The Ten Schools Admissions Organization is a group of highly selective college prep schools that cooperate in their recruitment of prospective students. These schools consider their strengths “high academic standards, rich institutional histories, and a commitment to educating the whole person. As boarding schools, they create intimate communities of learners in which students and teachers live, work, inquire, discover and recreate side by side. As institutions dedicated to instilling the qualities of leadership, they afford young men and women the opportunity of spending their formative years in a setting where character, achievement and intellectual endeavor are highly valued.”

The first school we will examine is Choate Rosemary Hall. 

Choate enrolls approximately 630 boarding and 220 day students representing 41 states and 41 countries. 38% of students identify themselves as persons of color. For the 2008-2009 year total fees were $43,380 for boarders and $33,030 for day students. Financial aid totaling $8.5 million was awarded to 33 percent of the student body, the average award being $33,570 for boarders and $22,400 for day students. For the 2009-2010 year there were 1,682 applicants for 269 places.

The faculty numbers 109 full-time and 10 part-time instructors, 70% of whom hold advanced degrees. There are in addition 48 administrative faculty. The student-faculty ratio is 6:1, and the average class size is 12. Edward J. Shanahan has been headmaster of Choate since 1991, when he arrived from Dartmouth where he had been Dean of the College. Each spring Shanahan teaches a senior elective course on Irish Literature.

There are five college admissions counselors at the school. From 2005 to 2009 the most popular college destinations of Choate graduates were Georgetown with 48 matriculating, 33 at NYU, 32 at Yale, 27 at Boston University, 26 each at Boston College and George Washington, 25 each at Brown, Columbia, Cornell, and Tufts, 24 each at Harvard and Wesleyan, 23 at Dartmouth, 21 each at Princeton and Penn, 20 at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, 19 each at Johns Hopkins and Colgate.

The admission process for international students is the same as for domestic students. However, students whose first language is not English are expected to take the TOEFL exam in addition to the other required tests.