Best private schools in NYC?
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Anonymous
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I'd move Collegiate up to Tier 1. Really top of the top are Trinity, Brearley, Collegiate.
I'd move Regis up (it's a school where unhooked kids get into HYP) to Spence level. St Ann's is not as desirable as it was even 3 years ago. |
Anonymous
What changed with St. Ann’s? |
Anonymous
The recent scandal I would imagine? I would never send my children there after that. |
Anonymous
They fired everyone involved, the catfishing felon teacher took a deal and will be in prison for a few years - but that plus the suicide case profiled in the NYT turned me off completely. I don’t believe their college rates are good because it’s a good school at all at this point, I think it’s past reputation, legacy donations, and other ineffable things. It never had a rep for rigor or high intellectual activity, did it? |
Anonymous
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I think Chapin and Spence are the same tier these days, their college placements are incredibly similar.
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Anonymous
St. Ann's is very artsy fartsy. Which is very attractive for some people. But I agree that it was never known for its academic rigor, and the recent situations have brought out into the open what it is. I am a Dem but I always found St. Ann's to be so performatively woke, and the effort to be super kind and forgiving to the horrible teacher blew up. Ironically, I know a family that is now pretty Trumpy that sent their kid there, but the kid graduated pre-2015 so the world was a different place then. |
Anonymous
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St Ann's has definitely lost its luster. The college placement doesn't seem all that impressive once you remove the celebrities.
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Anonymous
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The top students at St Ann's learn more than any student at any other school in NYC or possibly elsewhere. The reason is that the no grades policy plus the very long school day (7:30-6:15 with no lunch, if you are crazy enough to try) allows the students to take huge numbers of extra academic subjects and electives without having to worry about doing perfectly in each class. For self-motivated kids, this is perfect. There are tests, but there are far more research papers and project based learning exercises. The class isn't as big as at Dalton, and there are considerably fewer STEM types, so kids can and do run out of classes. They used to cater more to prodigies -- e.g. a 2nd grader taking calculus, but I haven't seen many of those lately. |
Anonymous
Look at the decisions IG pages for Dalton, Spence, etc. Look at the baby pictures then google the parents of the kids if you can figure that out. A lot of the kids are legacy or minority, but it is really hard for outsiders to tell if that was the determining factor. |
Anonymous
I am a moderate Dem who is to the left of the vast majority of America, but I find the school to be full of virtue-signaling wokeness. I despise MAGA Trumpers but I wonder if a traditional socially moderate, fiscally conservative conservative would have been treated with respect there. I think your statement that they learn more than any student is hyperbole, though I appreciate that you qualified it as being top students. They actually do have pretty standard core requirements. I find the no grade policy to be not constructive at the HS level. Most top privates provide extensive narratives with grades. And most top universities know what the top private schools are and how to interpret their grading systems. That being said, I just looked at their exmissions page and it is better than I thought. Like other schools, I'm sure there are a ton of legacies/minorities in there, but still impressive. https://saintannsny.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/SchoolProfile24-25.pdf |
Anonymous
I agree with your first statement -- the previous headmaster was pretty cynical about the DEI stuff and let the activists run wild. The worst ones have been fired, and there's less emphasis on it now, but a lot of the parents tell their kids not to talk about any of this stuff except as a mechanism for getting into college. My statement about learning more is based on math and how kids learn: -- there are only so many waking hours in a day -- commutes are largely non-productive time -- excessive sports are largely non-productive time -- sitting in a class where you know the material is largely non-productive time -- it takes significant rote memorization and time to go from mastery (95-97) to perfection (100). (e.g. memorizing tables of integrals, irregular verbs, vocabulary lists, etc) So kids who live nearby, are intrinsically motivated, doesn't get distracted by their parents' social climbing / jet set vacations, and are prepared to work hard can take vastly more classes than at any other school. As an example, HM limits students to 5 core subjects plus a few non-core electives. St. Ann's theoretically allows 8+, but 6 is common (two languages or two sciences), and 7 is rare. Since there's no real competition, students can get a very broad education that is deep in some areas. I think it turns them into good individual contributors, good writers, good researchers, but mediocre finance/office workers. Being forced to do well in your least favorite class teaches useful life skills that St. Ann's grads often lack. |
Anonymous
Are most of the St Ann's kids really self driven to do this kind of work? |
Anonymous
Interesting. I disagree with so much of this but your description of it is very fair and interesting, so thank you. What about extra-curriculars? And I am referring to real extra-curriculars for the sake of exercise, creativity and escaping, not for the sake of padding a college app. Being in academic school for that long is not healthy. Kids need to be kids. There is also a difference between "jet set vacations" and "taking a week to do something else to recharge." Which all people should do. A lot of people pinch pennies to send their kids to expensive privates to get away from the Stuy mentality of countless APs and non-stop work. Especially for high school kids. Colleges should be doing a better job of encouraging kids to relax. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
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St. Ann's . . . Very impressive. Attending: Yale-5, Brown-5, Harvard-3, Cornell-4, Cu/Princeton/UPenn-4 Whoever said they are 4th tier is DELUSIONAL. |