In your opinion, which is the more prestigious New England prep boarding school: EXETER or ANDOVER?

Question

And why?

Answer 1

compare the prestige of the alumnae. thats what people do when they try and choose good schools.

Answer 2

Exeter

Answer 3

I could not agree more with bluebell.

Answer 4

Who cares?  Self-believing look-down-your-nose types come out of both

Answer 5

Phillips Exeter has the larger endowment (902 million) compared to Phillips Academy Andover (670,000,000), and it also has made it into more novels detailing what life in a prep school is like:  A Separate Peace, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and The World According to Garp.

Andover, however, seems to have more alums who have recently made a name for themselves -- George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Benjamin Spock,  and Humphrey Bogart -- as opposed to Exeter's Arthur Schlesinger, Gore Vidal, and Dan Brown.  

Both schools also have seen a lot of alums whose fathers made a name for themselves, beginning with names like Lincoln, Grant, and Taft, and continuing into the 20th century -- Rockefeller, Eisenhower, and Kennedy.

Both are feeder schools to the Ivies (just as Eton and Harrow feed Oxford and Cambridge), and graduating from either one shouts, "Old money!"  Of course, both institutions like to point out that they are now ethnically diverse.  Nevertheless, it's hard to be a self-made man or woman if one graduates from either.

Should points be deducted from Andover for having let George W. Bush slip by without furthering his intellectual curiosity?  I suppose that means that Exeter wins.