No fucking way is Phillips Exeter Academy is the best school in America, though it is unique and really great for certain students--and way better than Andover, which is a douchebag hot house. Exeter is too big, as is Andover, more like small colleges than proper high schools. For some perspective, let's be honest up front that all those private Manhattan day schools are fucking garbage whose purportedly astounding college acceptance ratings are all about legacies and parting clueless rich New York assholes from their money. The best and brightest students at all those schools run like hell from those day schools and go to a real boarding school each and every time. I went to one of the big five prep schools, Andover, Choate, Exeter, Hotchkiss, and St. Paul's. These are the only peer schools, no Lawrenceville, no Northfield Mount Hermon, no Deerfield, no Taft, with the acknowledgement of Groton's existence but not inclusion due to the micro size of the Groton student body--seriously, every of those little bastards at Groton is like 9-10 inches tall. The only school that can make a claim of inclusion with those premier five in 2015 is Deerfield, which has taken the last 25 years of coeducation to renovate its drab and threadbare campus and buy a renewed reputation with tainted Koch money. Today, perhaps those big five should really be the big six, but do we really trust Deerfield or the vile Koch brothers that much?
Of the big five, neither Andover nor Exeter is the best. Exeter is the better of the two, with an academic rigor and facilities which can't be matched by the somewhat worn and stale Andover. Choate is not the best, either. Choate has a long-standing endowment problem, and when they made the move to make the school smaller a generation ago, shrinking from Andover and Exeter size, and increase endowment, they neither got small enough nor increased the endowment enough to matter. Choate also has way too many day students, something like 25% of the student body--that's higher than the percentage at The Gunnery, and nobody considers The Gunnery one of the best of the best--which is an atrocity considering Choate is in nowheresville, so the quality of those ubiquitous day students must suck balls. Choate should have reduced its student body to around 600 with no more than 10-12% day students. Too many day students is a sign of weakness. So Choate's out.
For what it's worth, Northfield Mount Hermon was a thousand kids back when Choate was, with a fucked up and awful two campus system, but they cut way down to around 650, with a smaller day student percentage than Choate. NMH is the kind of school I would definitely let my kid go to if I didn't have a legacy thing going on; I always kinda dug that school, and the smaller, single-campus version is the best ever. The great Edward Said went there. Unfortunately, so did the disgusting Dore Gold.
That leaves St. Paul's and Hotchkiss. Since the general move to coeducation by so many boarding schools in the early 70's--note that fucking Deerfield was a generation late to that shit--St. Paul's was always considered the best and most exclusive of the big five. All boarding, great campus, sky-high endowment. Hotchkiss is, was, and always has been the sleeper. Hotchkiss has a fantastic campus and monstrous endowment. What holds it back, maayyybbbbeeeee, is the palpable excess of NY city over-articulated preppy inanity among some of the kids, but that's a stretch even today. The analogy would be comparing Harvard, Princeton, and Yale to Williams and Amherst. Is Harvard the best undergraduate education in America? Not a fucking chance. Williams and Amherst are a billion times better, but if you wear a Harvard shirt, everyone knows what that means, but if you wear a Williams shirt, you get a "what's that?" type question. Andover and Exeter are not the best high schools, but they are the only two elite boarding schools recognized by the wider civilian population.
The best high school in America is St. Paul's or Hotchkiss, with Groton right there if you like a really small school and can live with the lack of opportunity such a small school represents. And really, an acceptance to any of the big five, even Andover, Choate, and Exeter, or Groton, and possibly Deerfield in the 21st century, is the best thing that can happen to any 13 year old kid and represents a life-changing opportunity.
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