Best boarding schools in the United States, ranked by published college outcomes

Which boarding schools in the United States have the strongest published college outcomes?

Among the 64 boarding schools in the United States with a counted college list, Phillips Academy (Andover) sends the most graduates to the Ivy+ twelve, 83 per class year (83 over 1 class year), followed by Choate Rosemary Hall (63.4) and The Lawrenceville School (52.2).

2 more publish a counted list without a class-year window we can divide by, so they are listed with the published total rather than ranked.

Boarding schools in the United States that publish a counted acceptances list

An acceptances list counts every college that admitted a graduate, so one student admitted to three of the twelve counts three times. It is a different document from a matriculation list and is never added to the table above.

How many boarding schools in the United States publish a college list?

64 of the 179 boarding schools in the United States publish a college list with counts, 101 publish a list without counts, and 14 publish no list we have read.

Where are the boarding schools in the United States?

The 179 boarding schools in the United States are in 38 states: Massachusetts 24; Connecticut 18; California 17; New York 15; Virginia 13; Pennsylvania 10; Maine 7; New Hampshire 7; Maryland 6; North Carolina 5; New Jersey 5; Hawaii 4.

Which boarding schools in the United States are religiously affiliated?

On the federal Private School Survey, 8 of the 179 boarding schools in the United States are Catholic, 35 have another religious affiliation and 102 are nonsectarian; the survey lists no affiliation for the rest.

What families are also choosing at a boarding school

Parents are not only shopping for college outcomes. The tables above count where graduates enrolled, and a high school is also four years of a teenager's days: who they spend them with, what the school asks them to value, and whether the adults know them.

• Community and values fit. A private school sets its own mission and expectations, and the application, the entrance exam and the interview work as a fit signal in both directions. On the federal Private School Survey, 8 of these schools are Catholic, 35 have another religious affiliation and 102 are nonsectarian.
• Residential life. Living on campus is the point of a boarding school: the dorm, the dining hall, weekend programs and the adults on duty are part of the education, not an add-on.
• Class size. Class size is a fair question for each school's admissions office; we hold no student–teacher ratio for the schools listed here.
• Advising. Each private school builds its own college-advising model, so the useful question is how many students each counselor carries and how early the work starts.
• Arts and athletics access. A smaller school can mean more students on each team and in each production; ask each school what participation looks like.

Public schools are a great choice when a family cannot afford a private school, and a published college list is one of the few outcome measures a private school and a public school can be read on side by side.

Every other boarding school in the United States with a page on Reach (14)

Listed alphabetically. These schools publish no college list we have read; that is all their absence from the tables above means.

School	City	Grades	Affiliation	State
Applewild School	Fitchburg	PK–12	—	MA
Bard Academy & Bard College at Simon's Rock	Barrytown	9–12	—	NY
Besant Hill School of Happy Valley	Ojai	9–12	—	CA
Fishburne Military School	Waynesboro	7–12	Nonsectarian	VA
Grand River Academy	Austinburg	8–12	Nonsectarian	OH
Hargrave Military Academy	Chatham	7–12	Other religious	VA
John Bapst Memorial High School	Bangor	9–12	Nonsectarian	ME
Kimball Union Academy	Meriden	9–12	Nonsectarian	NH
Maplebrook School	Amenia	7–12	Nonsectarian	NY
North Yarmouth Academy	Yarmouth	—	Nonsectarian	ME
The Mount Academy	Esopus	9–12	Other religious	NY
The Webb School	Bell Buckle	6–12	Nonsectarian	TN
Tmi Episcopal	San Antonio	6–12	Other religious	TX
Villanova Preparatory School	Ojai	6–12	—	CA

Other metros are on the private high schools by metro index. The same arithmetic across every state is the Ivy+ enrollment board and the boarding-school board; for one college at a time, see which private schools send the most students to each college.

Ivy+ means these twelve: Harvard University, Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University in the City of New York, University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Cornell University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Chicago, Duke University. A graduate is counted once, at the college the school says they enrolled at; the per-class-year figure is the published total divided by the class years the school's own document covers, and both are shown. A school that is not on this page did not publish a numbered matriculation list we could read — that is all absence means here. It is never a statement about a school's graduates. Lists of acceptances (where students were admitted, not where they enrolled) are never counted in this ranking: an acceptances list runs about three times an enrollment list, so counting the two together would compare different things. Those lists are ranked on their own, separately. Grades and religious affiliation are from the National Center for Education Statistics' Private School Survey. Boarding is read from the TABS member directory — The Association of Boarding Schools' 2026 list of its US member schools — matched onto our school pages by exact or town-confirmed name (173 of them). A school that directory does not list is not called a boarding school on a guess, so it waits for the next directory pass rather than appearing here.