Because my parents recently moved from the house that I grew up in, I went back and cleaned out my old room. In a stack of papers I found the matriculation list from my Lawrenceville class back in the late 1970s. Since I don’t think the US News rankings had started back then and would have been somewhat different even if they had, I didn’t bother doing a full analysis of the data. I did, however, check the HYPMS and Ivy statistics. My class had a HYPMS percentage of 13.9% (no M’s since I was the only one to get in and I chose one of the HYP’s) and an Ivy percentage of 23.4%. These percentages compare with Lawrenceville’s current ones of 13.4% and 23.3%. Amazing!
A Little Context
It’s obvious that some of the schools shown on these pages have absolutely incredibly matriculation statistics. As it turns out, even the schools which don’t seem to compare favorably to the other schools shown here also have very impressive results when viewed in the proper context. For example, Collegiate in NYC and Roxbury Latin in Boston have the highest HYPMS percentage with approximately 25% of each year’s graduating class attending one of those five fine universities. On a nationwide basis, approximately only one quarter of one percent, 0.25%, attend those universities. So, on a percentage basis, about 100 times as many students from those schools go HYPMS as do on a national basis! But if we look at the schools shown on these pages with the lowest HYPMS percentages, we still see levels solidly above 0.25%. So, it’s important to keep in mind that even if a school looks like it’s at the bottom of a list after you’ve done the “sort” of your choice, it still has very impressive results.
I also estimated the Ivy percentage on a nationwide basis. It was approximately one half of one percent. Again, the schools with highest Ivy percentages dwarf that percentage, though not quite by the 100 to 1 ratio we saw with the HYPMS ratio. The maximum ratio we’ve seen so far is about 80 to 1. In any event, the schools that do not appear so favorably compared to the other schools here, still have impressive results when viewed in a national context.
About this section
I know that what has drawn you here is most likely that very human fascination with rankings in general and with the rankings of either NYC day schools or boarding schools specifically (day schools in other cities hasn’t gotten much traction yet). But I realized that in addition to producing those rankings for your use and/or entertainment, I had a few things to say about them.
Some of those things will be about how the process of finding and analyzing more data is going (of course, this can never finish – new data comes out every year). And some will be about interpreting tidbits that I’ve noticed in the data.
For today, I have something very simple to mention, but it was exciting to me. I had thought I had found all the data I was going to find for NYC schools. But yesterday evening, I found that I had missed information for Nightingale-Bamford, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side. The information is publicly available on the school’s website, but not in an obvious place. Just some dumb luck led me to stumble upon it, and it has now been added to the NYC page.