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Andover, nonetheless, is not exactly an academic Ellis Island. Some 14% of the students are alumni children. Next year's tuition will come to $4,975, more than most American families can pay, and the student roster lists some blue-chip names, among them, John F. Kennedy Jr. But this year Andover handed out $1 million in financial aid to 30% of its students, and the full tuition charge is still only half of what it costs to educate each student. A $57 million endowment and $600,000 in annual alumni giving make up the difference. In 1976 the school also began a $50 million fund-raising campaign. Andover needs the money, says Headmaster Theodore Sizer, to maintain diversity and excellence in an era of high inflation and soft stock markets. A boyish-looking former dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Education, Sizer, 45, remembers that, as an undergraduate at Yale in the early '50s, he "frankly resented" Andover boys. "They came arms linked," says Sizer, "and left arms linked." At Harvard, his focus was mostly on education in public high schools. Since coming to Andover as its twelfth headmaster in 1972, he has worked hard at fulfilling its charter: to be "ever equally open to youth of requisite qualifications from every quarter." He set up Short Term Institutes, which bring some 95 high school students a year to Andover for intensive sixto ten-week seminars in a single subject, and an accelerated math and science program for minority students at the school's 700-student summer session. With middle-class families facing ever increasing tuition costs, Andover is taking more and more of their children for just a year or two.
Though a few faculty members grumble that Sizer is "using the school as a laboratory for his social experiments," others applaud him. Sizer likes to recall Andover's greatest benefactors: John Watzek, an immigrant's son who spent only a year at the school in 1910 but gave it $5.8 million between 1958 and 1973; Walter Leeds, who came to Andover in 1905 on scholarship and was kicked out nine months later, yet remembered the school in his will last year to the tune of $5 million.
Andover's reputation as a national and "democratic" school is not new.
Moreover, it is shared by Andover's great rival and sister school, Phillips Exeter Academy (965 students, $47 million endowment), founded by Samuel Phillips' uncle, John Phillips, in 1781. But for years, democratic was the last word used to describe most New England boarding schools. No longer.
Other first-line schools—St. Paul's (497 students, $46 million endowment), Groton (300 students, $17.7 million), Deerfield (558, $21 million), Lawrenceville (700, $24 million), Hotchkiss (478, $10.4 million), and Choate Rosemary Hall (920, $11.7 million)—have also sought a wider range of students. Limited resources, rather than any residue of snobbery, keep them from reaching further. Inflation has forced all of them into massive money-raising efforts and budget tightening. The admissions picture is more bullish, thanks partly to the declining quality of public schools. Applications are up at top prep schools, and the percentage of children in private schools around the country has been increasing.