My son, who is in eighth grade, will be entering high school next year. He and I have been touring public and private schools, an experience that is, at best, schizophrenic.
One day, we’ll be walking through the hallways of a run-down public high school that looks like East Berlin, circa 1972; the next, we’re being led through expensively carpeted, LEED-certified buildings featuring exquisite multi-million-dollar auditoriums while were told that each student gets an IPad. At most public schools, we learn that there may be 30 or more kids in a class; at many privates, we’re told most classes exceed no more than 15 students.
Its when were wandering through the private schools’ hallowed highways that I find myself wondering what will happen if my son ends up going public – which he most likely will given the $30,000 (give or take a few thousand) a year private school price tag. Will he steer academically off-course and have little shot after four years of entering a top college?
Public or private: May not matter
According to Jay Matthews of the Washington Post, no. In a recent revelatory post, Matthew argues that whether attending a public, private, or parochial high school has little bearing on where a student will continue onto college – at least in a certain socio-economic bracket with “children of college-focused parents and excellent achievement results.”
Incredibly, notes Matthews, until recently no solid data existed that looked at whether staying in public school after elementary school helped, or hindered, a student’s chances of admittance into a quality college.
Then in 2007, health-care technology analyst Leonard Jewler did a small study of the grduating class of 200 at Lafayette Elementary, a large public elementary located in an affluent Washington D.C. neighborhood. About a third of the Lafayette students attend private high schools, a third public, a third couldn’t be reached.
Did going to a public high school or a private one affect what kind of college the students attended? Jewler found that the Lafayette kids who went to top state universities were just as likely to have graduated from public as private high school. What’s more, whether the Lafayette graduates went on to private high school or attended public high school, an equal number wound up at U.S.News top universities such as Yale, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and Georgetown.
The perk of going public
In fact, going to a public high school could even proof advantageous, writes Matthews. Selective universities have a leveling mechanism so if a student has “straight A’s, a solid SAT score of 2200, and good activities and recommendations, your chances of getting into an Ivy League school are better if you are attending an average public high school than a competitive private one.”
And in a more recent study Jewler conducted with a larger sampling of students (336) from Lafayette and Murch, another high-achieving D.C. elementary, Jeweler has arrived at pretty much the same conclusion: That attending a top-achieving private high school doesn’t give students a notable edge when it came to college acceptance. (Jewlers website: evernowchronicles.org, gives the full report.)
It’s beyond reassuring that if my son attends public high school for the next four years, as long as he gets the grades, he’ll have as fair a shot as the private school kids at a great college. (How we afford that is a whole new worry.)
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