Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
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Ten years ago, Mark, who works in finance and lives on the Upper East Side, and his wife, an attorney, glided through the private-school application process for their two daughters. Both girls attended a feeder private nursery school (what was once known as a “baby Ivy”) where the school directors had a direct line to the admissions offices at the very best ongoing schools, and their mother was an alumna of a “top-tier” (or, as certain parents call them online, “TT”) private K–12 all-girls’ school. His daughters applied to that school in September and were accepted in December, in an early wave of notifications reserved for siblings and legacies. He knew the process might be a little more difficult for their much younger son, who applied to kindergarten this past fall without a legacy advantage, said Mark, whose name has been changed to protect the privacy of his children. “I didn’t realize it would be like this.”
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 networking that involves preschoolers sitting for assessments and “interviews” just before nap time. But the February 2026 notification week was more brutal than expected for Mark — or at least as brutal as applying to pay $70,000 for kindergarten can be. He had fallen hard for two elite all-boys’ schools — Collegiate (“It is rare for a school to have practically everyone be a Ph.D.,” he told me) and St. Bernard’s School (“Kids don’t have laptops; they use the chalkboard,” he opined) — and his son was wait-listed at both. He received just one acceptance, at what Mark considered a safety school. Mark’s experience wasn’t an anomaly. All month long, in Facebook groups like “Moms of the Upper East Side” and “UES Mommas,” parents of 4- and 5-year-olds had been venting about misguided expectations as they came to terms with getting wait-listed and rejected at the schools where they genuinely believed their children would soon enroll. “Any other moms feeling disappointed in the private school results today?” asked one mother who struck out in the process. A steady stream of commiseration filled the comments section. “So much hard work and time put in for a disappointing outcome.” “Many tears have been shed,” wrote another. “Not sure how to proceed.” “Confused as to who got in,” added one well-connected observer. “I know a few extraordinary families, with all the pedigrees, connections, money, extracurriculars etc who have been wait-listed to all their choices! Kids I thought would get in everywhere! I’m shocked!” Another parent wrote, “It’s a bloodbath this year.”
Brooke Parker, a Manhattan admissions consultant who focuses exclusively on kindergarten and nursery schools, didn’t use the word bloodbath, but she did confirm that admission to New York’s private kindergartens was unusually competitive this cycle. “Applications across the board were up 25 percent,” she told me, citing data gleaned from her clients’ preschool directors. Then she regaled me with some theories she has as to why.
First, she said, this year’s applicant pool was part of a pandemic baby-boom, which made it larger than past cohorts. And, anecdotally, she told me, many of those babies were the second, third, or even fourth children in their families. (“There are so many families now who have three to four kids,” she said. “It’s becoming a flex.”) Where an applicant’s parents went to school matters, but not nearly as much as where their brother and sister are currently enrolled.
Unlike colleges, independent schools don’t share their admissions statistics; how many students apply, how many are accepted, and how many from that pool decide to attend (called “the yield”) are a mystery to prospective parents. But from years as a consultant, Parker has developed some estimates. Using the Trinity School (where tuition for kindergarten is $69,000, not including extended-day and after-school programs) as an example, she said, “They take 100 percent of their faculty’s children — you’re pretty much in if you’re a sibling — and then they take 50 percent of their alums. How many spots does that leave? Barely any.” She said that practically speaking, the school has an even lower acceptance rate than the high single digits that it’s known for. When her son applied to kindergarten a few years ago, she heard Trinity had spots for only about five unconnected boys. When asked for comment, Trinity responded that “it is accurate to say that Trinity has a strong sibling policy that is an expression of its values” but that “admissions percentages by affiliation with Trinity vary annually, and for alumni and faculty children, vary significantly in number.”
Staggered notification dates and poor parental manners added to the acceptance-week chaos this year, said Parker. For decades, all of the private schools sent out their kindergarten acceptances, wait-pool notifications, and rejections on the same day. And for the vast majority of schools, which are members of a consortium called the Independent School Admissions Association of Greater New York, that’s still the case. (ISAAGNY’s stated mission is to “coordinate admissions procedures, and in doing so, ensure order, equity, and professionalism.”) But the Horace Mann School left ISAAGNY in 2014, and three other elite schools — Collegiate, Brearley, and the Ethical Culture Fieldston School (which has two separate lower-school programs, Ethical Culture and Fieldston Lower, that lead to Fieldston Middle and Upper School) — have as well. This has enabled these schools to create their own admissions processes and to notify families earlier if they so choose. This year, Collegiate, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, and Horace Mann notified applicants on Monday, February 2 — three days earlier than the ISAAGNY schools (and Brearley), which notified on Thursday, February 5. On Monday, Parker told me, many families that had sent gushing “first choice” letters to these schools (an unspoken tradition that allows families to alert a school that they’ll go if they get in) were reeling with disappointment. As they processed their rejections, they had an idea: email one of the ISAAGNY schools on their list with a new “first choice” love letter. “Anybody who didn’t get in on that Monday pulled out whatever connections they could,” said Parker. A nightmare game of one-percenter dominoes ensued: “I had a phone call with a client who was telling me, ‘Oh my gosh, the nursery school called a friend and said, ‘You are getting in.’ Then they got a call five minutes later saying, ‘You’re going to be wait-listed.’ Then they got another call back: ‘You’re not getting in at all.’”
Making matters worse, said Parker, is that it seems very few applicants who were accepted on Monday rescinded their pending applications. “People just want to have bragging rights and see where they can get in,” Parker said. “But that means that they are possibly taking a spot from someone.” (Parker said she advises her clients, some of whom she begins working with while their children are still in utero, to accept their acceptance within minutes of receiving it. She wouldn’t disclose her fee but said that her peers in the same field charge in the “ballpark” of $20,000 per application cycle.)
Alina Adams, an admissions consultant for K–12 schools in New York City, bolstered many of Parker’s comments — and said that new public-school policies added to the application glut. A statewide deadline approved by Governor Kathy Hochul to reduce class sizes to 25 students per teacher is coming in 2028. This mandate, Adams said, could cause the city to assign children in a wealthy neighborhood to schools outside their home districts to ensure the citywide cap. “You used to be able to buy your way into a good school by buying a home in a good school zone,” she added. “Now people are really concerned that they will be zoned out even of their zoned schools.” Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposal to eliminate Gifted and Talented programs at the kindergarten level may also have boosted interest in private schools. “People who were considering public school were very nervous about Mamdani winning,” said Parker. “The only area in Manhattan, really, that voted for Cuomo was the Upper East Side.”
There are a few options for parents who failed to land a spot at a preferred kindergarten during the February rush, a time Adams called “panic season.” They can trudge into a local public school, like more than 900,000 other local children, for an education paid for by their taxes or hope for the moon shot of getting off a wait list later in the year. They can also reapply in the first grade, when there are far fewer openings. They could also move.
That’s something that Sara (who is using a pseudonym), an academic from Europe who lives on the Upper East Side with her entrepreneur husband, is considering now. She said their daughter did not get into any of their preferred kindergartens despite spending her toddler years in an impressive fashion: spending half the day at a language school and the other half at a feeder private pre-K. It was “very shocking when the results came in that basically we were wait-listed at all of the schools,” she told me. “I consider myself more intellectual, and I thought that the elites in those private schools may have some of that. But it ended up being old families that were very well established and well-off.”
Although her daughter did get one acceptance, it didn’t come with the financial aid Sara had requested. “We’re lucky that we have a second home in Westchester,” she said.
As for Mark, he has removed his son’s name from the wait pools he was offered and sent a deposit to the school where his son was admitted. He told me that many parents try to work the wait list. “But I turned to my wife: I was like, ‘We’re about one of a hundred that have been wait-listed, and we don’t know where we are on the list,’” said Mark. “We have to put all our energy toward this school now. The way I look at it now is it’s kindergarten — I could always pull him out at some point and try this process again.”
Then he told a story about a child he knows whose parents also recently applied to private kindergarten in New York. “This boy would be at a birthday party and take off his belt and start swinging it at people. His mom would have to put him in a stroller to contain him,” said Mark. “He got into Collegiate.”
Correction: The Ethical Culture Fieldston School and Fieldston Lower are separate programs in the same school. A previous version of this story misstated their relationship.
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