, please ignore it.
In 2007 the Wall Street Journal put together a list of best high schools, based on a "success rate," defined as the number of students matriculating to a particular list of colleges, divided by the number of students at the high school. The schools weren't the Ivy's, but included: Harvard, Princeton, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, Univ. of Chicago, Johns Hopkins. They began with the colleges' entering class and worked their way backwards. Among their best are 11 boarding schools:
Phillips Andover
Phillips Exeter
Milton
Groton
Laqwrenceville
St. Paul's Webb Schools
St. Andrews
Hotchkiss
Deerfiled
Choate</p>