The rat race starts young for the children of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
On the Upper East Side, as in certain wealthy enclaves of San Francisco and Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., parents devote extraordinary effort towards getting their 5-year-olds into “top-tier” K-12 schools.
Acceptance into these elite private schools is an “infamously complicated and time-intensive game of tutoring and networking that involves preschoolers sitting for assessments and ‘interviews’ just before nap time,” writes Matt Stieb for New York Magazine’s Intelligencer.
One suspects a certain “public school for thee, not for me,” attitude among these parents. Manhattan’s Upper East Side is reliably blue. Mothers who extol the virtues of public education over mimosas are often the same women furiously enrolling their toddlers into kindergarten-prep programs. (RELATED: Kids Dumb As Rocks Now So Parents Across Country Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands)
This was a particularly tough admissions season, Stieb says. There was a COVID-19 era baby boom, and many of Manhattan’s most sought after private schools are openly nepotistic.
“Where an applicant’s parents went to school matters, but not nearly as much as where their brother and sister are currently enrolled,” Stieb writes, citing Brooke Parker, a “Manhattan admissions consultant who focuses exclusively on kindergarten and nursery schools.”
Parker claims some of her clients come to her “while their children are still in utero,” according to Stieb.
Parents have complained for decades that getting into an elite independent school in Manhattan is harder than getting into Harvard; for the wealthy parents who are competing to spend about $70,000 a year, it’s an infamously complicated and time-intensive game of tutoring and… pic.twitter.com/gYFkbAGS9W
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) March 3, 2026
I don’t take issue with legacy admissions. One function of an elite school is to educate its students. Another, perhaps greater, function of an elite school is to facilitate connections between well established families.
Besides, I’m quite sure that the children who don’t gain admission to the handful of schools considered “top-tier” will do just fine. Their parents appear to be affluent, intelligent, and highly conscientious, if a bit neurotic.
It’s the neuroticism with which I do take issue. I’m reminded of a social media post by former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, in which he took American culture to task for “venerat[ing] mediocrity over excellence.”
“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” Ramaswamy wrote in December 2024. (RELATED: Vivek Ramaswamy Rage Quits Social Media After Being Bullied For Being Indian)
Ramaswamy’s understanding of American culture is shallow. Often, the jock and the valedictorian are the same person. The United States produced its fair share of inventors, scientists, and artists prior to the popularization of Type A “tiger parenting.”
One example: Seymour Cray graduated from his local, public high school in 1943, served in World War II, and went on to more or less invent the supercomputer industry.
Genius benefits from cultivation, yes. It should be shaped and oriented towards the good. That does not entail obsessing over a slight change in one’s grade point average, or spending one’s childhood collecting resume items for a Harvard application.
Follow Natalie Sandoval on X: @NatSandovalDC
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