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A university-preparatory school or college-preparatory school (usually abbreviated to preparatory school, college prep school, or prep school) is a secondary school, usually private, designed to prepare students for a college or university education. Some schools will also include a junior, or elementary, school. This designation is mainly current in North America. In many parts of Europe, such as Germany, the Benelux and Scandinavia secondary schools specializing in college-preparatory education are called Gymnasiums.

There are three types of preparatory schools in the United States and Canada. Some have living quarters (dormitory, dining room) where students reside (known as boarding schools); most are day schools, and some boarding schools also admit local students who seek the benefits of the prep school life. Some admit students of only one sex; others are co-educational. Prep schools are selective, academically challenging, and largely independent of state and local control.

Parents of top-tier prep school students often pay fees comparable to Ivy League university tuition (example: Brearley School, Dalton School, Spence School, Chapin School, and Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City, are considered part of the finest private schools in the nation, having tuition of nearly $30,000 a year or over). Among the principal benefits of prep schools is a very low student-to-teacher ratio, hence, smaller class sizes than in public schools. The tuition allows schools to hire highly-qualified teachers and retain them in tenure. These schools often have significant endowments financing scholarships permitting demographic heterogeneity.

Preparatory schools place a strong emphasis on sports (see The Ten Schools Admissions Organization, Independent School Leagues or Ivy Preparatory School League). In many private schools students are required to participate in one or more of the school's sports teams. University-preparatory education is also often associated with the preppy subculture.

In Canada, preparatory schools blend the American and British traditions. The schools generally focus on all aspects of the "well rounded" human being (honoring a classical ideal many see expressed in the Latin phrase "Mens sana in corpore sano" ["A sound mind in a sound body"]); including rigorous academics and athletic programs. University-preparatory schools also focus on many other opportunites such as elaborate plays and musicals, and many other clubs and leadership opportunites that prepare the students for University.

In the United States, prep schools have drawn upon British precursors but over time developed their own American tradition. Some notable former prep school attendees include U.S. Presidents George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and other prominent figures such as John Kerry, Daniel Webster, Howard Dean, William Carlos Williams, William Randolph Hearst, Ambassador John R. Bolton, and Dan Brown.

The term "prep school" has been applied to several schools that the NCAA has ruled insufficient in their academic standards in determining eligibility for intercollegiate athletics. Athletes attending these schools were declared academically ineligible for NCAA athletic participation after graduation from high school.^[1]

In France, certain private or public secondary schools offer special postgraduate classes called classes préparatoires, equivalent in level to the first years of university, for students who wish to prepare for the competitive exams for the entrance in the Grandes écoles. French classes préparatoires are exceptionally intensive and selective, taking only the very best students graduating from high schools but generally not charging fees.

In the United Kingdom schools are classified in other ways. The term preparatory school, more commonly "prep school", is used to describe schools which traditionally prepare younger students for independent schools, although not all preparatory-school students continue their education within the independent-education sector, and not all students at independent secondary schools have started theirs at preparatory schools.

• The Independent Schools Directory (Global)
• National Association of Independent Schools
• Independent Schools Association of the Southwest
• Canadian Association of Independent Schools
• The Association of Boarding Schools
• Wilbraham & Monson Academy

1. ^ http://sportsline.com/general/story/10041226

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