The Harvard, Princeton, and MIT pipeline from Washington
Sixty-seven Washington high schools placed at least one student at Harvard, Princeton, or MIT between 2022 and 2025 — 166 admits in total. Five schools account for more than a third of them. The mix is more public than people assume.
Published May 13, 2026 · updated May 15, 2026college admissionsHPMHarvardPrincetonMIT
67 schools, 166 admits
Number of Washington schools that placed at least one student at Harvard, Princeton, or MIT 2022-2025 — and the total admits
PolarisList compiles publicly-acknowledged admissions records from Harvard, Princeton, and MIT going back several years. For Washington 2022-25, the picture looks like this:
Lakeside #1, then a long tail
Lakeside School alone placed 31 students (19% of all WA HPM admits). The top five sending schools account for ~37% of the total; the top ten account for ~52%.
Top WA high schools by Harvard / Princeton / MIT admits, 2022-2025 (number of placements)
Lakeside School (private)
31
Interlake HS, Bellevue (public)
13
Redmond HS (public)
6
Bellevue HS (public)
6
Holy Names Academy (private)
6
Roosevelt HS, Seattle (public)
5
Mercer Island HS (public)
5
Nikola Tesla STEM HS (public)
5
Newport HS, Bellevue (public)
5
Eastside Catholic (private)
4
Kentridge HS (public)
3
Central Kitsap HS (public)
3
Skyline HS, Sammamish (public)
3
Eastside Preparatory (private)
3
PolarisList. "Newport HS, Newport WA" (Pend Oreille County) shows 4 placements all in 2024 — a one-year burst that likely reflects a name-disambiguation issue with Newport HS in Bellevue; excluded from this chart pending verification.
Year by year
Per-year placements across the three schools combined, 2022-2025:
Washington admits by university (Harvard, Princeton), 2022-2025
HarvardPrinceton
PolarisList. MIT showed 16 / 14 / 14 / 21 across the same years (n=65, the largest of the three for WA).
The public-private mix
Counted by raw admits, 112 of the 166 placements (67%) came from public schools and 54 (33%) from private schools. (Excluding the four likely-misattributed Newport-Pend-Oreille placements doesn't move either ratio — 108 of 162 is still ~67% public.) Both ratios depart from the assumption that elite-college admissions in Washington run primarily through private prep — they do at Lakeside, which has the per-student rate to back it up, but the long tail of admits is public-school territory.
Geographic concentration
By city: Seattle (Lakeside, Roosevelt, Holy Names, Garfield, Ballard...) and the Eastside corridor of Bellevue / Redmond / Sammamish / Kirkland together produce the vast majority of the placements. Outside the Puget Sound metro, only a handful of schools (Pullman HS, Central Kitsap HS, Kentridge HS in Kent) have multiple placements.
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67 Washington high schools placed at least one student at Harvard, Princeton, or MIT 2022-25 — 166 admits total. Top 5 (Lakeside, Interlake, Redmond, Bellevue, Holy Names) = ~37% of them. 2/3 of the admits came from public schools.
Source: WA K12 Academic Atlas · https://waschools.org/research/hpm-pipeline-map/
Methodology
Source is the PolarisList Harvard/Princeton/MIT admissions dataset, scraped via API and joined to the WA K12 Academic Atlas school list as polaris_total (with separate per-university counts in polaris_harvard, polaris_princeton, polaris_mit). Per-year breakdowns come from polaris_*_by_year dicts. PolarisList relies on publicly acknowledged admissions (school newspapers, social media, school announcements), so coverage is best at schools with active reporting cultures and lighter at smaller or less-public schools — a school showing 0 admits could mean 0 or could mean nobody announced it. One known data-quality issue: "Newport High School, Newport, WA" (a 298-student school in Pend Oreille County) shows 4 placements all from 2024, which is structurally suspicious and likely a name-disambiguation collision with Newport HS in Bellevue; we've excluded that line from the headline chart.
Sources
PolarisList — Harvard, Princeton, and MIT admissions records, 2022-2025
OSPI school directory and enrollment data (for per-1k denominators)
These figures come from the WA K12 Academic Atlas — an interactive map of every K-12 school in Washington, assembled from twelve public data sources. Browse the map · see the rankings. Reporters: see the note on the research index.