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Top-ranked Roman Catholic prep school is Portsmouth Priory (220 boys), which aims not at Holy Cross or Notre Dame, but at Harvard, Yale, Princeton. New England-style prep schools are rare outside the East, but the best include Ohio's Western Reserve (235 boys), Colorado's Fountain Valley, California's Cote, which puts on classical drama in the original languages. California's Thacher shuns football but requires every boy to own and operate his own horse for two years. Top event there is a gymkhana featuring orange-spearing at full gallop. Equally important now: a summer program in math and astronautics. One smart crew of Thacher satellite trackers recently exposed an error in Russian data.
From Arabic to archaeology, nearly every school now boasts something special. At Hotchkiss, which still sends 25% of its graduates to Yale, the stress is on sound English and modern math. Each year some boys finish in the eleventh grade, may go on for a year at an English school. Pennsylvania's Hill livens up humanities with a two-year course that correlates the art, music and literature of any one period. Science and philosophy go into a similar course for all seniors at Loomis, which is also strong on atmospheric science. Pomfret is particularly proud of intensive area studies, has sent students to Africa and India in the summer, on the ground, as one Pomfret teacher puts it, that "we can't just sit here on our hilltop." Upper-crusty, hockey-playing St. Paul's makes admirable use of the summer with a pioneering school for gifted New Hampshire public school students.
Exeter, though often mentioned in tandem with Andover, is significantly different. Exeter has put up only one new building in 30 years, but is richer (endowment: $35.2 million, book value). It began actively recruiting poor boys long before Andover. Though it gives fewer scholarships to fewer students, it gives bigger ones, reaches deeper into low-income groups.
Next year Exeter's tuition will rise to $2,100, topping Andover's, partly because it spends more for instruction—it has fewer students per teacher. It also boasts more Westinghouse winners (twelve) than Andover, and this month it topped all U.S. schools in National Merit Scholarship finalists: 73 to Andover's 18.
Exeter's towering (6 ft. 4 in.) Principal William G. Saltonstall, 56, is not only a first-rate history teacher but also a noted athlete who won three varsity letters at Harvard. He still coaches Exeter teams most afternoons, looks from 50 yards like a 1962 All-America with prematurely white hair. Because he believes in "motherhood and the home," Saltonstall is reducing the number of younger boys at Exeter, took in only 90 juniors this year, against Andover's 140. The purpose: more maturity at Exeter and "more new blood." Though it is smaller than Andover, Exeter thus has the same number of seniors, last June sent its graduates to more (54) colleges, while also getting more (57) boys into Harvard.