A standard piece of received wisdom about Washington high schools is that the elite-college pipeline runs through Lakeside, then a tight cluster of Seattle and Eastside private preps (Holy Names, Eastside Catholic, Eastside Prep, Overlake, Charles Wright), then everything else. The data does not bear this out.
Between 2022 and 2025, Harvard, Princeton, and MIT collectively admitted 166 Washington students. The breakdown by sending school type:
HPM admits per 1,000 students enrolled
Lakeside leads on a per-student basis — by a lot. But the next tier of HPM-producing schools is mixed, and several public schools (Interlake, Nikola Tesla STEM, Bellevue HS, Mercer Island, Roosevelt) beat well-known private preps on this measure.
| Lakeside School (private) | 35.4 | |
| Holy Names Academy (private) | 9.8 | |
| Nikola Tesla STEM HS (public) | 8.2 | |
| Interlake HS, Bellevue (public) | 7.9 | |
| Eastside Catholic (private) | 4.5 | |
| Bellevue HS (public) | 3.5 | |
| Mercer Island HS (public) | 3.4 | |
| Roosevelt HS, Seattle (public) | 3.2 | |
| Newport HS, Bellevue (public) | 2.7 | |
| Redmond HS (public) | 2.6 | |
| Pullman HS (public) | 2.4 |
PolarisList for HPM placements; OSPI directory for enrollment. The 3-placement floor and 500-enrollment floor exclude one-off bursts at small schools that distort per-1k rates.
4-year matriculation rates
Step out of the HPM-admit lens entirely and look at the simpler question — what share of a high school's graduates enroll at a 4-year college the fall after graduation? Washington's ERDC data answers this for public schools (privates, as we've written about, don't report).
Six Washington public high schools send more than two-thirds of their graduates to a 4-year college:
| Mercer Island HS | 75% | |
| Eastlake HS (Sammamish) | 71% | |
| Bainbridge HS | 68% | |
| Skyline HS (Sammamish) | 67% | |
| Lake Washington HS (Kirkland) | 67% | |
| Roosevelt HS (Seattle) | 65% |
ERDC HS Graduate Outcomes via OSPI.
These rates are competitive with the matriculation rates that elite private preps cite in their admissions materials, and they're externally verified — ERDC matches every Washington public-school graduate to enrollment records via the National Student Clearinghouse, and reports the aggregate. Private schools' college-acceptance claims, by contrast, are self-reported with no independent audit — a distinction that, when Washington doesn't require private schools to publish anything, ought to count for something.
The catch — but it cuts the other way this time
Because Washington doesn't require private schools to report academic outcomes, we can only compare the two on the measures where data exists for both. That's a thin overlap: HPM admits (from PolarisList), athletic state titles (from the WIAA archive), and basic enrollment / demographics (NCES). On the measures we can compare, several public schools match or beat any private prep in the state. On test scores, graduation rates, AP load, attendance, discipline, and postsecondary destinations, the comparison is structurally one-sided in the public schools' favor — the public schools publish; the private schools don't.