Yesterday Forbes released their list of the best prep schools in America, which really is basically a list of the best prep schools in New York, because seven of the top twenty are here in the city. For number of fancy schools, we’re apparently only rivaled by Boston, which had three in the top twenty. The order of New York schools is this: Trinity (which topped the whole list), Horace Mann (second), Brearley (fourth), Collegiate (seventh), Spence (ninth), Chapin (eleventh), and Dalton (thirteenth). Now, obviously no list like this is ever that meaningful — we’ll leave out our opinion of the placement and order of Andover, Exeter, and St. Paul’s — but we’re sure there are plenty of people who have something to say about it. For example, the first person to point out the list to us and indicate its importance was, as you might guess, a Trinity grad.
Here’s how Forbes explains how it came to its conclusion:
Half of the ranking was weighed equally between student/faculty ratio, percentage of faculty that possess advanced degrees and size of the school’s endowment. The other half was based on percentage of graduates, over the last five years, that matriculated into 10 top colleges: Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. This list, while arbitrary, reflects the fact that many parents send their kids to prep school specifically so they can get into the most prestigious universities.
Sorry, Duke, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Caltech, and every other Ivy plus school not on this list. Parents send their kids to prep school to get their kids into top schools in the Northeast. And Stanford.
America’s Best Prep Schools [Forbes]
