From Cookson & Persell's `Preparing For Power: America's Elite Boarding Schools'--Part 10

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 and its undemocratic admissions process:

“The exact percentage of whites in the questionnaire sample of 20 schools is 90.3, of blacks, 4.3, and of Asians, 5.3…Some boarding schools have as few as one percent black students and, on average, 4 percent of boarding-school students are black…29 percent of the black students in the sample had a relative who had attended boarding school…

“…Today [in 1985] one-quarter of all boarding-school students are now Catholic, close to the 27 percent of Catholic-Americans…Episcopal and progressive schools have the fewest Catholics…Today [in 1985] 11 percent of the students in our sample of 2,475 are Jewish, compared to less than 3 percent in the general population…In our sample there were no Jewish respondents at either the Episcopal schools or the Catholic schools. Jewish families have fewer legacies than any other group except blacks…65 percent of Jewish fathers own their own business, and 22 percent of Jewish mothers own their own business…

“In sum, boarding schools are overwhelmingly from high-income professional and managerial families…7 percent are non-citizen, 5 percent are Asian, and 4 percent are black. More than half (54 percent) of the students have one or more relatives who also attended boarding school…

“Boarding school students, by any reasonable standard, are elite…The select 16 boarding schools can be particularly selective in who they admit…”