I came across a previous CollegeConfidential thread from 2018 titled Where the Smart Money is Going: Elite Prep School Matriculation which commented on the college matriculation rates from some of the country’s most elite/selective prep schools. This time round, I’ve looked at the most recent matriculation lists/school profiles of 30 prep schools (~11,000 matriculations) across the country (Andover, Exeter, Choate, Brearley, Groton, Lakeside, Harvard-Westlake etc.) to identify whether there has been any changes in popularity/feeder school magnets/general observations since then. The standardized test scores of the average student at these prep schools typically places them within the top 5 percentile/decile nationwide.
As before, all of the schools placed very strongly in the Ivy League + Stanford, Duke, Chicago and MIT with about 37% of all matriculants attending one of the 12 colleges. 33% went to other private universities with the most popular being NYU, Georgetown, Tufts, WashU and USC. 13% went to public universities with the most popular being UMich, UVA, St Andrews (UK), UC Berkeley and UW. Finally, 18% to LACs with Wesleyan, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Colby and Amherst being the most common destinations.
|Column 1 | Column 2 | Column 3 | Column 4 | E | F|
|— | — | — | — | — | —|
|1 | Chicago | 564 | 16 | Michigan | 239|
|2 | NYU | 482 | 17 | Dartmouth | 231|
|3 | Georgetown | 472 | 17 | Northwestern | 231|
|3 | Harvard | 472 | 19 | Duke | 213|
|5 | Cornell | 442 | 19 | Tulane | 213|
|6 | Brown | 409 | 21 | Northeastern | 212|
|7 | Yale | 405 | 22 | Virginia | 190|
|8 | Penn | 384 | 23 | BostonU | 186|
|9 | Columbia | 375 | 24 | Weslayan | 166|
|10 | Tufts | 327 | 25 | St Andrews (UK) | 165|
|11 | WashU | 272 | 26 | Bowdoin | 163|
|12 | Stanford | 265 | 27 | SMU | 162|
|13 | USC | 259 | 28 | Middlebury | 147|
|14 | Princeton | 249 | 29 | Wake Forest | 146|
|15 | BC | 241 | 30 | UC Berkeley | 145|
Main Observations:
- Chicago was by and far the single biggest target. It has massively increased its intake from prep schools in recent years. However Yale was the only college which saw numerous matriculants from each of the 30 prep schools in the list.
- Universities well known for being dominated by the top 1% (New York Times, 2017) but are not necessarily Ivy+SDCM tier are well represented in the T30 for prep schoolers: NYU, USC, Tufts, WashU, Tulane, SMU and Wake Forest.
- Amongst USNews T30 colleges, Rice and Notre Dame (+ Vanderbilt and Johns Hopkins to an extent) were under-represented which is probably due to their location not being favored by students from NE prep schools. CalTech was rarely present in any matriculation lists which is not a surprise given its size. However for publics in the T30 which would have larger student bodies, UC Davis, UC San Diego and UF saw close to zero prep school matriculants.
- As you would expect, region plays a large part in a college’s popularity. Some universities located in the same state/region were only popular with matriculants of the prep school e.g. Andover & UMass Amherst and Ransom Everglades & UF. UW would have failed to make it into the top 5 public universities if Washington-based prep schools were excluded - virtually no matriculants from NE prep schools enrolled at UW.
- Southern Methodist University was not a universally popular choice despite making it into the top 30, only 13/30 prep schools saw more than one matriculant going there with schools in the South sending high numbers.
- As in previous threads, St Andrews was the only non-US college to appear in pretty much every matriculation list of, both east coast and west coast, prep schools. Despite having a student body around a quarter of the size of the next most common non-US college, McGill (Canada), St Andrews enrolls about 5x more students from prep schools.
Trends:
- The proportion of prep schoolers enrolling at Ivy+SDCM has maintained at the 37-38% range. LACs, as a whole, have seen a drop in popularity since the previous analysis, from 22% to 18%.
- The most common other private universities (NYU, Georgetown, Tufts, WashU, USC and BC) remain unchanged although Tufts and WashU have risen in popularity whilst USC and BC have declined. The top most common other public universities (UMich, UVA, St Andrews, UC Berkeley) remain unchanged from the previous analysis however UCLA has dropped slightly in numbers (perhaps reflecting its increased selectivity?) while UIUC has dropped to the point that it barely features in any matriculation lists. UW (University of Washington) and UW-Madison have seen modest increases in popularity.
- The previous two threads do not mention Tulane and Northeastern, but from anecdotal experience, Tulane is declining in popularity whilst Northeastern is rising. These may not be fully reflected in the figures since the matriculation list figures are typically for a 5-year period.
Feeder/Pipeline Schools:
Some prep schools disproportionately sent its alumni to some colleges relative to acceptance rate/student body/other prep schools, this includes:
- Andover—MIT; Brearley—Harvard; Bush—USC/UW; Cate—Stanford/Tulane; Chapin—Cornell; Choate—Yale/St Andrews; College Prep—Chicago/UCLA; Dalton—Harvard/Weslayan; Deerfield—Brown/Virginia; Episcopal—Virginia/UNC-CH; Exeter—N/A; Georgetown DS—NYU/WashU; Groton—Chicago; Harvard-Westlake—Chicago/NYU; Horace Mann—Chicago;
- Hotchkiss—Chicago/Middlebury; Lakeside—Stanford/UW; Lawrenceville—Penn/Colgate; Middlesex—Chicago/Trinity; Milton—Harvard; Nueva—Stanford; Pingry—Princeton/Notre Dame; Ransome Everglades—MIT/NYU; Roxbury Latin—Harvard; St Mark’s—UT Austin/SMU; St Paul’s—Brown/Virginia; Taft—Georgetown/Miami; Thacher—Dartmouth/Colorado; UPrep—UW; Winsor—Harvard
- The Top 5 Prep Schools for Ivy+SDCM Placements as a proportion of their matriculants were Brearley, Groton, Dalton, Nueva and Hotchkiss.
- NB: The concept of “pipeline schools” has been heavily debated recently with suggestions that this is more a reflection of the number of legacies/athletes/children of donors/faculty at the prep school rather than the prep school having a better chance of getting the student into a specific college.
*Average matriculant figures were used for Andover, Exeter and Deerfield as they do not provide exact figures. For clarity, 564 refers to 564 of the ~11,000 matriculants analyzed matriculating to the University of Chicago. Some prep schools were not chosen for this analysis as they only provided the names of the colleges where matriculants went to.
P.S. If you’re interested in the raw data (it also includes the five universities which just narrowly miss out on being in the top 30), search for this thread on Reddit and you’ll be able to find a link to a Google Sheets. I was actually told by a parent from there that I should share my findings on here as this will likely be of interest to CollegeConfidential parents.
), but deep south so curious on your take… Vandy is ranked well above Tulane, so it would seem given they are both southern schools, that Nashville having a more powerful economic engine/growth vs. New Orleans, that it would be better represented among these elite prep schools.