Phillips Academy
Phillips Academy, also known as Andover, is a private, co-educational, boarding-and-day, college-preparatory school located in Andover, Massachusetts, near Boston. Phillips Academy is the oldest incorporated academy in the United States, having been founded in 1778. The school enrolls approximately 1,150 students in grades 9 through 12, including postgraduate students. It is part of the Eight Schools Association and the Ten Schools Admission Organization.
Notable alumni include American presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, several members of the Washington family and Kennedy family, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Josiah Quincy III, Philip K. Wrigley, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Benjamin Spock, Frank Stella, Bill Belichick, foreign heads of state, members of Congress, five Nobel laureates and six Medal of Honor recipients, and artists, athletes, and businesspersons.
Phillips Academy admits students on a need-blind basis and provides financial aid covering 100% of students' demonstrated financial need. 47% of Andover students receive financial aid, and 12% are on full scholarship.
History
Revolutionary-era beginnings
Phillips Academy was established by Samuel Phillips Jr., a local businessman who hoped to educate Calvinist students for the ministry.The American Revolutionary War had caused significant upheaval to education in New England, and Phillips Academy filled part of that gap. The founders of Phillips Academy were strongly associated with the Patriot cause. Samuel Phillips and Eliphalet Pearson manufactured gunpowder for the Continental Army, and the founders attempted to stock Andover's library with books confiscated from Loyalist families who had fled New England.
Several prominent Revolutionary figures maintained links with the academy, including George Washington, John Hancock, and Paul Revere. Revere's design of the academy seal incorporated a beehive, crops, the sun, and the academy's two mottos: Non Sibi and Finis Origine Pendet. Other mottos include Youth from Every Quarter and Knowledge and Goodness, two paraphrases from the academy constitution.
In 1828, all-boys Phillips Academy was joined by a sister school, Abbot Academy. Abbot was one of the first secondary schools for girls in New England. Although the academies had neighboring campuses in the town of Andover, their administrations sought to limit and regulate contact between the student bodies. The two academies merged in 1973.
Andover Theological Seminary
From 1808 to 1907, Phillips Academy shared its campus with the Andover Theological Seminary, which was founded by orthodox Calvinists who had fled Harvard University after it appointed a liberal Unitarian theology professor. The Phillips family financially backed the seminary, and the two institutions shared a board of directors.The Andover-Exeter rivalry developed after Samuel Phillips' uncle John Phillips founded Phillips Exeter Academy in 1781. The seminary's commitment to orthodox theology helped fuel the rivalry. Exeter was more welcoming to Unitarians, or at least less religious than Andover; as such, Exeter tended to send its students to Unitarian Harvard while Andover steered its students to Yale, more hospitable to Calvinists. The Phillips Academy constitution originally required all teachers and trustees to be Protestants, although the school has not enforced this restriction for many decades. Today, Andover and Exeter are both nonsectarian institutions.
Andover and Exeter's sports teams have meanwhile played each other since 1861, and the football teams have met nearly every year since 1878, making Andover-Exeter one of the nation's oldest high school football rivalries.
During the late 1800s, some New England families were drawn to Andover's reputation for theological conservatism. In the 1880s, the bulk of Andover students came from Congregationalist and Presbyterian households, and the academy enrolled "almost no" Unitarians or Methodists. However, by the 1900s, Calvinism was no longer popular in New England, and Andover Theological Seminary was facing declining enrollment. In 1907, the seminary reconciled with Harvard and returned to Cambridge.
Revival as college-preparatory institution
After a period of decline, Cecil Bancroft, Alfred Stearns, and Claude Fuess led Andover through a long era of expansion that transformed Andover into one of the largest and richest prep schools in the United States. Bancroft improved Andover's academic reputation; he reformed the curriculum to the expectations of college presidents and visited the English public schools to learn about best practices in Europe. Aided by a "sink-or-swim" policy of expelling underperforming or undisciplined students, the academy was able to place a majority of its students at Yale, Harvard, or Princeton. Enrollment, which had fallen from 396 students in 1855 to 177 in 1877, rebounded to roughly 400 by 1901 and passed 700 in 1937.To compete with newer, fully residential boarding schools, the headmasters built new on-campus housing and modernized the academic facilities, a process that took over a generation to complete. Shortly after taking over, Bancroft recognized that Andover's historical reliance on local families for student housing was hurting its reputation. By 1901 Andover provided housing for approximately one-third of boarders; by 1929 all boarders could finally live on campus. Much of this expansion was funded by banker Thomas Cochran '90, a partner at J. P. Morgan who had no children and wanted to make Andover "the most beautiful school in America." Cochran donated roughly $10 million to Andover ; for reference, when he died his estate was probated at $3 million. In 1928, as many as 15,000 people visited Andover's campus to hear President Calvin Coolidge deliver the keynote address at Andover's 150th anniversary celebration, a speech that Cochran had arranged.
During this period, Andover was a primarily white and Protestant institution, although its expanding scholarship program and occasional steps toward racial integration made it relatively diverse by New England boarding school standards. The share of scholarship boys steadily increased from 10% in 1901 to roughly 25% in 1944. Andover was one of the first New England boarding schools to accept black students, starting in the 1850s. However, it had just five black students when Bancroft died in 1901, and black representation actually declined under Bancroft's successors: only four African-Americans attended Andover between 1911 and 1934. The academy admitted more Jewish students but capped their numbers at roughly 5% of the student body. Andover was also one of the first American schools to educate Chinese students, participating in the 1872–1881 Chinese Educational Mission; one student, Liang Cheng, later became the Chinese ambassador to the United States.
In the 1930s, Andover participated in the International Schoolboy Fellowship, a cultural exchange program between U.S. boarding schools, British public schools, and Nazi boarding schools. As U.S.-Germany relations deteriorated, Andover terminated the arrangement in 1939 at the State Department's request. Following America's entry into World War II, over 3,000 Andover graduates participated in the war effort in some capacity, with 142 deaths.
Post-war to present
updated the curriculum and improved salaries and benefits for faculty members. Under his leadership, Andover co-authored a study on high school students' preparation for college coursework, which led to the creation of the Advanced Placement program. Although tightening academic standards at elite universities and increased competition from public schools caused Andover's college placement record to decline significantly during Kemper's administration—the proportion of graduates attending Yale, Harvard, or Princeton fell to 55% in 1953 and 33% in 1967—nearly every major boarding school endured similar declines during this period.Like many other boarding school administrators, Kemper and his successors also sought to democratize the campus. Andover began to admit more black students in the 1950s and 1960s, but progress was slow; by 1978, 6% of the student body was black or Hispanic. Andover abolished secret societies in 1949, although one society still exists. It also abolished mandatory attendance at religious services in the early 1970s. Phillips Academy became co-educational in 1973, when it merged with its sister school Abbot Academy.
During this period, Andover also began coordinating policy with other large and wealthy secondary schools. In 1952, the Ten Schools Admission Organization began coordinating outreach to potential applicants and streamlining the admissions process. After Kemper's retirement, Andover became a founding member of the Eight Schools Association, an informal group of headmasters of large boarding schools that began meeting in the 1970s and formalized in 2006.
Raynard S. Kington has been Head of School since 2019. He was previously the president of Grinnell College in Iowa. The previous Head of School was law professor John Palfrey, who left Andover to take over the MacArthur Foundation. The academy is supervised by a board of trustees, all of whom are alumni except the Head of School. It is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges.
Admissions and student body
Admission policies
Phillips Academy is one of the most selective boarding schools in the United States, especially in light of its size. In 2016, four boarding schools had an acceptance rate lower than 15%, and Andover was larger than the other three put together. The acceptance rate normally hovers around 13%, but during the COVID-19 pandemic, it fell to 9% in 2022.Andover has practiced need-blind admission since 2007. It also offers financial aid that covers 100% of demonstrated financial need for every admitted student. To recruit U.S. students from "historically underrepresented" backgrounds, Andover pays for certain prospective financial aid applicants and their guardians to visit the campus during the admissions process.
About one of every eight Andover students has a parent who attended Andover, and at least one out of every five Andover students has a sibling who attended Andover.