Best Private High Schools in Seattle
Twelve schools admit students through twelfth grade inside the Seattle city limits — five secular independents (Lakeside, University Prep, Bush, Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences, and The Northwest School), three Catholic high schools (Seattle Preparatory School, Bishop Blanchet, and O'Dea), two large Christian K-12 systems with Seattle-area campuses (King's School in Shoreline and Bellevue Christian's Clyde Hill campus), the city's oldest school of any kind in Holy Names Academy (1880), and Seattle Waldorf, which operates the only accredited Waldorf upper school in the metro.
The geographic shape of the field tracks the city's old neighborhoods. Lakeside and King's anchor the north end around Haller Lake and Shoreline; Bishop Blanchet sits in Greenwood; University Prep is in Wedgwood. The Catholic-and-progressive cluster on Capitol Hill / First Hill includes Holy Names, Seattle Prep, O'Dea, the Northwest School, and Seattle Academy. Bush sits alone in Madison Valley. None of these schools maintain a meaningful boarding program — Northwest is the only one that runs day-and-boarding at all, and the boarding cohort is small.
The decision Seattle families weigh is which institutional style fits: the older single-sex Catholic college-preps (Holy Names for girls, O'Dea for boys), the Jesuit Catholic co-ed college-prep (Seattle Preparatory School, the city's oldest Catholic high school at 1891), the long-established co-ed secular independents (Lakeside, Bush, University Prep), the smaller arts-and-progressive-pedagogy schools (Northwest, Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences, Seattle Waldorf), the archdiocesan Catholic co-ed option (Bishop Blanchet), or the larger Christian K-12 systems (King's, Bellevue Christian). All twelve admit by application; most run through SSAT-style admissions testing for ninth-grade entry, and most have a small but real number of tenth- and eleventh-grade transfer slots each year.
The S-tier secondaries cluster around two distinct identities. Lakeside and Holy Names operate from a hundred-plus years of institutional pedigree (Lakeside's ~$260 million endowment is among the largest of any independent secondary school in the country; Holy Names is the oldest continuously operating school in Washington). Bush, University Prep, and Seattle Academy share a more recent secular co-ed identity that grew up in three waves across the twentieth century. The A-tier Catholic high schools and Christian K-12 systems represent the parish-feeder and evangelical alternatives to the senior independent track.
The college-placement gap inside the S-tier is wider than the rest of the framing suggests. Across the 2022-2025 admissions cycles, Lakeside seniors received 31 Harvard, Princeton, and MIT acceptances by PolarisList's count — roughly eight a year out of a graduating class of about a hundred and ten, the highest count of any school in Washington and more than five times the next-closest private. Holy Names is second statewide at six over the same four-year window; among Seattle private secondaries outside those two, no school registers more than a single HPM acceptance across the entire period.
S Tier · 5 schools
- 001LAKESIDE SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING875 students
- 002HOLY NAMES ACADEMY(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING614 students
- 003SEATTLE ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING1,081 students
- 004THE BUSH SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING703 students
- 005UNIVERSITY PREP(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING613 students
A Tier · 7 schools
- 006THE NORTHWEST SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING453 students
- 007SEATTLE PREPARATORY SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING750 students
- 008KING'S SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING1,097 students
- 009BELLEVUE CHRISTIAN SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING918 students
- 010BISHOP BLANCHET HIGH SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING750 students
- 011O'DEA HIGH SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING500 students
- 012SEATTLE WALDORF SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING278 students
B Tier · 1 school
- 013NORTHWEST YESHIVA HIGH SCHOOL(PRIVATE SCHOOL — INDEPENDENT) · KING52 students
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