These Arizona High Schools Send The Most Graduates To Ivy League Universities

One Phoenix high school topped all others in sending the most students to Harvard, Princeton and MIT — and it wasn’t a private or charter school.

While a few charter school operators — such as Basis Charter Schools and Great Hearts Academies —usually top the overall local school rankings by SAT scores, it was Desert Vista High School, a traditional public school, that sent the most graduating students to the top three prestigious Ivy League colleges between 2015-2018, according to an annual ranking from PolarisList.

While the ranking focuses on the total number of graduates sent during the four-year period from 2015-2018, Chaparral High School in Scottsdale saw four of its students in the graduating year of 2018 go to MIT.

PolarisList researchers said they focused on Harvard, Princeton and MIT based on a combination of their selectivity and their accessibility to lower income students.

“Selectivity is important to us because it means these schools have their pick of the lot when it comes to applicants,” according to the PolarisList website. “If a high school is able to send students to one of these three schools, it means that the school has created an environment to support high achieving students, whether it’s in academics or extracurriculars.”

These three universities also are among the colleges with the highest percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, which most often are given to undergraduate students with family incomes below $20,000.

Click here to read the full ranking by PolarisList.