Princeton’s Class of 1928 included 61 men from the Lawrenceville School, approximately 10 percent of the University’s student body. The school — located just minutes down the road from campus — was “founded avowedly as a feeder to Princeton,” in the words of The Daily Princetonian in 1897.
Let’s fast forward 100 years. In Princeton’s Class of 2028, more than 20 percent of students are eligible for federal Pell Grants. 16 percent are the first in their families to go to college. Roughly half identify as non-white.
Even so — some old habits die hard.
Using the Freshman Herald, a since-discontinued yearbook of the incoming freshman class, the ‘Prince’ generated a list of 250 high schools that have produced an average of at least one Princetonian per year for a decade-long period beginning in the early 2000s. Even 10 years ago, they accounted for as much as 40 percent of each Princeton class.
The list spans well-known public and private schools across the northeast — Phillips Exeter in N.H. and Andover in Mass., Stuyvesant in N.Y. and Thomas Jefferson in Va.— and along the West Coast — the likes of Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles and the Menlo School in the Bay Area. Public high schools familiar to resident New Jerseyites also feature prominently: Princeton High School and the Bergen County Academies.
The classes of 2008, 2009, and 2013 were not included in this analysis, as the Freshman Heralds were either inaccessible or did not include a high school directory. Because the Freshman Herald was discontinued after the Class of 2012, the ‘Prince’ filled in as much recent data as possible through a combination of requests to high schools, student interviews, and publicly available matriculation data online through the Class of 2027. Some data points may not align due to gap years.
The ‘Prince’ found that several prominent schools historically identified as “feeders” appear to have shifted away from sending students to Princeton. In the Class of 2027, only three students came from the Lawrenceville School according to the count of the ‘Prince,’ compared with an 11 student average for the Classes of 2003–16.
In a statement to the ‘Prince,’ the University did not comment on why certain schools are admitted at higher rates, nor directly acknowledged the existence of feeder schools.
“Many factors that contribute to its holistic review of an applicant; however, no one factor, like the high school a student attends, is the basis of the team’s decision-making process,” University spokesperson Jennifer Morrill wrote.
Thomas Jefferson High School, a magnet school in Northern Virginia routinely ranked among the best public high schools in the country, used to supply 10–20 Princeton students on average every year in the early 2000s. But beginning with the University’s Class of 2019, six or fewer incoming students a year came from Thomas Jefferson. Over the analysis period, Thomas Jefferson averaged more students per year than any other school aside from Princeton High School.
Josh Stephens ’97, a college counselor based in Los Angeles, noted that college applications have gotten far more competitive.
“These schools do not have a monopoly on bright, ambitious, accomplished applicants, by any stretch,” he said. “It might be more refreshing for Princeton to take a student who’s strong from some random high school they’ve never admitted a student from than to dip into what can often be, let’s be honest, ‘cauldrons of anxiety’ at some of these more famous, traditional feeder schools.”
But Jonathan Baker ’80, a college counselor in private Mass. high schools for decades, also pushed back on the notion of modern “feeder” schools altogether.
“‘Feeders’ is just wrong,” he said. “It’s just not what’s happening because it’s got an active verb connotation to it. That was reality some generations ago.”
However, Princeton High School — just a 20-minute walk from campus — has sent at least nine students to Princeton every year since 1999, including 16 members of the Class of 2027.
Dean of Admission Karen Richardson ’93, in fact, oversees admissions from one “region” made up of just Princeton High School. Richardson did not respond to questions regarding this practice.
“A lot of people who go to Princeton High School have connections to Princeton University. Maybe their parents went to Princeton and settled in Princeton, or maybe their parents who work at Princeton University,” said Ned Erickson ’27, who attended Princeton High School. “Then also, there are a lot of students from Princeton High School who have taken courses at Princeton University.”
Students from Princeton High School can enroll in the University’s math, biology, physics, chemistry, languages, computer science, and music classes if they have exhausted the available high school classes.
Erickson added that Princeton feels “a bit more attainable just because it’s right here in our backyard.”
The furthest feeder school from Princeton is Hwa Chong Institution in Singapore. Seventeen of the 250 schools are located outside the United States in 10 countries, predominantly in the United Kingdom and East Asia. The ‘Prince’ did not identify any schools in South America, Africa, Australia, or New Zealand.
The list of 250 schools compiled by the ‘Prince’ comprises roughly 40 percent public schools and 60 percent private schools. 15 percent of the public schools on the list are selective. This proportion of feeder schools matches closely to Princeton’s total undergraduate body — close to 14 percent of Princeton frosh over the last two years reported they attended a selective public school, according to the Frosh Surveys conducted by the ‘Prince.’ About 20 percent of the private schools offered some sort of boarding or overnight residential option.
Many of the private schools also did not come cheap. The median annual tuition of the 132 domestic private schools which offered a day rate — excluding room and board — was $47,434 for the 2024–25 year. Twenty-two schools charged more for tuition in the 2024–25 school year than Princeton, which ran at $62,400.
Some private schools have offered increasingly substantial financial aid programs in recent years, as does the University. At 31 of the private schools on the list, at least one-third of the student body was on some form of financial assistance. One school, Archmere Academy in Delaware, advertised that 75 percent of students received tuition assistance during the 2024–25 academic year.
Sasha Mykhantso ’27, an international student from Chortkiv, Ukraine, attended the Lawrenceville School on full financial aid.
“I’m glad to be here, but I can definitely not relate to all these people whose parents actually afford to pay this much,” he said of his time at Lawrenceville.
While the full cost of boarding at the Lawrenceville School is $79,500, families with an income under $125,000 paid an average of $703 to attend, according to the school.
“I think it is very likely the schools like Princeton are finding some of those strongest, underrepresented applicants from these feeder schools,” said Stephens.
James Clavel ’27, who attended Phillips Exeter Academy, posited that Exeter’s high matriculation rate to Princeton resulted from an already academically strong student body. Exeter accepted 14 percent of applicants during the 2021–22 cycle.
“They already did it once, and they think they can do it again,” said Clavel.
But that does not mean that admission to Princeton from a well-known private school is a given. Over the course of the last six admissions cycles, on average, 12.5 percent of Exonians who applied to Princeton were accepted, according to documents obtained by the ‘Prince.’ For the Class of 2025, Princeton admitted 4.38 percent of all applicants. The University no longer promotes its acceptance rate.
“Because there’s such a large pool of talented kids, you can’t send every kid from one school to an Ivy League school,” Lillian Auth ’28 said. Auth attended Deerfield Academy and was recruited to compete for women’s lightweight rowing.
Deerfield Academy is another consistent top sender to Princeton and is the high school with the seventh most current athletes competing for Princeton. In fact, approximately half of the 250 schools have a former student currently playing for a Princeton varsity team.
“I think in some cases, things can backfire in these … competitive, high-pressure environments,” Stephens noted. “That undermines would-be applicants who often get so wrapped up in the competitiveness that they don’t become very appealing applicants in various ways.”
Several public high schools also topped the list, notably Princeton High School and Thomas Jefferson.
“I do feel like [Thomas Jefferson High School] prepared me in a way that another high school couldn’t,” said Chinmay Bhandaru ’27. “I think last year, freshman year of Princeton, was easier than my junior year or senior year of high school. I think that’s just because of how much rigor I put myself in.”
“When you look at schools like [Thomas Jefferson] and Stuyvesant, you have to test into those schools, so the kids who are going to the schools are already high test takers, they’re smart kids, they are naturally gifted in academics,” said Allison Slater Tate ’96, director of college counseling at a small Florida private school and college consultant. “Empirically, those are the kinds of kids who are going to do well in the metrics that end up leading you to places like Princeton.”
But Princeton and other Ivy League universities have also made efforts to host admissions events in areas of the country that don’t traditionally attract as many applicants. As part of an initiative called Small Town Outreach Recruitment and Yield, University representatives recently attended events in Gallup, N.M. and Grand Junction, Colo.
“Retention and graduation rate are two very big numbers in enrollment management,” Slater Tate said, yet noted she could not speak for the admissions office. “Sometimes it takes one kid getting in and going from a school, and if that kid does well, [University admissions] can see that they were prepared. They can kind of trust [the high school] more.”
Trakker French ’27 hails from McPherson, Kan., a town an hour outside of Wichita, and is one of three students in the Class of 2027 from Kansas. He expressed that many of his peers simply did not believe that attending an Ivy League university was within reach — both financially and culturally.
“You don’t really get any information unless you go searching for it. And I think that’s a big reason why rural people don’t even try to come to schools like this,” he said.
“They don’t know how good the financial aid is [at Princeton],” French added. “I know several people that could have gotten in just as easily as I did, they just didn’t apply because they thought, ‘it’s just too expensive for me.’”
But for now, a substantial portion of Princeton’s student body continues to matriculate from New York, New Jersey, California, and other coastal areas. Nearly half of the feeder schools identified by the ‘Prince’ were located in those three states.
“I think [for] any inequity that we might identify in feeder schools, we have to acknowledge that those inequities are far more vast and run far deeper,” said Stephens.
“I don’t know that it’s a bad thing. I think it’s a thing,” said Slater Tate on feeder schools. “I think that going back to the same high school, you have to look at it as those schools are going to have a higher volume of students who are prepared for the work at Princeton, which I think we can all agree is pretty high paced and hard.”
“It’s not for everybody. Princeton is not for everybody.”
Miriam Waldvogel is an associate News editor and the investigations editor for the ‘Prince.’
Andrew Bosworth is a head Data editor and staff Sports writer for the ‘Prince.’
Alexa Wingate is an assistant Data editor for the ‘Prince.’
Grace Zhao is a senior Data writer for the ‘Prince.’
Assistant News editor Chris Bao contributed reporting.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.