Northeastern Prep Schools

NORTHEASTERN PREP SCHOOLS

Prep Schools

At the beginning of the twentieth century America's leading college preparatory schools, although few in number, wielded an impressive influence in American life—particularly in the northeastern United States, where most such institutions were concentrated. The prestige of these preparatory, or "prep," schools—Hotchkiss, Exeter, and Groton, to name a few— derived largely from the distinguished accomplishments of their graduates, many of whom, especially in the Northeast, became community, state, and national leaders. In 1900 a song from the Choate School summed up the notion that these elite prep schools were the training grounds for future leaders. The song was sung to the tune of "Jingle Bells."

Let us now explain
What we mean to be.
That boy there will be a judge
And that one a M.D.
That one's a Diplomat,
To London he'll be sent,
And the one who's manliest of all,
We'll make him President.

Characteristics

Most of the leading prep schools in the United States were founded during the thirty-year period from 1880 to 1910; and among those created in the decade 1900-1909 were Middlesex (1901), Deerfield Academy (1903), and Kent (1906). All these elite, north-eastern schools shared four key characteristics. First, all were boarding schools for boys. Second, the objectives of each institution were simultaneously to prepare its students for college success and to build the students' characters. A third common denominator among these schools was that their operating expenses were covered by student tuition and by endowments made by wealthy philanthropists. None of these schools received government assistance, and all were private institutions. Fourth, and perhaps most important, because these schools were expensive to run and therefore charged very high tuitions, their students were almost all sons of wealthy Americans. At a time when two-thirds of all adult male workers in the United States received a yearly salary of $600 or less, these preparatory schools typically levied a tuition greater than $600. Primarily because of such high tuitions, critics charged the prep schools were elitist and, in fact, "class schools." Defenders of these schools pointed with pride to their "independent" nature and claimed that, because they differed in style and curriculum from timid, bureaucratic, public schools, the nation's prep schools had established themselves as the bastions of America's future leadership.

Institutional Connections

In the decade 1900-1909, at the same time prep schools were emerging as a strong institution in the United States, the modern American university was beginning to take its definitive shape and American high schools were surging in number. The simultaneity of these trends is not coincidental. By the end of the nineteenth century, following the decline of the academy—a private secondary school that principally served the economic elites—educators began to search for a new institution to prepare students for college. Critics charged that most of the nation's high schools failed to prepare students adequately for first-rate universities. Indeed, many critics of high schools were themselves university leaders; and some university presidents, to ensure a body of well-prepared students for their freshman classes, urged the creation of family boarding schools to teach the skills and knowledge necessary for college-level work. During the decade 1900-1909 a large percentage of the students at the leading northeastern universities were graduates of private boarding schools. At Yale in 1907, for example, nearly 40 percent of the freshman class came from the country's top fourteen boarding schools; only 20 percent came from public high schools; the rest came from private day schools. The trend at Yale was repeated in other respected northeastern universities, which, in 1909, drew most of their entering classes from private schools, predominantly boarding schools. At Princeton 78 percent of all entering students in 1909 came from private schools; at Yale, 65 percent; and at Harvard, 47 percent. By comparison only 9 percent of the University of Michigan's entering class of 1909, and just 8 percent of the University of Wisconsin's, had graduated from private schools.

Student and Institutional Origins

The fourteen leading prep schools at the turn of the century fell into three distinct categories. In the first were the oldest boarding schools—Andover, Exeter, and Deerfield—that were comparatively inexpensive and had a student body generally more diverse than that of other prep schools. The second group—St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, St. George's, and Kent—consisted of Episcopalian church schools whose student populations came almost solely from wealthy urban families. The third group consisted of nondenominational boarding schools—Lawrenceville, Hill, Choate, Taft, Hotchkiss, and Middlesex—that also drew their students from wealthy, urban families. The goal of all these schools was perhaps fitly summed up by the son of a St. Paul's School rector, who characterized the schools as "self-sufficient and insular communit[ies], providing for [their] rather narrow clientele just what was expected—a conservative, gentle-manly preparation of body and mind for the Ivy League Colleges and for support of the economic, political, and religious status quo."

Source:

James McLachlan, American Boarding Schools: A Historical Study (New York: Scribners, 1970).