Talk:Collegiate School (New York City)

"Oldest educational institution in North America"
Whoever keeps vandalizing this article to misstate that the Collegiate School is the oldest educational institution in North America, please stop. The National Autonomous University of Mexico, founded in 1551, is quite simply over 75 years older. There are other older educational institutions as well. Wikipedia is not a forum for advertising or boosting your school, it is a repository of fact. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.92.39.176 (talk • contribs)


 * You cannot simply delete article discussion because you do not like what it says, or you will be reported.
 * In brief: "North America" does NOT mean "the United States." It includes Canada, the United States, and Mexico, which possesses education institutions older than Harvard and, yes, Collegiate.  This is a simple matter of fact.


 * The New York Times article cited in support of the "North America" claim never once mentions "North America," only "the nation." I doubt the citer even read it; check ProQuest.  This issue is very simple; again, please stop the vandalism or you will be reported. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.92.39.176 (talk • contribs)


 * It is not the oldest independent school; rather, it is the oldest SCHOOL! The NY Times article says: "If accurate, the 1628 date would make Collegiate, now nonsectarian, the oldest school in the nation, predating Boston Latin School, according to Collegiate officials. Boston Latin, a public school founded in 1635 to prepare students for Harvard University, celebrated its 350th anniversary last Tuesday." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.175.100.14 (talk • contribs)


 * Notice the term "If accurate" <-- the validity of the oldest school claim is in dispute, while the validity of the oldest independent school claim is not. Either we put a modifier around the oldest school claim, or we put a direct statement of the oldest independent school claim. —Preceding unsigned comment added by NYC5 (talk • contribs)

Edits to Hopkins School
I'm happy to admit that Hopkins is #3 if it's true, but are you sure TCS has been CONTINUOUSLY operating, as that's what the section you edited referred to? Are you certain it didn't close for WWII or something? Staxringold 02:39, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Yep. Upon checking Roxbury Latin School (an article that made a similar claim), Collegiate closed down briefly during the Revolution so while you are older than Hopkins you are not an older school in continuous operation. Staxringold 02:43, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

WSJ - Collegiate NOT named top secondary school
Collegiate was not named the top secondary school in the April 2, 2004 edition of the Wall Street Journal. St. Ann's was named the top school in the country, and other NY schools ranked in the nation's top ten include Trinity (3), Horace Mann (4), Dalton (8), and Hunter College High School (9). Collegiate did not make the list.

See the WSJ article directly for proof or (to avoid paying to read the archives) see College Bound News' summary of the WSJ article.

''The April 2 Wall Street Journal examined those issues by looking at how 66 private and public high schools did in getting their students admitted to 10 exclusive colleges (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, U. Pennsylvania, Cornell, Brown, Pomona, U. of Chicago, Duke).  'The top ten high schools were: Saint Ann's School, Brooklyn, N.Y., tuition $20,500, success rate, 41 percent; Winsor School, Boston, tuition $23,800, success rate, 39 percent; Trinity School, New York City, tuition $23,475, success rate, 37 percent; Horace Mann School, Riverdale, N.Y., tuition $24,500, success rate, 35 percent; Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., tuition $23,400, success rate, 30 percent; Deerfield Academy, tuition $23.005, success rate, 30 percent; National Cathedral School, Washington, D.C., tuition $21,850, success rate, 30 percent; Dalton School, New York City, tuition $24,680, success rate, 30 percent; Hunter College High School, New York City, tuition, $0, success rate 28 percent; St. Paul's School, Concord, N.H., tuition $31,125, success rate 28 percent.  '''
 * Wrong. From that very Wall Street Journal article, available for free here : "Our numbers thresholds, to be sure, excluded some small schools that had an extremely high admissions success rate. For example, New York's Collegiate School -- which John F. Kennedy Jr. once attended -- fell just below our minimum class-size requirement, with a graduating class last year of 49 students. However, a whopping 25 of them, or 51%, went to our college picks; that would have made it No. 1 in our study." Rampa geouS   21:35, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Notable alumni and attendees
It is not right to mislead readers by putting the two together. If there are notable attendees currently on the alumni list, we should move them to a "attendees" list.


 * Attendees are alumni. The words are synonyms. The distinction you seem to want to make would be alumni vs. graduates. - Nunh-huh 05:20, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for that clarification. Some months ago, I had added some famous attendees who weren't necessarily graduates -- and then they were deleted. RahadyanS 19:53, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Should the list of alumnis be reordered either alphabetical order or in order of date they would have graduated? RahadyanS 20:02, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

There is no rule that says a notable person MUST have a wikipedia page. I included an alumni who is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and author of a NY Times bestseller, which entry was deleted by Esrever simply because the man does not have a wikipedia page. Seems like you, Esrever, police this page pretty heavily so I will create a wikipedia page for this writer simply to please you. It's absurd. Mattbucher (talk) 15:20, 12 November 2015 (UTC)
 * There's no rule, no, but it's a pretty good way to keep a list of alums from getting too long to be useful, wouldn't you agree? Esrever (klaT) 16:49, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

article name
I'd like to propose moving this article from "The Collegiate School" to "Collegiate School (New York)". Per the Wikipedia naming conventions, there should not be a definite article in the page's name. As Collegiate School is currently taken by a disambiguation page, I think this is the best solution so as both to conform to the naming guidelines and disambiguate this article from the other Collegiates out there. I know that this is probably the "best known" of the similarly named schools, but I'm not sure that presents an "overwhelming" case for not putting the geographic distinction in the page name, too. If there are no real objections in a day or two, I'll make the move. Cheers! Esrever (klaT) 02:47, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

"most academically prestigious"
I've reverted the additions to the article that include such statements as "Collegiate is perhaps the second most academically prestigious boys' school in the nation, right behind Massachusettes elite Roxbury Latin School, the oldest continually operated school in the US" and "the Brearley School, the United States most challenging girls' school," mostly because the cited websites don't say any such thing. Neither of the two sites that's been linked to (here or here) suggests any measure of comparative "academic prestige" among Latin, Collegiate, or Brearley. The former is merely a profile of Latin; the latter is a list of schools sending students to Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Neither of those two sites suggests that Collegiate is a better or worse school than any other school, and thus they have no place as citations for POVish statements. There are ample news sources that strive to "rank" high schools. Perhaps cite one of those instead. Esrever (klaT) 04:21, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

RfC on validity of "shaky" claim

 * The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Should the claim of oldest school be modified so that it appears disputable? See here and here for disputed claims. Upon further review I have realized that this would also include modification/rewording of the history section. To clarify, the reason for the RfC is that the claim made by the school appears to be somewhat unreliable. Funkyman99 (talk) 01:59, 2 November 2016 (UTC)

*Modify to state multiple viewpoints The NY Times article for example, states different viewpoints on the oldest school.CuriousMind01 (talk) 11:04, 2 November 2016 (UTC) *Agreed Needs revising. Something like "Collegiate School is an independent school for boys in New York City and by some counts the oldest school in the United States. --BoogaLouie (talk) 22:47, 2 November 2016 (UTC) (editor is a volunteer for the feedback request service.)
 * Support modification - "... and according to the New York Times, the oldest school in the United States." Meatsgains (talk) 18:20, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Modify substantially. Considering that the first decade is private tutoring at a minister's home, not a corporate body at all, the question of whether it was a school arises, not to mention whether it was the same school (whatever that means; was Jonathan Edwards' school for Indians in Stockbridge the same as Princeton University?) - and if it was, were there similar schools at Jamestown, Plymouth, or Santa Fe? "claimed to be the earliest still existing school in the United States"


 * Our ultimate source here is not the Times, but Maglione's paper, which sounds just a touch partisan. Let us have some salt. (As a guide in dealing with partisan claims, see the article on the age of the University of Pennsylvania.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:20, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
 * Modify substantially for above reasons Cl ea n Co py talk 13:16, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Per this RFC have added refs and adjusted the text. Shearonink (talk) 03:47, 30 November 2016 (UTC)


 * The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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