Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:>There are legit “townies” with DUIs, eight kids, no college, pick ups, and they become grandparents in their late 30s

Is this issue here that your kids have to know and interact with "regular" Americans? Like that would be so bad?

Lol. Apparently there are no locals in Westchester. Only if you slum it in New Jersey or Long Island do you have to deal with the low life riff raff "locals".

There are townies in Rye, low income people in Bronxville apartments, and Port Chester exists. Mount Kisco is ruining Fox Lane. Happy now?

I knew someone who lived in a Bronxville apartment. They were low income by Bronxville standards but still quite high income, white collar professionals with one having an Ivy degree. Not everyone who goes to top schools pursues high paying degrees, but they might still want an excellent education for their child so find a way to make it work. It is not easy being the "poor folk" in town but in a case like this, the gap is not as huge as if they were in the Westchester equivalent of NYCHA or something like that (which the government is trying to get all of these rich towns to build, which would be a nightmare for all parties involved).

I guess you're living in a nightmare because horror of horrors, there are public housing developments in Westchester county.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Back to op’s original question. Op, you seem to have a belief that your kids will have a better chance of attending a T10 coming from Princeton High than your private, because you think the class will be less competitive. Last year, Princeton high school had 371 AP scholars (students who scored at least a 3 on three or more ap tests). Assuming this number is spread equally among sophomores, juniors and seniors (since freshman won’t have data)meven though more likely to be concentrated among juniors and seniors, that’s one hundred and twenty kids per class that will be gunning for highly selective colleges.
Further, 84 kids applied to Princeton U from Princeton High two years ago. https://www.towntopics.com/2025/10/29/matriculation-report-helps-phs-counselors-discover-student-trends/ That is roughly the number of kids who think they are Ivy level applicants, the number is maybe 30 kids at my kid’s private.
19 of those kids were accepted which seems like a huge number. But we know that three quarters will usually be faculty kids. Let’s assume only two thirds are faculty kids. That’s assume only one other kid is hooked in any way, also probably an underestimate. That gives us an unhooked acceptance rate to Princeton from Princeton High of 7 percent. You can compare that to your current school, but my guess is that they are similar. Princeton High sends zero to two kids to other Ivies and about 3 to 5 to Cornell. That isn’t better than my private, and the pool of competitive applicants at Princeton High is at least twice as large.

So it’s a nice place to live and you should give it a try if you want a suburb with a high quality of life. But don’t move because you think it will improve your kid’s odds of getting into an Ivy, it won’t do that.

Thank you for this well thought out post. I think we would make the move if we felt that we weren't hurting the quality of our kids' education (it's bad enough that they would have to say goodbye to many close and good friends). Princeton is somewhat unique because there does seem to be a very well-qualified pool of undergrads who are active in tutoring local kids. So we don't expect any issues in terms of supplementing to make up for any not so great teachers when that occurs. We expect the peer set to lean more towards STEM which actually we welcome.

With regards to colleges, I agree with the 7% you backed into for Princeton specifically. Thank you for sharing the AP Scholar stat as I wasn't aware of it before and it's a very instructive metric. With that said I think the kids who are really in the running for Ivy's are going to be in the range of 8 to 10 AP's and are going to need all 5's. From a base of let's say 180 AP scholars per class I feels plausible (but this is a total guess) that maybe half or less are in that category. So let's call this a base of 90 kids in the true "AP crowd". Excluding the 15 or so hooked seniors who matriculate to Princeton each year, it gets to something like 20 to 25 kids going to Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke and UChicago out of a base of 75. That's not so bad if the assumptions I've made aren't just completely off. We're also double legacy at a mid-range Ivy and are pretty certain applying ED from Princeton High will be a lot more meaningful than doing that coming out of our current TT. But who knows is legacy is evening going to be a thing in 10 to 15 years.

All this is to say that we think (whether correctly or incorrectly) that Princeton public has comparable and certainly not worse matriculation odds than any other non-magnet (e.g. Bergen County Academies) public. We also think that it will in fact be less competitive academically than our current TT. So in our minds it's kind of a wash from a college exmissions perspective.

In terms of rigor and how competitive things are academically, if given the choice between the type of writing that's demanded from TT classes vs. scoring well in a rote AP test I think it's way easier (though far less beneficial educationally) to ace the AP test. Our biggest concern is that the kids truly do lose something in the teaching approach that a school like Princeton high is forced to structurally take compared to the discussion and Socratic? approach that can be offered by top privates. We could of course apply to Lawrenceville or boarding school later but we view that as applying to a worse version of where we are already at with exmissions being more competitive relative to Princeton public.

I invite everyone to please poke holes and ruthlessly tell me where I am completely wrong in all of this.

Unless you're hooked, you're not going to be able to engineer your kids into hypsm. They're going to have to do that. They can do it from Princeton high School as many have, or they can do it from your private school in New York as many have.

And assuming they do not get admitted to hypsm from Princeton high School because the vast majority of unhooked students, from anywhere, do not get admitted, are you going to beat yourself up for pulling them from the fancy New York private school? Are you going to be at peace with your decision?.

I'm not sure if the gist of my post got through. We totally get that college outcomes are a crapshoot. We're more concerned that we sacrificing the quality of the kids' educational experience at the expense of our preference for a suburban lifestyle.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:>There are legit “townies” with DUIs, eight kids, no college, pick ups, and they become grandparents in their late 30s

Is this issue here that your kids have to know and interact with "regular" Americans? Like that would be so bad?

Lol. Apparently there are no locals in Westchester. Only if you slum it in New Jersey or Long Island do you have to deal with the low life riff raff "locals".

There are townies in Rye, low income people in Bronxville apartments, and Port Chester exists. Mount Kisco is ruining Fox Lane. Happy now?

I knew someone who lived in a Bronxville apartment. They were low income by Bronxville standards but still quite high income, white collar professionals with one having an Ivy degree. Not everyone who goes to top schools pursues high paying degrees, but they might still want an excellent education for their child so find a way to make it work. It is not easy being the "poor folk" in town but in a case like this, the gap is not as huge as if they were in the Westchester equivalent of NYCHA or something like that (which the government is trying to get all of these rich towns to build, which would be a nightmare for all parties involved).

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Back to op’s original question. Op, you seem to have a belief that your kids will have a better chance of attending a T10 coming from Princeton High than your private, because you think the class will be less competitive. Last year, Princeton high school had 371 AP scholars (students who scored at least a 3 on three or more ap tests). Assuming this number is spread equally among sophomores, juniors and seniors (since freshman won’t have data)meven though more likely to be concentrated among juniors and seniors, that’s one hundred and twenty kids per class that will be gunning for highly selective colleges.
Further, 84 kids applied to Princeton U from Princeton High two years ago. https://www.towntopics.com/2025/10/29/matriculation-report-helps-phs-counselors-discover-student-trends/ That is roughly the number of kids who think they are Ivy level applicants, the number is maybe 30 kids at my kid’s private.
19 of those kids were accepted which seems like a huge number. But we know that three quarters will usually be faculty kids. Let’s assume only two thirds are faculty kids. That’s assume only one other kid is hooked in any way, also probably an underestimate. That gives us an unhooked acceptance rate to Princeton from Princeton High of 7 percent. You can compare that to your current school, but my guess is that they are similar. Princeton High sends zero to two kids to other Ivies and about 3 to 5 to Cornell. That isn’t better than my private, and the pool of competitive applicants at Princeton High is at least twice as large.

So it’s a nice place to live and you should give it a try if you want a suburb with a high quality of life. But don’t move because you think it will improve your kid’s odds of getting into an Ivy, it won’t do that.

Thank you for this well thought out post. I think we would make the move if we felt that we weren't hurting the quality of our kids' education (it's bad enough that they would have to say goodbye to many close and good friends). Princeton is somewhat unique because there does seem to be a very well-qualified pool of undergrads who are active in tutoring local kids. So we don't expect any issues in terms of supplementing to make up for any not so great teachers when that occurs. We expect the peer set to lean more towards STEM which actually we welcome.

With regards to colleges, I agree with the 7% you backed into for Princeton specifically. Thank you for sharing the AP Scholar stat as I wasn't aware of it before and it's a very instructive metric. With that said I think the kids who are really in the running for Ivy's are going to be in the range of 8 to 10 AP's and are going to need all 5's. From a base of let's say 180 AP scholars per class I feels plausible (but this is a total guess) that maybe half or less are in that category. So let's call this a base of 90 kids in the true "AP crowd". Excluding the 15 or so hooked seniors who matriculate to Princeton each year, it gets to something like 20 to 25 kids going to Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke and UChicago out of a base of 75. That's not so bad if the assumptions I've made aren't just completely off. We're also double legacy at a mid-range Ivy and are pretty certain applying ED from Princeton High will be a lot more meaningful than doing that coming out of our current TT. But who knows is legacy is evening going to be a thing in 10 to 15 years.

All this is to say that we think (whether correctly or incorrectly) that Princeton public has comparable and certainly not worse matriculation odds than any other non-magnet (e.g. Bergen County Academies) public. We also think that it will in fact be less competitive academically than our current TT. So in our minds it's kind of a wash from a college exmissions perspective.

In terms of rigor and how competitive things are academically, if given the choice between the type of writing that's demanded from TT classes vs. scoring well in a rote AP test I think it's way easier (though far less beneficial educationally) to ace the AP test. Our biggest concern is that the kids truly do lose something in the teaching approach that a school like Princeton high is forced to structurally take compared to the discussion and Socratic? approach that can be offered by top privates. We could of course apply to Lawrenceville or boarding school later but we view that as applying to a worse version of where we are already at with exmissions being more competitive relative to Princeton public.

I invite everyone to please poke holes and ruthlessly tell me where I am completely wrong in all of this.

Unless you're hooked, you're not going to be able to engineer your kids into hypsm. They're going to have to do that. They can do it from Princeton high School as many have, or they can do it from your private school in New York as many have.

And assuming they do not get admitted to hypsm from Princeton high School because the vast majority of unhooked students, from anywhere, do not get admitted, are you going to beat yourself up for pulling them from the fancy New York private school? Are you going to be at peace with your decision?.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:>There are legit “townies” with DUIs, eight kids, no college, pick ups, and they become grandparents in their late 30s

Is this issue here that your kids have to know and interact with "regular" Americans? Like that would be so bad?

Lol. Apparently there are no locals in Westchester. Only if you slum it in New Jersey or Long Island do you have to deal with the low life riff raff "locals".

There are townies in Rye, low income people in Bronxville apartments, and Port Chester exists. Mount Kisco is ruining Fox Lane. Happy now?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:>There are legit “townies” with DUIs, eight kids, no college, pick ups, and they become grandparents in their late 30s

Is this issue here that your kids have to know and interact with "regular" Americans? Like that would be so bad?

Lol. Apparently there are no locals in Westchester. Only if you slum it in New Jersey or Long Island do you have to deal with the low life riff raff "locals".

There are townies in Rye, low income people in Bronxville apartments, and Port Chester exists. Mount Kisco is ruining Fox Lane. Happy now?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:>There are legit “townies” with DUIs, eight kids, no college, pick ups, and they become grandparents in their late 30s

Is this issue here that your kids have to know and interact with "regular" Americans? Like that would be so bad?

Lol. Apparently there are no locals in Westchester. Only if you slum it in New Jersey or Long Island do you have to deal with the low life riff raff "locals".

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Back to op’s original question. Op, you seem to have a belief that your kids will have a better chance of attending a T10 coming from Princeton High than your private, because you think the class will be less competitive. Last year, Princeton high school had 371 AP scholars (students who scored at least a 3 on three or more ap tests). Assuming this number is spread equally among sophomores, juniors and seniors (since freshman won’t have data)meven though more likely to be concentrated among juniors and seniors, that’s one hundred and twenty kids per class that will be gunning for highly selective colleges.
Further, 84 kids applied to Princeton U from Princeton High two years ago. https://www.towntopics.com/2025/10/29/matriculation-report-helps-phs-counselors-discover-student-trends/ That is roughly the number of kids who think they are Ivy level applicants, the number is maybe 30 kids at my kid’s private.
19 of those kids were accepted which seems like a huge number. But we know that three quarters will usually be faculty kids. Let’s assume only two thirds are faculty kids. That’s assume only one other kid is hooked in any way, also probably an underestimate. That gives us an unhooked acceptance rate to Princeton from Princeton High of 7 percent. You can compare that to your current school, but my guess is that they are similar. Princeton High sends zero to two kids to other Ivies and about 3 to 5 to Cornell. That isn’t better than my private, and the pool of competitive applicants at Princeton High is at least twice as large.

So it’s a nice place to live and you should give it a try if you want a suburb with a high quality of life. But don’t move because you think it will improve your kid’s odds of getting into an Ivy, it won’t do that.

Thank you for this well thought out post. I think we would make the move if we felt that we weren't hurting the quality of our kids' education (it's bad enough that they would have to say goodbye to many close and good friends). Princeton is somewhat unique because there does seem to be a very well-qualified pool of undergrads who are active in tutoring local kids. So we don't expect any issues in terms of supplementing to make up for any not so great teachers when that occurs. We expect the peer set to lean more towards STEM which actually we welcome.

With regards to colleges, I agree with the 7% you backed into for Princeton specifically. Thank you for sharing the AP Scholar stat as I wasn't aware of it before and it's a very instructive metric. With that said I think the kids who are really in the running for Ivy's are going to be in the range of 8 to 10 AP's and are going to need all 5's. From a base of let's say 180 AP scholars per class I feels plausible (but this is a total guess) that maybe half or less are in that category. So let's call this a base of 90 kids in the true "AP crowd". Excluding the 15 or so hooked seniors who matriculate to Princeton each year, it gets to something like 20 to 25 kids going to Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke and UChicago out of a base of 75. That's not so bad if the assumptions I've made aren't just completely off. We're also double legacy at a mid-range Ivy and are pretty certain applying ED from Princeton High will be a lot more meaningful than doing that coming out of our current TT. But who knows is legacy is evening going to be a thing in 10 to 15 years.

All this is to say that we think (whether correctly or incorrectly) that Princeton public has comparable and certainly not worse matriculation odds than any other non-magnet (e.g. Bergen County Academies) public. We also think that it will in fact be less competitive academically than our current TT. So in our minds it's kind of a wash from a college exmissions perspective.

In terms of rigor and how competitive things are academically, if given the choice between the type of writing that's demanded from TT classes vs. scoring well in a rote AP test I think it's way easier (though far less beneficial educationally) to ace the AP test. Our biggest concern is that the kids truly do lose something in the teaching approach that a school like Princeton high is forced to structurally take compared to the discussion and Socratic? approach that can be offered by top privates. We could of course apply to Lawrenceville or boarding school later but we view that as applying to a worse version of where we are already at with exmissions being more competitive relative to Princeton public.

I invite everyone to please poke holes and ruthlessly tell me where I am completely wrong in all of this.

Unless you're hooked, you're not going to be able to engineer your kids into hypsm. They're going to have to do that. They can do it from Princeton high School as many have, or they can do it from your private school in New York as many have.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:>There are legit “townies” with DUIs, eight kids, no college, pick ups, and they become grandparents in their late 30s

Is this issue here that your kids have to know and interact with "regular" Americans? Like that would be so bad?

And also, they write like this is so awful. It's not like one can live in a bubble in NYC and completely avoid the common folk here - just go in a hermetically sealed bubble between the Park Avenue duplex, Dalton, dad's hedge fund office, and your place out east. Once in a while suck it up and bump into the doorman and/or porter.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Back to op’s original question. Op, you seem to have a belief that your kids will have a better chance of attending a T10 coming from Princeton High than your private, because you think the class will be less competitive. Last year, Princeton high school had 371 AP scholars (students who scored at least a 3 on three or more ap tests). Assuming this number is spread equally among sophomores, juniors and seniors (since freshman won’t have data)meven though more likely to be concentrated among juniors and seniors, that’s one hundred and twenty kids per class that will be gunning for highly selective colleges.
Further, 84 kids applied to Princeton U from Princeton High two years ago. https://www.towntopics.com/2025/10/29/matriculation-report-helps-phs-counselors-discover-student-trends/ That is roughly the number of kids who think they are Ivy level applicants, the number is maybe 30 kids at my kid’s private.
19 of those kids were accepted which seems like a huge number. But we know that three quarters will usually be faculty kids. Let’s assume only two thirds are faculty kids. That’s assume only one other kid is hooked in any way, also probably an underestimate. That gives us an unhooked acceptance rate to Princeton from Princeton High of 7 percent. You can compare that to your current school, but my guess is that they are similar. Princeton High sends zero to two kids to other Ivies and about 3 to 5 to Cornell. That isn’t better than my private, and the pool of competitive applicants at Princeton High is at least twice as large.

So it’s a nice place to live and you should give it a try if you want a suburb with a high quality of life. But don’t move because you think it will improve your kid’s odds of getting into an Ivy, it won’t do that.

Thank you for this well thought out post. I think we would make the move if we felt that we weren't hurting the quality of our kids' education (it's bad enough that they would have to say goodbye to many close and good friends). Princeton is somewhat unique because there does seem to be a very well-qualified pool of undergrads who are active in tutoring local kids. So we don't expect any issues in terms of supplementing to make up for any not so great teachers when that occurs. We expect the peer set to lean more towards STEM which actually we welcome.

With regards to colleges, I agree with the 7% you backed into for Princeton specifically. Thank you for sharing the AP Scholar stat as I wasn't aware of it before and it's a very instructive metric. With that said I think the kids who are really in the running for Ivy's are going to be in the range of 8 to 10 AP's and are going to need all 5's. From a base of let's say 180 AP scholars per class I feels plausible (but this is a total guess) that maybe half or less are in that category. So let's call this a base of 90 kids in the true "AP crowd". Excluding the 15 or so hooked seniors who matriculate to Princeton each year, it gets to something like 20 to 25 kids going to Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Duke and UChicago out of a base of 75. That's not so bad if the assumptions I've made aren't just completely off. We're also double legacy at a mid-range Ivy and are pretty certain applying ED from Princeton High will be a lot more meaningful than doing that coming out of our current TT. But who knows is legacy is evening going to be a thing in 10 to 15 years.

All this is to say that we think (whether correctly or incorrectly) that Princeton public has comparable and certainly not worse matriculation odds than any other non-magnet (e.g. Bergen County Academies) public. We also think that it will in fact be less competitive academically than our current TT. So in our minds it's kind of a wash from a college exmissions perspective.

In terms of rigor and how competitive things are academically, if given the choice between the type of writing that's demanded from TT classes vs. scoring well in a rote AP test I think it's way easier (though far less beneficial educationally) to ace the AP test. Our biggest concern is that the kids truly do lose something in the teaching approach that a school like Princeton high is forced to structurally take compared to the discussion and Socratic? approach that can be offered by top privates. We could of course apply to Lawrenceville or boarding school later but we view that as applying to a worse version of where we are already at with exmissions being more competitive relative to Princeton public.

I invite everyone to please poke holes and ruthlessly tell me where I am completely wrong in all of this.

Anonymous wrote:Back to op’s original question. Op, you seem to have a belief that your kids will have a better chance of attending a T10 coming from Princeton High than your private, because you think the class will be less competitive. Last year, Princeton high school had 371 AP scholars (students who scored at least a 3 on three or more ap tests). Assuming this number is spread equally among sophomores, juniors and seniors (since freshman won’t have data)meven though more likely to be concentrated among juniors and seniors, that’s one hundred and twenty kids per class that will be gunning for highly selective colleges.
Further, 84 kids applied to Princeton U from Princeton High two years ago. https://www.towntopics.com/2025/10/29/matriculation-report-helps-phs-counselors-discover-student-trends/ That is roughly the number of kids who think they are Ivy level applicants, the number is maybe 30 kids at my kid’s private.
19 of those kids were accepted which seems like a huge number. But we know that three quarters will usually be faculty kids. Let’s assume only two thirds are faculty kids. That’s assume only one other kid is hooked in any way, also probably an underestimate. That gives us an unhooked acceptance rate to Princeton from Princeton High of 7 percent. You can compare that to your current school, but my guess is that they are similar. Princeton High sends zero to two kids to other Ivies and about 3 to 5 to Cornell. That isn’t better than my private, and the pool of competitive applicants at Princeton High is at least twice as large.

So it’s a nice place to live and you should give it a try if you want a suburb with a high quality of life. But don’t move because you think it will improve your kid’s odds of getting into an Ivy, it won’t do that.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:>There are legit “townies” with DUIs, eight kids, no college, pick ups, and they become grandparents in their late 30s

Is this issue here that your kids have to know and interact with "regular" Americans? Like that would be so bad?

Lol. Apparently there are no locals in Westchester. Only if you slum it in New Jersey or Long Island do you have to deal with the low life riff raff "locals".

Anonymous wrote:>There are legit “townies” with DUIs, eight kids, no college, pick ups, and they become grandparents in their late 30s

Is this issue here that your kids have to know and interact with "regular" Americans? Like that would be so bad?

Anonymous wrote:Back to op’s original question. Op, you seem to have a belief that your kids will have a better chance of attending a T10 coming from Princeton High than your private, because you think the class will be less competitive. Last year, Princeton high school had 371 AP scholars (students who scored at least a 3 on three or more ap tests). Assuming this number is spread equally among sophomores, juniors and seniors (since freshman won’t have data)meven though more likely to be concentrated among juniors and seniors, that’s one hundred and twenty kids per class that will be gunning for highly selective colleges.
Further, 84 kids applied to Princeton U from Princeton High two years ago. https://www.towntopics.com/2025/10/29/matriculation-report-helps-phs-counselors-discover-student-trends/ That is roughly the number of kids who think they are Ivy level applicants, the number is maybe 30 kids at my kid’s private.
19 of those kids were accepted which seems like a huge number. But we know that three quarters will usually be faculty kids. Let’s assume only two thirds are faculty kids. That’s assume only one other kid is hooked in any way, also probably an underestimate. That gives us an unhooked acceptance rate to Princeton from Princeton High of 7 percent. You can compare that to your current school, but my guess is that they are similar. Princeton High sends zero to two kids to other Ivies and about 3 to 5 to Cornell. That isn’t better than my private, and the pool of competitive applicants at Princeton High is at least twice as large.

So it’s a nice place to live and you should give it a try if you want a suburb with a high quality of life. But don’t move because you think it will improve your kid’s odds of getting into an Ivy, it won’t do that.