From Cookson & Persell's `Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools'--Part 1

In their 1985 book, Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools, Peter W. Cookson Jr. and Cardine Hodges Persell wrote the following about the U.S. power elite's private school and elite prep school educational system:

"...Less than 10 percent of American high school students attend private school and only 20 to 30 percent of those are enrolled in private residential schools...If we were to reduce our sample even further to include only elite preparatory, or `prep,' schools, then the number of students attending those schools is less than one percent of the total high-school population. The one percent who attend the elite schools are not randomly selected from the population at large. They are overwhelmingly the children of the privileged classes. At one elite school, 40 percent of the 1982 graduating class was drawn from families listed in the Social Register...

"In this book we document how the philosophies, programs, and lifestyles of boarding schools help transmit power and privilege and how elite families use the schools to maintain their social class..."