@superdomestique: most of the schools you listed aren’t lower tier when you look at their alumni achievements compared to those of Ivies.
I meant no offense, however the reality is that some people (including the OP) consider the Ivies on a different tier.
If you do not feel this way, you are lucky as your universe is larger.
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This question has been tossed around frequently in the Prep Schools forum quite a bit over the years, and those threads are worth the read.
The core issue is that no parent has a crystal ball. It is hard to know what an 8th grader is going to need/want from college four years from now. No parent can know whether a an 8th grader will get into a particular college, let alone whether their chances go up or down depending on which high school they attend. So much of our futures are the result of chance encounters - that inspirational teacher that flips a switch in your kid could be at the LPS or PA, who knows?
Your kid will get himself into college, not the school. He will or won’t apply himself, he will or won’t find his inspiration, he will or won’t shine, more based on who he is than a top tier bs v lps. I figure our job as parents is to put our kids into the surroundings that maximize the likelihood that they will grow into the best versions of themselves and have as many options as possible. For some kids, that is uber-competitive PA, and for some it is a big fish in small pond local options. If you nail that choice, the issue of whether he ends up at the best college for him takes care of itself.
If your kid is thriving and stretching in high school, he will get into that Ivy (Or wherever) no matter where he goes to high school. If he doesn’t, he won’t. So know your kid and what makes him a happy learner/explorer and have faith that he will have more and better options when it comes time. Plus, you and he will know what colleges fit him better in a couple years, too.
Fwiw, I say this as a parent of a public school kid now at a “top tier” (not PA) bs. I started the high school analysis much like OP with Ivy matriculation in mind. Now, having seen the profound magic of high school fit unfold, with teachers who truly know my kid, I know he is going to do great getting to a college that is right for him. Don’t care if it is an Ivy (although if that’s his goal he’s got as good a shot as any unhooked kid). High school can be that transformative. I truly believe my kid has a better shot of being a happy adult because we luckily got high school right.
So the answer lies with what school fits your kid best. Answer that, and that is the school that gets him into the best college, not the other way around.
We’re in the camp that taking care of the high school education takes care of college. There are (way) more than 50 great colleges in the U.S., and all of these boarding schools send every one of their students to a great institution. They do a beautiful job of preparing their students to hit the ground running at any of the fine colleges they attend. They also do an amazing job of curing college myopia and educating parents on what constitutes a great college and setting parental expectations accordingly. They’ve been in this business a long, long time and expertly advise their students in crafting the perfect list of target “fits” for students they know intimately. By the time our son was a sophomore, his BS knew him as a student better than we did; we were comfortably able to take our hand completely off the throttle (not that we ever had it there — our kid chose a service academy “over our dead bodies” and the surprise of his school). As a BS parent, you have zero control over your child’s college results, so you might at well let go of that now. Surprising, I know, but your BS will help you understand this long before your student starts the application process. 
As Andover-alum @skieurope always wisely posted: Colleges admit students not high schools. (We miss you ski.) The cohort that attends these elite high schools is already cherry-picked and would be successful from wherever they apply and will be successful in life from wherever they attend college. The choice of high school did not produce their success.
Boarding school is about a stellar high school education, not college results. Andover will help you understand this, and your student is in for the ride of his life. Cheers to him wherever he lands! 
ETA: Had our son had solid local options, we never would have entertained boarding school. We missed a lot. He missed nothing.
ETAA: @CateCAParent’s post is spot on.
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This thread would get more traction in the Prep forum. OP, if you search, your question has been discussed there many times over with insight from parents who have firsthand experience.
Here’s a thread to start with. There are gobs more.
This one might be helpful, too, as to Andover specifically:
Fun fact: Andover reported Mean SAT scores (2019-2020 Andover School Profile) approximately AT or BELOW the lower 25th percentile of SAT scores for most of the Ivies (excluding Cornell and Brown), Stanford, MIT, Northwestern, Duke, Rice, Vanderbilt, Chicago.
I recognize the SAT is but one part of the application process, and that kids at BS may have less time or interest in doing extensive SAT prep which may skew the scores a but, but still - the elite boarding schools don’t have a monopoly on amazing applicants to the most selective universities. But as parents have said on this thread, there are SO many great colleges and universities beyond the famous “5” or “15” or whatever arbitrary cut-off is used. If Andover is a good fit for your kid and results in him really enjoying his 3 or 4 years of high school, the college process will turn out successfully.
I recall the WSJ article by Daniel Golden (“For Groton Grads, Academics Aren’t Only Keys to Ivy Schools”) about the family that was so upset their Groton grad didn’t get into his (their?) dream colleges. He “only” ended up at Johns Hopkins, and is a renowned doctor.
@sportyprep has a great point. You do run the risk of your kid ending up at a school like Hopkins or Duke. In all seriousness, an elite boarding school is not the golden ticket to the Ivy League that it was a generation or two ago. I graduated from an elite boarding school (not PA) in the late 80s. Even in my day, the average unhooked students were matriculating at Georgetown or Tufts rather than Yale or Harvard.
I agree with all of the above advice from @ChoatieMom and @CateCAParent. If Andover is the right fit for your son, the rest will fall into place. Choose the school that will provide your son the best high school experience. What made you choose Andover to begin with? Is your son excited about the unique opportunities that Andover offers? Most importantly does he want to go there?
As far as your friends who feel that Andover wasn’t worth it or that it hurt college admissions outcomes: where did their kids end up? More importantly, how do the kids feel about their Andover experience? Would they do it all over again if they could?
You said that you feel a prestigious college is more important than a prestigious high school. I basically agree with that but would add another caveat. Generally I would say graduate school is more important than undergrad. A good prep school is just that. It prepares a student for college. I can tell you that for me and all of my high school friends, college was a breeze. That was true for those attending Ivy League schools as well as for those of us attending less prestigious schools. When it came time for grad schools, those top grades opened doors to elite programs.
Good luck to you and your son.
Sometimes it’s easier to get to an Ivy League college from a LPS if you are the top 1% of the class like my daughter. Just have a college admission plan early. She took AP classes, participated in athletics, choir, and got excellent recommendations from teachers. She applied ED and got full financial aid. She was intelligent and hard working but I doubt if she could make it to the top 10% of the PA class just because of the competition is more intense. My youngest applied to PA and got rejected due to ORM even with. 4.0GPA and 99% SSAT score. But she was accepted to a top local private school with full financial aid and I was happy because I have 4 more years with her. The top 15% of this school usually goes to Ivy or Stanford so Is not a bad alternative.
Boarding schools prepare kids to thrive in the subsequent chapters of their lives. That’s the goal – doing well in college and in life – not getting an acceptance letter from a particular institution. Our culture pushes us to be too near sighted!
While it has been nice to hear everyone’s philosophy on BS and PA, the OP’s question was
“will high school at andover help or hurt my child’s chances of ivy league college admission”
In my opinion, the answer (assuming the OP’s lvy legacy status is not linked to meaningful alumni giving) is HURT.
Obviously, to many of us, fit is the most important issue and Ivy admission is probablythe least. However, if we limit the scope of responses to answering the question that was asked, what do the experts say?
I think the answer is that you have no way to know for sure, so all you can do is make the best decision you can for your kid for now.
Maybe going to Andover means your child will discover and develop a talent or interest that maybe they wouldn’t have at another school with fewer resources, which might help with college admissions.
Or maybe it means your child will feel stressed out, be homesick, and will struggle due to these, which might hurt college admissions.
I don’t think people can necessarily predict how BS will turn out for their kids. I wouldn’t recommend choosing to send your kid to BS or not based on how you think it might affect college chances. I personally don’t think attending BS helps most kids for college admissions, but I think there are potentially a small group of kids that attending BS helps in college admissions. I do think it might hurt some kids as well. But it all depends on the kid’s particular circumstances.
If you think Andover has good opportunities for your kid, and those opportunities are ones your kid won’t find elsewhere, then your kid is excited about the opportunities, then send them to Andover for those opportunities in high school.
If you think your local public school or any of your other options offer similar opportunities and there isn’t anything special that Andover has to offer your kid, don’t send your child.
It’s the whole bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. You have no way to know whether your kid’s college chances will be better from another school compared to Andover. They might be. They may not be. So make the decision about high school based on what your kid needs and wants now for high school.
It is much more difficult to get into the Ivies now (meaning, acceptance rates are lower) compared to 25-40 years ago when you likely applied to college. Add to that that BS now send fewer kids to Ivies than they did back then. But what that means in my area is that even being among the best at public high school doesn’t mean you have a good chance at an Ivy either, because I live in an area where the public high school does not send many kids to Ivies. And I hear that in other nearby towns where more kids go to Ivies from public high school, those kids are very stressed and competing with their classmates.
I absolutely agree with @mairlodi. The reason most of us are talking about fit is because it has everything to do with how successful your kid will be at boarding school. I can give you an example of a family friend. Kid was a B student at a private day school in my city. Sophomore year they sent him off to Choate. Kid excels and gets into Harvard. I can give you examples of other kids who crashed and burned at boarding school. Some couldn’t handle the academic pressure, some maybe just weren’t ready to leave home at 14, some were expelled for drugs or alcohol.
No doubt it is much more difficult to distinguish yourself at a place like Andover where all the kids were top students at their previous schools. As a general premise, the high school valedictorian at the local public school has a better chance at Ivy League admission than the below average student at Andover. However, we all know that the Ivies reject plenty of kids with 4.0 gpas and 1600 SAT scores. Whether at Andover or elsewhere, the student needs more than just good grades.
No one can answer that question as no one here knows the OP’s kid or who/what the OP’s student will become at either LPS or BS, how that student will perform, or who the student’s competition will be in the year s/he applies to college and, even if we did have perfect knowledge of all of those things, we still couldn’t answer as we also don’t know what any particular college’s institutional needs will be in any given year, how deep their (increasingly shallow) boarding school buckets are, what type of class they are trying to craft, how this student might match any missing piece of their community puzzle, and so on and so on and so on. Heck, we’re not even very good at guessing boarding school admission chances here, so most of us avoid these parlor games.
Many of us who have been around this block are, instead, addressing what we see as the flaw in the question. Boarding school is about a great high school education, not any particular college result. The boarding schools themselves shout this loudly and clearly, and they try to ferret out applicants and parents whose goals are otherwise as they are almost sure to be disappointed. If an Ivy League college is the OP’s son’s sole goal in attending Andover, he needs to understand that Andover won’t “get him into” one of those schools (or any others). Just as from LPS, he will need to be competitive for those colleges among his peers, and he will need to bring something to the table that one or more of those colleges are looking for that year. And, yes, he will need to be in the top segment of the class (BS or LPS), but that won’t guarantee him a place at any of those colleges either; they turn down truckloads of academic excellence from both LPS and BS every year.
My advice: If only a small group of colleges is the goal, don’t waste Andover’s time. Grind it out at the LPS where it might be possible to look a bit more shiny among those peers understanding that you have no guarantees from that pool either. The Andover name on the diploma does not imbue any applicant with magical consideration. Again, colleges admit students, not high schools–and most students who are admitted to top colleges did NOT attend boarding school. OTOH, if an outstanding high school education is the goal, decide where you think your student can become the best version of himself (as @gardenstategal and @CateCAParent said upthread), and let the college chips fall where they may; your son will not be “hurt” by any of the long list of fine colleges he will be prepared to attend.
I too, agree with the majority of what has been offered to the OP, but out of courtesy, I think his specific question should be answered, especially since this question is asked frequently by those parents who prioritize Ivy League admission over everything else.
For the unhooked applicant, going to an uber competitive school that is filled with a lot of highly hooked students, with the narrow goal of Ivy League matriculation is a low percentage play.
If the Ivy League is the goal, a higher percentage play is to go to a diverse public school and be the best (which will be easier than at PA).
While the higher percentage play answer may not result in the best education, the most meaningful life experience, or most in-depth college prep, it answers the question that was asked. This is the kind of advice the OP is looking for.
Additionally, while elite BS still get students into the Ivies, these numbers are generally declining in favor of public schools. Any one who does alumni interviews for an Ivy can tell you this is a trend. In our state, this year the school I interview for took no one from private school and a higher percentage of the accepted students were first gen, low income, and/or from far flung regions than ever before.
We have no idea if matriculation from Andover will be “low percentage play” for this student. No one does. He may end up being a standout for something not even on his radar yet and be admitted by every college to which he applies.
I doubt the OP wanted the generic answer s/he could have gotten anywhere (and already knew when s/he posted): It’s harder to stand out in a cherry-picked excellent pool than it is in one that is less so. Andover is a cherry-picked excellent pool. Do the math. Draw your conclusion. Ivies are not a guarantee for anyone from any pool.
Is the OP’s kid going to end up being Ivy material/attractive from any high school? No one knows.
It is impossible to answer the question. But I will say this - if bs parents are disappointed with their kids’ college acceptances, it is soooooooo much easier/less painful to blame the bs than their kid. They will never know what would have have been the result if their kid went to a public school, so no one can refute the allegation that their really talented kid got screwed by attending a school with many other really talented kids, plus legacies. But fact is, more super-talented kids from public schools get rejected from the Ivies than bs kids. The likelihood of any super smart kid getting into any super elite school is small. The difference of likelihoods between schools is not enough to design an educational plan around.
I’ll go against the current wisdom that public schools give kids a better shot at Ivies. I don’t believe for a second that a hard working kid in bs doesn’t have an advantage over the hard working public school kid. They have unbelievable resources thrown at them. They have so many opportunities others don’t have. The college counseling resources alone - not only does the college counselor know your kid, they have direct access to college admissions officers - are amazing. If you end up in the middle of the pack at bs, you are still going to do well in the college admissions game.* Anecdotes about how a public school kid here or there got in when a bs school kid didn’t doesn’t sway my fundamental belief that bs provides a higher likelihood of success in the admissions game. That bs kid has a higher likelihood of maximizing their achievements and crafting applications. Admissions to an Ivy just isn’t a sure thing. Public school kids navigate the path all on their own. That is so much harder.
Anyway, there is no way to prove it one way or the other. So I go back to my premise: set your kid up for success in high school, and college will take care of itself.
*I am defining success in the admissions game here as meaning admissions to the top 20-30 prestige schools. That is not how I personally define It, but I think that is how OP is thinking about it. And how lots of people think about it. If it were me, and my goal was Ivy or bust, I would still choose bs and make darn sure my kid gratefully took advantage of every opportunity that came his way, especially nurturing the relationships with the teachers who not only dole out those opportunities but then will write letters of recommendation. The bs kids who have those relationships fare the best, imho. And not just in college admissions.
Of course no one knows. That is the easy (qualitative) answer.
However, given there is quantitative data, if you look at the matriculation lists for all the most elite BSs, and filter out all the hooks, the number of unhooked Ivy-bound kids is very small, and are almost always in the top 5% of the class. That is a lot of pressure. If the Ivy League is the goal of the OP, the answer to his question is more Hurt than Help.
Please know that I agree with most the people who have posted that the OP is asking the wrong question, however, also please know that some parents have an Ivy fixation, rightly or wrongly, that they need to process this for themselves. To insist the OP is asking the wrong question without answering it is also wrong and also may be culturally insensitive.
It is worth noting that if a broader universe of colleges is acceptable, elite BS are a very worthy option. Decades ago, I was a bottom quartile graduate of a top east coast BS and was still able to matriculate at a top 30 school (and I was not a legacy/athlete/URM/development case). This would have never happened at a public school. Obviously, the college counselors at elite BSs have extremely strong relationships with schools in the top 20 to 40 and can make miracles happen. That being said, while it will take more parental navigation and student self awareness/motivation at a non-boarding school experience, it can be done.
While I don’t know the OP, I have been asked the question he is asking many times. Of all the people who have asked me this question (who had unshakeable Ivy aspirations) who chose to go to BS have regretted the decision, despite their child having a memorable/unique experience and enviable, but non-Ivy results. In retrospect, most have suggested that the LPS or regional private day school might have worked out better.
In my own experience, we did not go the elite BS route or the LPS route for our three children, but have been fortunate that Ivy League outcomes (none at my alma mater) are not an either/or proposition. Thinking critically about the process, and looking at the data quantitatively, and be willing to look past the BS marketing are steps in the right direction to making a good decision.
If his Ivy aspirations are unshakable, I think the OP is right to ask the question and deserves more than one answer to the question he is asking.
I agree there is no way for any of us to answer that question for your child as experiences will obviously vary.
For mine the answer was yes. Attending PA definitely hurt his chances for admission to an Ivy League college, but I would be saying the same thing if he had decided to attend Exeter, Deerfield, or Suffield (other schools he was admitted to). He would have been a straight A valedictorian if he stayed at our LPS, but instead was just another “average kid” at Andover and this would most likely have been the case at the other schools I mentioned. Because of this his chances would and should obviously lessened when it is that easy for colleges to compare him to his many brilliant classmates.
Even though his chances were hurt by attending Andover he is now much better prepared for future success in both college and life than he would have been spending the past four years at our LPS being told how smart he was. Absolutely no regrets!
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https://www.andover.edu/files/CCOProfile2019-2020.pdf
So let’s talk about actual matriculation stats for Andover. For the class of 2019, about 27% matriculated to an Ivy, Stanford or MIT. About the same amount matriculated to the next tier (shudder to use that language, but I am going with it).
What percentage of students is an “acceptable” number for Ivy matriculation? Because 27% seems pretty good to me. Middle of the pack kids are doing just fine. And not just legacies, athletes and urms. Do people really think that a middle of the pack Andover kid automatically deserves an Ivy spot? Harvard’s admissions rate is what, 4%?
9 out of 304 Andover students matriculated to Harvard. More probably got in than matriculated. If 100 (33% - just a guess) Andover students applied and 10 got in, that’s a 10% acceptance rate. Even factoring in legacies, etc (those exist out in the gen pop, too btw, not just in bs), that is a pretty good result.
In contrast, in my “one of the best in California” high SES school district, our public high schools graduate about 1300 students. 200 (15%) applied to Harvard. 13 ( 6.5%) got in. Also a good result, but not as good. I don’t know how many actually matriculated. There are loads of brilliant and talented kids here (almost no one sends their kids to bs so very little brain drain). The top 10% here would be indistinguishable from Andover students. Probably a significant number of legacies here, too. If I wanted my “average excellent” kid to go to Harvard and money was no object, I would take my chances with Andover over the public high school - especially since Andover comes with so many other perks.