To Impress Colleges,
Prep Schools Get Aggressive
By DANIEL GOLDEN
Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal
From The Wall Street Journal Online
For elite prep schools,
getting graduates into Ivy League universities once took little more than a
well-placed call from the headmaster.
These days, old-boy ties
to top colleges have faded, and Ivy League schools want students from many
other sources. Yet more than ever before, private secondary schools are
graded on how many graduates enter the likes of Harvard, Princeton and
Stanford universities.
The result: Prep schools,
under pressure from tuition-burdened families and nostalgic alumni, are
straining to improve their graduates' college-admissions prospects. They're
easing up on grading, and paying top dollar for college counselors with Ivy
League pedigrees. Some prep schools even face questions about embellishing
college-placement documents.
A former employee at
Newton Country Day School of the Sacred Heart, a girls' school in Newton,
Mass., says the school's headmistress tinkered with transcripts to improve students'
college chances -- accusations school officials deny. At Shady Side Academy
in Pittsburgh, the director of college counseling abruptly stepped down last
April after the school found he had marked courses with an "H" for
honors -- although the school had no such honors-class designation -- on 10
to 12 students' transcripts submitted for collegiate athletic scholarships.
"We didn't distort
any numbers or change grades. We described courses in an enhanced way,"
says Peter Kountz, president of Shady Side, which has 915 students in
kindergarten through 12th grade and charges $15,000 tuition. "There's a
whole intensifying of pressure on college-placement people to present
students in the best possible light. It's very, very difficult to do the right
thing consistently."
The counselor, Alex
Howson, says the documents he enhanced weren't official transcripts. He did
nothing wrong, he says. He was planning to retire in June anyway because
pressure from "a small core group of parents" to play up students'
academic records had taken the fun out of his job, he says.
The prestigious Middlesex
School in Concord, Mass., is still reeling from its discovery in 1997 that
its college-counseling director inflated the track record of its graduates in
getting into Ivy League and other elite universities. Thomas O'Neil, the
49-year-old director, committed suicide a short time later. "His sole
motive was to make Middlesex School look better," says Bradford Kingman,
a former Middlesex assistant headmaster.
Enrollment at independent
private schools, now at least 500,000 students nationwide, has soared 20% in
the past decade, more than at some top liberal-arts colleges. Parents pay a
median annual tuition of $13,345 for a day school or $24,350 for boarding
school, fees that have nearly doubled in the past decade. They count on the
investment to propel their children into the Ivy League or other top-tier
colleges, as ranked by US News & World Report and other popular indices.
Students, who survive a
grueling admissions process to get into prep school, can be just as
demanding. The student newspaper at prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover,
Mass., alma mater of president George W. Bush, complained last April that Ivy
League rejections "seemed too numerous." It noted wistfully that
Harvard University, which admitted 69 of 74 applicants from Andover in 1950,
took only 18 out of 89 a half-century later. (Two more Andover students were
later admitted from the wait list.)
Overall, private-school
graduates constituted 32% of this year's freshman class at Harvard, compared
with 44% in 1960. And many more private schools are represented now, meaning
even fewer admissions for each prep school to cite in its marketing efforts.
Selective colleges that
once relied on a short list of feeder schools now recruit internationally.
Their swelling endowments afford more financial aid, permitting more
lower-income students to enter. The best public high schools, meanwhile, are
offering more advanced-placement courses and catching up to prep schools in
academic rigor. Those public schools increasingly stake their reputation on
standardized tests administered by most states. Few private schools use the
tests.
Private secondary schools
are left with college admissions as the main barometer of their quality. In
response, prep schools are paying more for college counselors -- salaries are
up 22% since 1995 -- and rebuilding old Ivy League ties through an academic revolving
door. When San Francisco University High School and the University School of
Milwaukee recently hired directors of college counseling, for instance, they
recruited admissions staffers from Stanford and Harvard, respectively.
Some private schools are
also buffing up their school profiles, the one- to two-page information
sheets that accompany every college application and are widely used to assess
a high school's quality. Traditionally, these profiles list colleges attended
by recent graduates. But the definition of "recent" is extending
further into the past. The Kiski School in Saltsburg, Pa., for example, used
to list colleges attended by graduates over the previous three years. Last
year, it adopted a five-year profile, allowing the school to include more top
colleges.
Other schools cite every
college where graduates were admitted, not just those where they actually
enrolled. A single top student accepted by Harvard, Princeton, Yale and
Stanford universities would account for four "admissions" on the
profile. "We're a small school," says Anne Ferguson, director of
college counseling at Hathaway-Brown School in Shaker Heights, Ohio. The
school graduates about 55 students each year, and lists the colleges where
all graduates for the past five years gained acceptance. "If you put
only where the kids were going, that really doesn't accurately reflect the
range of options they have," she says.
Heathwood Hall Episcopal
School in South Carolina identifies only the most-competitive schools where
graduates have been accepted, omitting less-prestigious state colleges.
"There's a small element of PR to it," acknowledges James Robinson,
assistant head of the upper school.
Some private schools are
also reluctant to report disciplinary actions against students to colleges.
Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Conn., doesn't disclose them at all, citing
fear of liability. The Wheeler School in Providence, R.I., decided last year
that it wouldn't divulge sanctions against students prior to 12th grade.
"In the back of our minds, you don't want to offer a reason for a
college not to accept a kid," says Wheeler headmaster William Prescott.
Some college-admissions
officials worry they aren't getting the whole story. "We want to
know" about disciplinary actions, "and we know we don't know,"
says Eileen Feikens, senior associate director of admissions at Barnard
College, the women's-college affiliate of Columbia University.
Even schools that pride
themselves on resisting grade inflation are giving ground. At Buckingham Browne
& Nichols School in Cambridge, Mass., administrators have encouraged
faculty to give students the benefit of the doubt in grading. Eric Benke,
director of the upper school, says the result has been "some shift
upward" in grading, which the school hopes will help its students
compete when they apply to college.
At the Middlesex School,
which proclaims in its profile that "grading standards are unusually
high," the late Mr. O'Neil's successor, Diane Proctor, is lobbying
faculty to give fewer C's and D's to freshmen and sophomores. She says
colleges are paying more attention to grades in those two years.
Grading practices have
also been the focus of controversy at another suburban Boston school, Newton
Country Day. The school, one of a national network of 21 Sacred Heart
schools, has 315 girls enrolled in grades 5 to 12. Long regarded as a sleepy
finishing school for daughters of Boston's Irish-Catholic elite, including
Rose Kennedy, it was traditionally a gateway to Catholic colleges such as
Boston College.
Sister Barbara Rogers,
headmistress since 1989, is widely credited with boosting the school's
enrollment, endowment, academic rigor, admission standards and college
placement. A former executive assistant at the school, however, says Sister
Rogers pressured her to raise the grades of several students.
Sara Colvin, the former
assistant, says Sister Rogers transferred the task of preparing transcripts
from the registrar to her own office in 1995, and then assigned her to type
transcripts based on report cards. In an affidavit, Ms. Colvin alleges that
Sister Rogers or her assistant headmistress, Kathleen Hodges, ordered her at
least five times to replace actual grades with higher ones when she prepared
transcripts of at least two students for submission to colleges. A former
trustee solicited the affidavit as part of a wider dispute between him and
the school.
Ms. Colvin says the
alleged changes were aimed at boosting the school's college-admission rates,
as well as helping one of the students -- Ms. Hodges' niece -- get into a top
college. The niece wound up getting into Barnard College.
Amanda McClure, a former
teacher at Newton Country Day, says that before Ms. Colvin's allegations
surfaced, Sister Rogers and Ms. Hodges "reamed me out" in front of
the niece for giving her a B-minus in world religion in the first semester of
her senior year. The two administrators said the grade was too low, according
to Ms. McClure. The grade wasn't changed.
Ms. Hodges, her niece and
Sister Rogers declined to comment. Robert Popeo, a prominent Boston attorney
who is a trustee and donor to the school, says he and three other trustees
investigated Ms. Calvin's allegations for the board last year and concluded
they were unfounded. The board recently gave Sister Rogers a five-year
contract. Mr. Popeo, who has a daughter teaching at the school, said
transcript preparation had been temporarily shifted to the headmistress's
office due to a staffing problem, and that grades of Ms. Hodges' niece and
the other student were appropriately adjusted based on consultation with
teachers or after the students underwent a summer tutoring program.
A look at how the
pressures played out at the Middlesex School shows how times have changed.
The school teaches 240 boarding and 75 day students in grades 9 to 12.
Founded in 1901, it charges $28,300 for boarders and says its students score
a median of 1280 on the SAT's 1600-point scale. Prominent alumni include
actor William Hurt and former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld.
When Thomas O'Neil attended
Middlesex, it was an Ivy League highway. He starred in sports, and repeated
his senior year to improve his grades for Harvard. Of Middlesex's 42
graduates in 1967, 13 went to Harvard, including Mr. O'Neil. Eight more
attended other Ivy League universities.
But after Mr. O'Neil
joined the Middlesex faculty in 1972, as he worked his way through his stints
as head college counselor, those proportions shrank steadily. Beth Nesbit,
director of college counseling from 1985-89, says some trustees were dismayed
by the fall-off in Ivy League admissions. Some "needed to be
educated" about the changes top universities were making in their
admissions policies, she says. Of 78 Middlesex graduates last June, 15 wound
up in the Ivy League, including five at Harvard.
Over the years, Mr.
O'Neil filled in wherever Middlesex needed him. His stern manner and
uncompromising grading as a teacher of English grammar initiated freshmen
into the elite boarding school. He served as dean and assistant headmaster,
ran the dormitory where he lived, and coached football, lacrosse and squash,
co-authoring a sports-psychology book with a Middlesex squash protege. Mr.
O'Neil, who left a $1.4 million estate at his death, was also a regular
financial donor to Middlesex. In one instance, he provided landscaping funds
to edge the campus walkways.
By the early 1990s,
having to soothe parents and slave late into the night over college
recommendations drained him, according to friends and colleagues. Each
summer, he escaped to Falmouth, a Cape Cod town where he was known by a
childhood nickname, "Pete," that he never used at Middlesex. He
skippered sailboats for friends, including prominent politicians and bankers.
After 1995-1996, a year that Harvard accepted only two of 18 applicants from
Middlesex, he quit college counseling.
"He had lost some
joy in it," says one friend. "There's no question that he regarded
the placement record as a reflection of his own value."
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