Talk:Saint Grottlesex

Spelling out "Saint"
No one spells out St. More wikifoolishness. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.160.178.11 (talk) 18:13, 6 June 2008 (UTC)


 * No one?? The New York Times does -- see http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/the-case-for-noblesse-oblige/ — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ngriffeth (talk • contribs) 20:49, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Proposed COI revision of article - 10 November 2023
Hi there - proposing an expansion of the current stub into a full-fledged article. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Saint_Grottlesex. Please let me know if you have any questions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 209.122.123.7 (talk) 15:57, 10 November 2023 (UTC)
 * The proposed text has been placed in a draft version of the article. Because the article is no longer under AFC review, that draft version may be deleted at any time. To ensure permanence of the request, the proposed text needs to be placed on this talk page. Additionally, the COI editor is reminded of the need to sign all talk page posts, and that new posts are always placed at the bottom of the talk page. Regards, Spintendo  11:52, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I will move the proposed text to the talk page shortly. 209.122.123.7 (talk) 02:15, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Proposed COI revision of article - 11 November 2023 (rev'd 25 January 2024)
Hi there - here is the proposed text from Draft:Saint Grottlesex. To avoid confusing the talk page headings with the proposed text headings, all of the following headings were moved down one rank.

My specific COI concern is that I attended one of the schools mentioned in the draft article. I am not being paid by anyone to propose this edit. I researched and drafted this expansion out of personal curiosity. I am happy to discuss any specific concerns you might have.

The term Saint Grottlesex refers to several American college-preparatory boarding schools in New England that historically educated the social and economic elite of the Northeastern United States.

The St. Grottlesex schools are traditionally given as:

The term is a portmanteau of the St. part of St. Mark's, St. Paul's, and St. George's, then part of Groton, an extra t, and then ending with Middlesex.

In addition, Kent School is occasionally categorized within St. Grottlesex.

The St. Grottlesex schools are broadly associated with upper-class Protestantism in the United States and preppy culture. St. Mark's, St. Paul's, St. George's, and Groton are all affiliated with the Episcopal Church, the wealthiest Protestant denomination. Middlesex, though ostensibly nonsectarian, was established by similarly upper-class Unitarian Boston Brahmins. They soon attracted an aristocratic clientele: in 1906 four-fifths of Groton and St. Mark's parents were listed in the Social Register.

With the exception of St. Paul's and St. Mark's, the St. Grottlesex schools were established at the turn of the twentieth century as part of a larger boom in the boarding school industry that also included Lawrenceville (refounded 1883), Taft (founded 1890), Hotchkiss (1891), Choate (1896), Kent (1906), and Loomis (1914). (The St. Paul's student body also doubled in size during this period. ) These new schools were consciously styled as the American equivalent of the English public schools, in contrast to the eighteenth-century "academies" like Andover, Exeter, Lawrence, and Deerfield, which were typically set up when a rural town lacked the tax revenue to support a public school, and principally educated students from the surrounding area. Moreover, unlike their academy forebears, the Gilded Age schools were explicitly founded to prepare their students for college. For example, while Exeter (founded 1781) and Middlesex (founded 1901) were both strongholds of Unitarianism and prepared students for Unitarian Harvard, as late as the 1880s only 18% of Exeter graduates went to college.

The St. Grottlesex schools entrenched their social distinctiveness by charging much higher tuition than the academies. When Groton was founded in 1884, it charged $500 a year for tuition, room, and board. By contrast, Lawrence charged $200 a year; Andover charged $69 a year for tuition and room, board not included; and Exeter tuition ranged between $60 and $81 a year, room and board not included. As late as 1940, tuition at Groton, St. Paul's, and St. Mark's was still nearly 30% higher than at Andover and Exeter (albeit less expensive than Deerfield); at Middlesex and St. George's it was closer to 50% higher.

There is no clear consensus on the source of the term; however, most sources link it to admissions practices and undergraduate student life at Harvard College, where St. Grottlesex alumni traditionally sat "[a]t the top of the social hierarchy."


 * Undergraduate admissions. The Harvard sociologist George C. Homans claimed that the term was coined by the Harvard admissions office to help categorize and sort through Harvard applicants.
 * Undergraduate housing. Until the 1970s, Harvard's undergraduate dormitories were allowed to admit their own sophomores. Under this system, boarding school alumni clustered within certain dormitories. Eliot House and Lowell House were reportedly "exclusively St. Grottlesex," and John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that when he was a tutor at Winthrop House, his housemaster's policy was to "automatically" accept alumni of St. Grottlesex and to "generally" accept alumni of Andover and Exeter. By contrast, graduates of other private schools were "tolerated," Jews (even if educated at St. Grottlesex) were subject to a quota, and admitting public school students was "definitely discourage[d]."
 * Student life. St. Grottlesex alumni historically dominated admission to Harvard's exclusive undergraduate final clubs. In 1906 only one Andover graduate (and zero Exeter graduates) was admitted to the Porcellian, A.D., or Delphic Clubs, compared to 20 St. Grottlesexers and six alumni of other boarding schools. As late as 1939-41, nearly half the St. Grottlesex alumni from those three graduating classes were admitted to a final club; fewer than ten percent of Exeter and Andover alumni obtained admission. Of the 293 Harvard students in those classes who joined a final club, 255 went to a St. Grottlesex school, 14 went to Exeter and Andover, 23 went to a different private school, and 1 went to a public school.

Although the St. Grottlesex schools were not the only college-preparatory boarding schools founded during the Gilded Age, they stood out for their aristocratic reputation and their college placement record. The two were related, as Harvard president Charles Eliot distrusted public high schools. Although he complimented Exeter for its "national" reach and "democratic" character, he encouraged boarding schools to temper America's "habitual regard for masses and majorities" with "aristocratic institutions" and "noble family stock[]." In fact, Eliot personally sponsored the establishment of Groton and Middlesex.

Harvard's admissions office continued favoring St. Grottlesex alumni after Eliot's retirement: even at mid-century, St. Mark's, St. Paul's, Groton, and Middlesex were still sending a larger percentage of their graduates to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton than their peer boarding schools. (Two notable exceptions were Andover and Exeter, which successfully reinvented themselves as college-preparatory schools. ) In 1959, the university conducted an internal study to see which of its top 79 feeder schools produced the most honors graduates per capita. It found that "not one of the 30 top institutions was an eastern boarding school" and that "[s]ome of the St. Grottlesex schools, in particular, had especially poor records."

Once Ivy League schools raised academic standards for undergraduate admissions in the 1950s and 1960s, St. Grottlesex's advantage partially dissipated, as nearly all the traditional feeder boarding schools lost significant market share during this period. Reinforcing this trend, the middle schools that traditionally fed students to St. Grottlesex began sending most of their students to private day schools instead, leading Groton's admissions director to comment that "the competition [for spots] isn't as stiff as it used to be, and the classics scholars are getting worried about a decline in intellectual quality." At Manhattan's Collegiate School, for example, the percentage of eighth graders who went on to boarding school declined from 75% in 1961 to 9% in 1971.

This process continued beyond the 1960s and eventually forced reforms. The schools broadened their applicant pools by belatedly admitting girls and ethnic minorities. Groton's first black student graduated in 1956, followed by St. Paul's (1964), St. George's (1968), St. Mark's (1969), and Middlesex (1970). Gender integration took longer. St. Paul's welcomed its first female students in 1971, followed by St. George's (1972), Middlesex (1974), Groton (1975), and St. Mark's (1977). Even so, this expansion of the applicant pool was not enough to fully arrest the decline in college outcomes. In 1992, St. Paul's appointed a new rector with a "mandate ... to improve the quality of the school academically," as "[n]obody had gone to Harvard in five years, except for legacies."

209.122.123.7 (talk) 02:23, 12 November 2023 (UTC)


 * @209.122.123.7 Thank you for posting the text here, it's much appreciated. Looking over this, I see that this topic initially concerns five schools that are listed at the beginning of the article, but then the article drifts into talking about many other schools which it calls "academies". The remainder of the article then describes the differences between these academies and the original five schools. If the COI editor could elaborate on the differences between these academies and the original five schools, as well as describe how discussing these academies does not stray from the topic of the original five schools, that would be most helpful. When ready to proceed with your reply, please change the request template's answer parameter to read from y to n. Thank you! Regards, Spintendo  06:27, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your thoughtful comments, and apologies for the delay in response. I think you're right that the draft should focus on the five schools originally listed, and have revised the proposal along those lines; it's admittedly painful to remove the material on academies but I'm sure I can find a use for it down the road. I have also dug up some more information on the possible source and/or institutional usage of the term "St. Grottlesex." I look forward to discussing the revised draft and any potential comments you might have. 209.122.123.7 (talk) 07:36, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
 * This is a lot of information to review, and it's sourced to offline books and research papers that many reviewers including myself will not have access to. I'm not sure how to proceed. I wonder if you'd have more luck reaching out to WikiProject Schools. ?  STEM info  (talk) 05:21, 5 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I think a simpler predicate answer might be: do I need a COI review if I'm an alum of one of the schools but am not otherwise connected to any of them? This always felt to me like a particularly tangential use of the COI procedure, and it is not uncommon for alumni to edit their alma maters' articles. I submitted a COI edit request because I was proposing a large expansion of a stub, not because I believe that an alumnus is categorically barred from editing a Wikipedia page. Of course if there is consensus against such edits, I'm happy to stand down.
 * I do want to note that my sources aren't as inaccessible as you might think - most (though not all) of the books I included are available online via Google Books if you want to double-check a citation, and registering a JSTOR account allows you to read 100 papers a month for free. 209.122.123.7 (talk) 02:11, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I took your advice and signed up for a JSTOR account. Thanks for the tip. As far as your point related to a conflict of interest, alumni are discouraged from editing their school's articles since they can introduce unintentional bias. For example, an alumni will want to make their school look as strong as possible, in case they are interviewing for a job and the recruiter looks up their school on Wikipedia. You can see how this plays out with a sentence in the lead. These schools have historically sent their graduates to the nation's most prestigious universities. The source is The New Yorker, and it doesn't say that. In the 2006 New Yorker opinion column written by author Malcolm Gladwell, he writes [Harvard] historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex. If the lead was going to be truly accurately based on that one source, it should say In a 2006 column for the New Yorker, author Malcolm Gladwell wrote that the schools were known for sending their graduates to Harvard. Not quite as broadly promotional. What's there now is called original research.
 * Getting back to your edit request, a few things stand out. There's too much emphasis on comparing admission rates from top prep schools. That's an area where a connected editor might subconsciously (or consciously) want to selectively show data to make their school look better. Also, the level of detail in the first table listing the five schools is too much for a lead section.  I think the bullet listing that's there now should be converted to linear prose, and the table you created should go further below. Lastly, the detail in the undergraduate housing and student life sections seem to exist only to highlight the connection with Harvard, and as such are out of place. If you want to take a fresh look with these suggestions in mind, I can review again. Or I can simply jump in and change the info in the most suitable way, and we can go from there.  STEM info  (talk) 20:51, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Hi there - I just want to clarify that I didn't write the sentence citing the Gladwell article, which is from the current version of the article. I agree that if we're taking a fresh look at the entire article it would be better to remove the entire sentence and citation (which is, in fact, what I did).
 * I think it would probably be better if you'd jump in and be bold, as the saying goes. 209.122.123.7 (talk) 21:05, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Some specific responses to your comments:
 * - No objection to moving the table down below.
 * - Admission rate chart - you're welcome to take that out, although to my mind the story it tells is primarily one of decline, not inter-school comparison. In any event I would still cite the study in some fashion, even if it's cut down and the table is removed. If you are concerned that I'm just here to make Groton look good, the Michael Gordon 1969 study includes raw admission numbers for each school, so I'm happy to provide consolidated figures for all five schools. In 1955 St. Grottlesex graduated 233 students, of whom 129 (55.4%) went to H/Y/P. In 1967 they graduated 259 students, of whom 98 (37.8%) went to H/Y/P. Same page cited as before. This requires some back of the envelope arithmetic but hopefully that doesn't violate the original research rule.
 * - If you want to counterbalance college admissions statistics with more negative appraisals, McGeorge Bundy (the faculty dean of Harvard who reformed Harvard admissions in the 50s and 60s) once said that in the earlier days, "If you [were a prep school student and] weren't a notorious and incorrigibly stupid or lazy person you could go to any college you wanted. You really could." (Powell, Arthur G., Lessons from Privilege: the American Prep School Tradition (1996), New York: Harvard University Press, p. 136.) Likewise, the headmaster of St. Mark's from 1968-74 (who graduated from St. Mark's in 1937) said that before WWII, colleges "were for the most part willing to accept any boys who could pass the [College] Boards and whose fathers could pay the tuition," so "[s]trong boarding schools[] with capable disciplinarians who knew their subjects ... enjoyed phenomenal success in getting their students into any college they chose." (Hall, Edward T., Saint Mark's School: A Centennial History (1967), Lunenberg, VT: Stinehour Press, p. 18.)
 * - Karabel (2005, already cited above) has some interesting statistics on the schools. "73 of the 86 students who applied from these schools in 1950 were accepted [to Harvard]. That same year, Bronx Science (New York City), Stuyvesant (New York City), and Central (Philadelphia) fared much less well, with only 17 of 52 gaining admission." (p. 194.) "Harvard's pronounced preference for the graduates of leading private schools followed the same logic. Apart from offering a steady supply of 'paying guests,' such schools educated just the sort of young men Harvard most wished to enroll. In 1940, of the 77 applicants from the St. Grottlesex schools, only 1 was rejected." (p. 174.) However, that is not why these five schools were unique, as Karabel goes on to say that the larger boarding schools had similar acceptance rates (same citation), reducing the distinctiveness of the neologism. He adds that in 1955, Andover/Exeter actually had a higher acceptance rate at Harvard than the St. Grottlesex schools (he includes Kent).
 * - I think it would be better to condense the Harvard housing/student life sections rather than delete them because Harvard is the source of this neologism and Harvard campus life is where you see an actual distinction between St. Grottlesex and Andover/Exeter; half the point of the term is to distinguish these schools from A/E, so if you don't have some data points that show a difference, what's the point of the term at all? (It is not as though these schools had better college acceptances than A/E.) It may be helpful to note that Yale and Princeton had a different set of feeder schools during this period; if Hotchkiss and Taft alumni were disproportionately represented in Skull and Bones (or Lawrenceville and Hill in the Ivy Club) I wouldn't be surprised, but I don't have the sources for that.
 * - If we don't focus on the specific ways in which the St. Grottlesex schools were different from other boarding schools, then it may make sense to look for ways in which the neologism is used in popular culture. 209.122.123.7 (talk) 21:51, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
 * I implemented a large chunk of your request. You did a good job putting it together. I restructured the info a bit, and deleted some of the info that I felt was out of place, per the earlier thread. You can see exactly what I did by clicking edit, pasting in your original text, and then clicking below to show changes. I wonder if some of the Harvard info might go in the Harvard article.  STEM info  (talk) 01:17, 24 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Sorry for the late reply. Thank you very much for patiently implementing my suggestions! 209.122.123.7 (talk) 02:15, 1 May 2024 (UTC)