The Hotchkiss School is a private college-preparatory day and boarding school in Lakeville, Connecticut. It educates approximately 600 students in grades 9–12, plus postgraduates. Founded in 1891, it was one of the first English-style boarding schools in the United States and an early proponent of student financial aid, having accepted scholarship students since its inception.
Hotchkiss is a member of the Eight Schools Association and Ten Schools Admission Organization, two groups of American boarding schools. It was also a founding member of the G20 Schools group, an international association of college-preparatory high schools.
The school's list of notable alumni includes Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, Nobel laureate Dickinson Richards, Morgan Stanley co-founder Harold Stanley, and Yale University president A. Whitney Griswold.
History
Early years and developing reputation
In 1891, Maria Hotchkiss, the heir to her late husband Benjamin's armaments fortune, founded Hotchkiss School in her hometown of Lakeville, Connecticut. Although Hotchkiss had intended to establish a small school of roughly 50 students that would educate local boys for free, her chief advisor, Yale University president Timothy Dwight, wanted to use Hotchkiss' millions to establish a feeder school for Yale.Kolowrat, pp. 10-11. He hired key staff from Phillips Academy (Andover), a traditional Yale feeder school,Kolowrat, p. 46. and placed several members of the Yale community on the board of trustees. The school focused heavily on preparing students for Yale's entrance exams, and by the early 1920s Hotchkiss was consistently beating Andover's scores at the College Boards.
The newly constituted Hotchkiss School was an instant success, and the graduating class of 1896 sent twenty-eight of its thirty graduates to Yale.Wertenbaker, p. 14. That same year, Hotchkiss enrolled its first international student, the Catalan-Puerto Rican José Camprubí; in addition, Chinese students have attended Hotchkiss since 1912. Buoyed by its college placement record, the school grew rapidly. In 1902, the school had 145 students. By 1909, it already had a national student body, attracting 223 students from 29 states; of that year's forty-six graduates, thirty went to Yale.Kolowrat, pp. 124–125. By 1926, Hotchkiss already enrolled 333 students. The school remained at roughly 300–350 students until the advent of coeducation in 1974.Kolowrat, p. 393.
From the start, Hotchkiss offered what was (for its day) an extensive scholarship program; through the 1920s, approximately 10% of Hotchkiss students were on full scholarships.Kolowrat, pp. 91, 430–431. (Today, 9.6% of Hotchkiss students are on full scholarships, and another 27% receive some amount of financial aid.) However, scholarship students and paying students were not treated with total equality: as late as the 1970s, only the scholarship boys were required to perform chores on campus. During World War I, the First Yale (Aviation) Unit was sarcastically dubbed "The Millionaire's Unit"; many of its key members were Hotchkiss graduates.
Following Maria Hotchkiss' death in 1901, the school cultivated ties to Midwestern industrialists, who became some of Hotchkiss' most important donors. The Ford family of Michigan built the school library; Ohio newspaperman Paul Block donated the chapel; and automobile magnate Walter Chrysler paid for the infirmary.Levine, p. 81. By 1920, the reputation was sufficiently established that Minnesota native F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise poked fun at Hotchkiss and its athletics rival Taft for "prepar[ing] the wealth of the Middle West for social success at Yale." The school's history speculated that Hotchkiss developed these ties because older New England boarding schools "looked askance at first- or second-generation wealth, especially if its possessors resided beyond the Northeast."Kolowrat, p. 73; see also id. at p. 474 ("The old upper crust historically went to Groton and St. Paul's and on to Harvard. That's not to say there wasn't any old money at Hotchkiss. But from the beginning the school catered more to industrialists, Wall Street executives, and a variety of newly rich go-getters.").
The disciplinarians and the gentlemen Over the years, the school acquired a reputation for gentility, fostered by long-serving headmaster George Van Santvoord, a former Yale professor and 1908 Hotchkiss graduate who ran the school from 1926 to 1955. Van Santvoord said that at his Hotchkiss there was only one school rule: "Be a gentleman"—a principle he inherited from his own Hotchkiss headmaster, Huber Buehler.Kolowrat, p. 33 ("Be a gentleman! That was the only rule, the Duke always liked to say, that the school truly had.") a "His school, the Duke used to say (Hotchkiss) had only one rule, and that was "Be a gentleman", How he defined what a gentleman was he did not say, but what a gentleman was usually became clear when you discovered what a gentleman wasn't. A gentleman didn't cheat. He didn't lie. A gentleman wasn't petty. A gentleman wasn't intolerant of others' shortcomings. A gentleman wasn't a whiner, wasn't a gossip, wasn't a boor, wasn't inconsiderate of others' feelings..." a "George Van Santvoord (1891–1975), whose distinguished bearing earned him the nickname the Duke. Van Santvoord, and his predecessor who was known as the King, claimed that at Hotchkiss there was only one rule for students to follow: Be a gentleman."— ¶ 2 a "And the number-one rule in the Blue Book—Be a gentleman."— p. 24, last ¶ (The phrase dates back to an 1893 student publication.)
Although Van Santvoord de-emphasized Hotchkiss' traditional focus on college entrance examinations,Kolowrat, p. 256 (" 'Think of all the wonderful boys we would have missed who went to Hotchkiss if we had accepted only those from the ninety-eighth percentile,' he once told [his stepdaughter]. 'I put my trust in the middle-of-the roaders. ... The bright ones have so many possibilities that quite often they can't settle on anything. They're good at everything, and they often come up with nothing.'").Wertenbaker, p. 92. Hotchkiss continued to send large numbers of students to Yale; sociologist Jerome Karabel calculated that in the 1930s, "more students came to New Haven from Hotchkiss than from the combined public school systems of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia." Van Santvoord found an ideological ally in Yale president James Rowland Angell, who declared at a Hotchkiss alumni dinner that college entrance examinations were "disastrous" for secondary education. When Van Santvoord announced his retirement in 1954, Time magazine stated that "of all U.S. prep schools, few, if any, can beat the standards Hotchkiss has set".a "Of all U.S. prep schools, few, if any, can beat the standards Hotchkiss has set. — ¶ 2 (The man in charge of Time was Henry Luce, a Hotchkiss fundraiser and former Hotchkiss scholarship student.Kolowrat, p. 160.)
Under Van Santvoord, Hotchkiss became the first of the post-1884 American boarding schools to accept black students when Marcellus Winston '55 matriculated in 1951. He also abolished hazing in 1930.Kolowrat, p. 219. However, Van Santvoord strongly opposed co-education, and due to his continuing influence over the school's board of trustees, Hotchkiss did not begin accepting girls until nearly two decades after his retirement.Kolowrat, pp. 379–384. Under his leadership, Hotchkiss' financial aid resources "largely went to the nouveau poor, well-to-do families who had taken their lumps during the Great Depression." He also opposed (unsuccessfully) proposals to start a summer school for low-income students.Kolowrat, p. 331.
Neither did Van Santvoord fully dislodge the school's no-second-chances approach to student discipline, which was facetiously compared to "Stalag 17". Twenty-five years after his retirement, The New York Times wrote that Hotchkiss "has long been known for its strict rules and the alacrity with which it expels youngsters who break them." Recognizing this reputation, Hotchkiss invited a former student, C. D. B. Bryan, to write the introduction to the official history of the school, in which Bryan recounts how Hotchkiss expelled him "for having an electric coffeepot and smoking a Lucky Strike."Kolowrat, pp. 13–19.
Modernizing Hotchkiss A. William "Bill" Olsen became headmaster in 1960 and proceeded to relax many of the austerities of life at Hotchkiss. He introduced new holidays to the school calendar (at the time, only seniors were allowed to go home for Thanksgiving), allowed students to keep radios in their dormitories, legalized smoking and drinking (in Connecticut, eighteen-year-olds may drink alcohol under specific circumstances), and moderated the system of punishments and expulsions.Kolowrat, pp. 326–328, 358–359. He also abolished compulsory Sunday chapel attendance in 1970; although Hotchkiss had been nonsectarian since its founding, the extent of its ecumenicism had been to allow Catholics to attend Sunday Mass at 9:00 a.m. as long as they attended the school's official Protestant service later that day.Kolowrat, pp. 272, 356.
The school also took steps to diversify its student body. In 1953, with Hotchkiss' help, Hotchkiss alumnus Eugene Van Voorhis '51 established the Ulysses S. Grant Foundation to assist minority New Haven students with the prep school application process. Hotchkiss has also participated in other recruitment initiatives from the 1960s onward, such as A Better Chance (ABC), Prep for Prep, and the Greater Opportunity (GO) summer program for inner-city students. In 1974, Hotchkiss began admitting girls (but not before certain board members nearly succeeded in firing Olsen to prevent it),Kolowrat, pp. 380–387. and as of 2014 there was an approximately 50–50 gender balance in the student body. To limit the number of male students who would be rejected as a result of this change, Hotchkiss agreed to increase the size of the student body from 350 to 500 students.
International relations and diversity In 1928, the school joined the English-Speaking Union and established the International Schoolboy Exchange. Established by the class of 1948, the Fund for Global Understanding enables student participation in summer service projects across the world. The school additionally offers a School Year Abroad program.
In 2010, Hotchkiss partnered with Peking University High School to establish its study abroad, international division called Dalton Academy. Hotchkiss is a member of the Global Education Benchmark Group (GEBG), the Round Square group, and the Confucius Institute International Division (Hanban).
Today, 42% of U.S. Hotchkiss students identify as people of color, up from 33% in 2018–19. To recruit U.S. students from "historically underrepresented" backgrounds, Hotchkiss pays for certain prospective applicants and their guardians to visit the campus during the admissions process. 14% of the student body is international.
Finances
Tuition and financial aid Tuition and fees for the 2024–2025 academic year are $71,170 for boarding students and $60,490 for day students. 37% of the student body is on financial aid, and the average aid grant is $62,075. The school's goal is for half the student body to be on financial aid by 2028. In addition, the school commits to meet 100% of an admitted student's demonstrated financial need, and awards full scholarships to 26% of students on financial aid (9.6% of the student body).
Endowment and expenses As of June 30, 2023, Hotchkiss' financial endowment was $553.9 million. In its Internal Revenue Service filings for the 2021–22 school year, Hotchkiss reported total assets of $760.3 million, net assets of $665.5 million, investment holdings of $549.5 million, and cash holdings of $9.2 million. Hotchkiss also reported $61.1 million in program service expenses and $12.9 million in grants (primarily student financial aid).