Phillips Academy Andover: College Matriculation and Academic Profile (2026)

November 10, 2026

Andover publishes unusually detailed information about where its graduates enroll and how their transcripts are built. We rebuilt three years of it from the school’s own college profiles and checked the most detailed list against the original three times.

In 2024, Phillips Academy Andover sent four graduates to Harvard. It sent six to the University of Miami, six to Case Western Reserve, and seven to UNC Chapel Hill. A year later, at least ten Andover seniors enrolled at Harvard. The year after that, the number fell back to somewhere between five and nine.

None of those numbers tells you much on its own, and that is the first lesson of looking closely at a single school. Andover is one of the most selective secondary schools in the United States, with a senior class of roughly 310 to 335 students, and its college list swings from year to year in ways that headline rankings flatten out. This profile works from what Andover reports to colleges: its Profiles for College Admission Offices for 2024–25, 2025–26, and 2026–27, its Course of Study, and its admission and tuition pages. We mark calculated figures as ours, attribute outside figures to their sources, and leave unpublished figures blank rather than estimate them.

If you are still sorting out the basics of residential schooling, start with our explainer on what boarding school is and our list of the best boarding schools in the US. This piece goes one level deeper on a single school.

Andover at a Glance

Figures come from the 2026–27 college profile, prepared in September 2026, unless the source column says otherwise. Where Andover’s website and its college profile report the same measure differently, we use the profile.

Measure Figure Source and year
Total enrollment 1,167 (858 boarding, 309 day) College profile, 2026–27
12th grade 334, including 20 postgraduates College profile, 2026–27
Geographic reach 43 states and territories, 56 countries College profile, 2026–27
Students of color 60% College profile, 2026–27
International students 17% Andover website fast facts (viewed Nov. 2026)
Students receiving aid 47% College profile, 2026–27
Total financial aid $30 million College profile, 2026–27
Average grant, returning students $51,500 Andover website fast facts (viewed Nov. 2026)
Boarding tuition $79,800 Andover website fast facts, 2026–27
Day tuition $63,840 Andover website fast facts, 2026–27
Teaching faculty 246 Andover website fast facts (viewed Nov. 2026)
Average class size 13 College profile, 2026–27
Endowment $1.67 billion (June 2026) Andover website fast facts
Courses offered About 300, including 8 world languages Andover website fast facts
Official AP courses 3 College profile, 2026–27
Class rank Not reported College profile, 2026–27
Admission rate 13% for fall 2024, with an 83% yield (not published by Andover) S&P Global Ratings, August 2024

Andover adopted need-blind admission in 2007 and commits to meeting 100% of demonstrated need. We did not find a current admission rate in its college profiles or on the admission pages we reviewed. The most recent credible figure we found comes from an August 2024 S&P Global Ratings report on Andover’s bonds, which cites a 13% acceptance rate and an 83.0% matriculation rate for fall 2024. Treat that as a historical data point from a third party, not a current rate.

Where Andover Graduates Enroll: The Class of 2024

The 2024–25 profile is the most recent one that lists an exact enrollment count for every college. Its newer profiles group the most recent class into bands instead. For the Class of 2024, the profile lists 324 students who enrolled at 108 colleges and notes that the class applied to 397 colleges in all. These are enrollments, not admission offers, so each student appears once. The full list appears in an appendix at the end of this article.

Cornell (14) and the University of Chicago (13) led the class, followed by Columbia and NYU at 10 each. UChicago is also the only college in Andover’s top three-year band in all three recent profiles; our guide on how to get into the University of Chicago covers why that school has become so selective.

The more revealing number is how far the class spread out. The 25 colleges shown above enrolled 176 students, or 54%. The other 148 students went to 83 different institutions, and 64 of those institutions enrolled one or two Andover students.

Forty-nine colleges enrolled exactly one Andover student in 2024. That list runs from Rice, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, and Pomona to Auburn, Purdue, and Liberty. A family looking at a top-ten list sees one Andover; the full list shows a class making very individual choices.

How the Class of 2024 Breaks Down

We sorted every college on the list into five groups. The groupings are ours, not Andover’s, and the rules are in the methodology section. The Ivy League, public, and international counts are unambiguous. The liberal arts line could move by a student or two depending on how a few small colleges are classified.

Group Colleges Students Share of class
Ivy League 8 50 15.4%
Other private colleges and universities 43 146 45.1%
Public colleges and universities 27 61 18.8%
Liberal arts colleges 25 55 17.0%
Institutions outside the US 5 12 3.7%
Total 108 324 100%

Adding Stanford, MIT, UChicago, and Duke to the Ivies produces a group of 83 students, or 25.6% of the class. Roughly three in four Andover students therefore enrolled somewhere outside that group, at places like Tufts, Northwestern, Bates, Michigan, and Wellesley. Sixteen Massachusetts institutions took 70 students (21.6%), and five universities abroad took 12: McGill and St Andrews with four each, Oxford with two, and Trinity College Dublin and University College London with one each.

Three Profiles of Matriculation: How Much the Numbers Move

Andover’s profiles report college outcomes in two ways besides the exact Class of 2024 list. Each lists every college where the most recent class enrolled, marking those with five or more and ten or more students but giving no exact counts. A college listed without a mark enrolled one to four. Each also groups colleges by total enrollment over the past three years.

College Class of 2024 (exact) Class of 2025 Class of 2026 3-yr band, 2024–25 profile 3-yr band, 2025–26 profile 3-yr band, 2026–27 profile
Harvard 4 10+ 5–9 20–29 30+ 20–29
Columbia 10 10+ 10+ 20–29 30+ 30+
Cornell 14 5–9 10+ 30+ 20–29 30+
UChicago 13 5–9 10+ 30+ 30+ 30+
Brown 6 10+ 10+ 20–29 20–29 20–29
Yale 6 5–9 5–9 30+ 20–29 10–19
Boston University 8 10+ 5–9 20–29 30+ 20–29
Stanford 9 5–9 5–9 20–29 20–29 20–29
MIT 7 5–9 5–9 20–29 20–29 20–29
Princeton 3 1–4 5–9 10–19 5–9 10–19
Penn 4 1–4 5–9 10–19 10–19 10–19
Dartmouth 3 5–9 1–4 5–9 10–19 10–19
USC 0 1–4 10+ 5–9 Under 5 10–19

Read the class columns as sample sizes, not rates. Harvard went from 4 enrollees to at least 10 and then to between 5 and 9. USC went from none in 2024 to at least 10 in 2026. With about 320 seniors, a handful of students choosing one college over another moves a school up or down a full band.

The three-year bands need one more caution. The profiles do not name the classes in each window, but each window appears to cover the three most recent graduating classes, so consecutive profiles share two of their three classes. A college can change bands because a strong year entered the window or because a strong year dropped out of it. If the windows work that way, Yale’s fall from 30+ to 10–19 over two profiles reflects the Classes of 2022 and 2023 leaving the window as much as anything about 2025 or 2026; Andover does not report those older classes individually. None of these movements shows that a college became more or less interested in Andover applicants. Matriculation also says nothing about admission: a college that enrolled five Andover students may have admitted many more who chose to go elsewhere.

Reading an Andover Transcript: The 6.0 Scale

Andover grades on a 0 to 6 scale. Its profile says students are not ranked and the school does not report a cumulative grade average, but it does publish aggregate GPA cutoffs so colleges can place a transcript in context. It also lists an approximate equivalent for each individual grade.

Andover grade Meaning Approximate 4.0-scale equivalent for that grade
6 Outstanding (High Honor) 4.3
5 Superior (Honor) 4.0
4 Good 3.0
3 Satisfactory 2.0
2 Minimum pass 1.0
1 Failure 0

That table applies to individual grades. Andover says its grades are best understood on its own scale, and it does not publish a method for converting a cumulative average, so we report GPAs on the 6.0 scale throughout.

The 2024–25 profile went further than any profile since and published GPA ranges for every decile of the Class of 2025, using Andover coursework through the spring of 11th grade.

The distribution was compressed at the top. In that class, a 5.84 put a student in the top 10%, a 5.46 still sat in the top 40%, and the class midpoint sat at roughly 5.35, where the fifth decile (5.36 to 5.45) ended. A student with a 5.30 at that point would have been in the sixth decile.

These cutoffs are not fixed standards. The two newer profiles publish only the top of each class, and the lines move:

Class (measured through 11th grade) Top 5% Top 10% Top 20%
Class of 2025 (2024–25 profile) Not reported 5.84+ 5.73+
Class of 2026 (2025–26 profile) 5.91+ 5.85+ 5.76+
Class of 2027 (2026–27 profile) 5.85+ 5.79+ 5.65+

The drop for the Class of 2027 has an explanation. The 2026–27 profile says its GPA distributions reflect an ongoing faculty initiative to make fuller use of the 0 to 6 scale, so ranges may differ modestly from earlier years, while academic expectations and rigor are unchanged. Families comparing a student’s GPA with an older cutoff should keep that in mind.

Context of this kind is what admission officers look for in a school profile, and it is also why the school-provided pieces of an application carry so much weight in selective admission. Our piece on what your school counselor can do for your application explains how that information reaches colleges.

Curriculum: About 300 Courses and Three APs

Andover runs on trimesters of about ten weeks, and students normally carry five courses per term; postgraduates usually take four or five. Courses are numbered by level, and the numbering is how colleges read rigor on an Andover transcript.

Level What it signals
100 to 200 Introductory and second-level courses, usually 9th and 10th grade
300 to 400 Third- and fourth-level courses, usually 11th and 12th grade (some 300-level courses suit 9th to 11th graders)
500 Equivalent to a first-year college course
600 Course work typically taken by college majors or after the first college year
900 Performance credit in music, theatre, or dance

Only three courses carry the official AP label: AB Calculus, BC Calculus, and Statistics. The 2026–27 profile says some students choose to test in other areas anyway, and it reports that 212 members of the Class of 2026 took 927 AP exams. Of the scores shown, 53% were 5s, 32% were 4s, and 12% were 3s.

The profile defines what Andover counts as advanced in each department. In math, English, interdisciplinary studies, philosophy and religion, and theatre, that means the 500 level and above. In world languages and art the line sits at 400. Science counts PHY400 and everything at 500 or higher, history counts HSS300 and everything at 500 or higher, and computer science starts at 450.

The Top of the Course Ladder

The 2026–27 Course of Study lists courses that sit well above the typical high school ceiling. A sample, with prerequisites from the catalog:

  • Mathematics: Multivariable Calculus (MTH650 and MTH651), which follows BC Calculus; Linear Algebra I and II (MTH660 and MTH661), which follow Multivariable Calculus; and an Honors Mathematics Seminar (MTH630)
  • Computer science: CSC600, Computer Science Research and Development, open after one advanced course numbered 550 to 599
  • Biology: Independent Laboratory Research in Biology (BIO600), which requires a year of chemistry and a year of 500-level biology with grades of 4 or above
  • Physics: Astronomy Research (PHY530), which follows PHY440 and requires concurrent or prior calculus
  • Independent work: the Abbot Independent Scholars Program, in which selected seniors work with a faculty mentor for course credit, graded on the 0 to 6 scale
  • Interdisciplinary electives such as Natural Causes: How Climate Change Wrote History, Ethics and Technology, Astrobiology, and Law and Literature

These courses show what is available, not what is required. Admission readers see an Andover transcript in the context of the school’s offerings, and strong performance across a demanding schedule tells them more than a single 600-level title. A student does not need to reach the top level in every subject to be a competitive applicant.

For a student entering in 9th grade, the diploma requires 54 term credits. The requirements include English 100, 200, and 300; history from 9th grade through U.S. history (History 300); math through MTH280 or MTH340; two three-term lab sciences; three terms of a world language at the 300 level or one of the alternatives the catalog lists; four credits in art, music, and theatre and dance; a term each of philosophy and religious studies and physical education; and a 25-yard swim assessment. Students who enter later need fewer credits, down to 48 for new 11th graders and seniors.

Testing Profile

The 2026–27 profile reports middle-50% ranges and averages for the Classes of 2025 through 2027. It does not say what share of students submitted scores, so treat these as a profile of test-takers rather than of every student. The 2024–25 profile reported no test scores at all, citing test-optional admission policies, so the series begins with the 2025–26 profile.

Test Middle 50% Average 2025–26 profile (Classes of 2024–2026)
SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing 680–760 716 660–740, average 699
SAT Math 690–790 731 670–770, average 711
SAT Total 1370–1530 1438 1340–1500, average 1410
ACT Composite 28–34 31 29–34, average 31

Who Enrolls: Entry Points and Class Size

Andover is not a school where a single 9th-grade cohort moves through four years together. Its 2026–27 enrollment shows a 9th grade of 244 students and a 12th grade of 334.

Andover’s admission FAQ explains the gap. Each year more than 200 new 9th graders arrive, joined by an average of about 85 new 10th graders, 20 to 25 new 11th graders, and 30 to 35 new seniors and postgraduates. For college planning, a student who arrives in 11th or 12th grade has much less time to build an Andover transcript and the faculty relationships behind recommendations.

How College Counseling Works at Andover

According to Andover’s 11th-grade counseling page, the college process officially begins in December of 11th grade, when students are assigned a counselor. Coverage in The Phillipian, Andover’s student newspaper, describes a kickoff for 11th graders in January followed by required individual meetings with counselors before and after spring break.

The 2026–27 profile lists Dean of College Counseling Sean M. Logan, Director Karina Hernandez-Guarniz, and 12 associate directors, along with four administrative staff. Andover says many of its counselors began their careers as college admission officers. It does not publish counselor caseloads, and we have not estimated one.

Does Attending Andover Improve Your Chances at an Ivy League School?

This is the question families most want answered, and the published data can only answer part of it.

What the data establishes is that Andover graduates enroll at highly selective universities in substantial numbers. In the Class of 2024, 50 of 324 students (15.4%) enrolled at an Ivy League school. In the Class of 2026, Brown, Columbia, and Cornell each enrolled at least ten Andover graduates, and Harvard, Princeton, Penn, and Yale each enrolled at least five.

What the data cannot establish is that Andover caused those outcomes. Andover admitted about 13% of its applicants for fall 2024, according to S&P, and the students it enrolls arrive with strong academic records. Some outcomes reflect preparation Andover provides; others reflect who enrolled in the first place. Selective colleges admit recruited athletes and, at many institutions, consider legacy status; Andover does not report how many of its matriculants fall into either group. Student choice shapes the list as well: financial aid offers, binding early decision commitments, and interest in schools abroad all affect where an admitted student enrolls. Our analysis of how binding early decision became the dominant path into selective colleges explains why enrollment lists increasingly reflect early-round commitments.

Answering the causal question would require applicant-level data, such as admission results for Andover applicants compared with similar students at other schools. No such data is public. Strong outcomes and an admissions advantage are different claims, and only the first is supported by what Andover publishes.

A Counselor’s Perspective for Andover Families

The points below are College Transitions’ professional interpretation, informed by our counseling work. They are consistent with Andover’s published data but are not proven by it.

Course level adds context to grades. With the middle 40% of the Class of 2025 between 5.10 and 5.54 through 11th grade, two applicants’ GPAs often look similar. Performance comes first, but the level of courses a student reached, and how well they did there, helps a reader distinguish one strong record from another.

Expect classmates on the same lists. The Class of 2024 applied to 397 colleges in total, and Andover does not publish how many students applied to each one. At the most common destinations, though, it is reasonable to assume several classmates apply in the same year. In our experience, students in that situation benefit from a clear academic or extracurricular thread that separates their file from a classmate’s with similar grades.

Build a wide list. The Class of 2024 enrolled at 108 colleges, and almost half of the class went somewhere outside its 25 most common destinations. Enrollment reflects choices as well as admission results, so this does not prove that wider lists produce better outcomes. In our counseling experience, though, students from schools like Andover are well served by lists that extend past the colleges that dominate conversation on campus.

Late entrants need a faster plan. A new 11th grader or postgraduate has a short runway to build recommendation relationships and a visible course progression, which makes the first terms disproportionately important.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Andover publish college acceptance data?

No. Andover publishes enrollment (matriculation) data, which counts each graduate once at the college they attend. It does not publish how many students were admitted to each college, and acceptance rates cannot be calculated from enrollment counts.

What is Andover’s acceptance rate?

Andover does not publish a current rate in its college profile. S&P Global Ratings reported a 13% acceptance rate and an 83% matriculation rate for fall 2024.

Does Andover offer AP courses?

Andover offers three official AP courses, all in calculus and statistics, but many students take AP exams in other subjects. The school’s own course levels, especially 500 and 600, are the main rigor signal on its transcript.

What GPA puts a student in the top of an Andover class?

For the Class of 2027, measured through 11th grade, the 2026–27 profile puts the top 20% at 5.65 and above on the 6.0 scale. The cutoff has varied from class to class, and Andover does not rank students.

Methodology

This profile draws on Andover’s 2026–27 Profile for College Admission Offices, prepared in September 2026; its 2025–26 profile, prepared in September 2025; its 2024–25 profile, prepared in September 2024; the 2026–27 Course of Study; Andover’s fast facts, admission FAQ, tuition, and college counseling pages; and the S&P Global Ratings report cited above. All sources were reviewed on November 10, 2026.

We label figures in four ways. Published figures appear in an Andover document as stated. Third-party figures, such as the S&P admission rate, are attributed to their source. Calculated figures, including group shares, the destination-spread chart, and the counts in the Class of 2024 analysis, are CT’s arithmetic on published data. Figures Andover does not publish, including a current admission rate, counselor caseloads, and acceptances by college, are left blank rather than estimated.

We extracted the Class of 2024 list from the 2024–25 profile three times, including one direct parse of the PDF’s text. All three produced the same 108 colleges and the same counts, which sum to the profile’s printed total of 324; no college appears twice. The 2026–27 profile states that its Class of 2027 GPAs are current through Spring 2027, which cannot be right for a document prepared in September 2026; consistent with the earlier profiles, we treat those figures as measured through 11th grade. All four charts draw on that audited list or on the profile figures named in their source lines.

Group rules: Ivy League means the eight member universities. Institutions outside the US means any college located outside the United States. Public means a US institution under state or local public control, including community colleges; separate campuses of a system (UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara, for example) count as separate colleges because Andover lists them separately. Liberal arts colleges are US private colleges focused on undergraduate arts and sciences education, including colleges with a small number of graduate programs; Barnard counts here because it admits and enrolls students separately from Columbia. All other US private institutions, including specialized schools such as Babson, Olin, and the Rhode Island School of Design, count as other private colleges and universities. No conservatories appear on the 2024 list.

Andover is the first school in a series. You can browse our other data visualizations, our directory listing for Phillips Academy Andover, and our broader guide to boarding school programs.

Appendix: Every Class of 2024 Destination

Exact enrollment counts from Andover’s 2024–25 profile, with CT’s group assignment for each college. A downloadable version of this table is available with the article.

College Class of 2024 enrollees CT group
American University 1 Other private
Amherst College 3 Liberal arts college
Auburn University 1 Public
Babson College 3 Other private
Barnard College 2 Liberal arts college
Bates College 6 Liberal arts college
Boston College 7 Other private
Boston University 8 Other private
Bowdoin College 2 Liberal arts college
Brandeis University 4 Other private
Brown University 6 Ivy League
Butler Community College 1 Public
Carnegie Mellon University 3 Other private
Case Western Reserve University 6 Other private
Coastal Carolina University 1 Public
Colby College 2 Liberal arts college
Colgate University 2 Liberal arts college
College of Charleston 1 Public
Colorado College 2 Liberal arts college
Columbia University 10 Ivy League
Connecticut College 1 Liberal arts college
Cornell University 14 Ivy League
Daemen University 1 Other private
Dartmouth College 3 Ivy League
Dickinson College 1 Liberal arts college
Drexel University 1 Other private
Duke University 4 Other private
Emory University 5 Other private
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering 1 Other private
Georgetown University 5 Other private
Georgia Institute of Technology 1 Public
Harvard University 4 Ivy League
Harvey Mudd College 2 Liberal arts college
Howard University 1 Other private
Iona University 1 Other private
Lafayette College 1 Liberal arts college
Lake Forest College 1 Liberal arts college
Lehigh University 1 Other private
Liberty University 1 Other private
Macalester College 1 Liberal arts college
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 Other private
McGill University 4 Outside the US
Merrimack College 2 Other private
Middlebury College 5 Liberal arts college
New York University 10 Other private
Northeastern University 4 Other private
Northwestern University 8 Other private
Pennsylvania State University 1 Public
Pomona College 1 Liberal arts college
Princeton University 3 Ivy League
Purdue University 1 Public
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 1 Other private
Rhode Island School of Design 1 Other private
Rice University 1 Other private
Roanoke College 1 Liberal arts college
Rochester Institute of Technology 1 Other private
Rutgers University 3 Public
Saint Joseph’s University 1 Other private
Scripps College 1 Liberal arts college
Southern Methodist University 3 Other private
Spelman College 1 Liberal arts college
Stanford University 9 Other private
Syracuse University 1 Other private
Trinity College 4 Liberal arts college
Trinity College Dublin 1 Outside the US
Tufts University 8 Other private
Union College 1 Liberal arts college
University College London 1 Outside the US
University of California, Berkeley 5 Public
University of California, Los Angeles 5 Public
University of California, Santa Barbara 1 Public
University of Chicago 13 Other private
University of Colorado, Boulder 2 Public
University of Denver 2 Other private
University of Florida 2 Public
University of Hartford 1 Other private
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1 Public
University of Illinois, Chicago 1 Public
University of Maryland, College Park 1 Public
University of Massachusetts, Amherst 5 Public
University of Massachusetts, Lowell 1 Public
University of Miami 6 Other private
University of Michigan 5 Public
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 7 Public
University of Notre Dame 1 Other private
University of Oregon 2 Public
University of Oxford 2 Outside the US
University of Pennsylvania 4 Ivy League
University of Pittsburgh 1 Public
University of Richmond 2 Other private
University of Rochester 2 Other private
University of South Carolina, Columbia 1 Public
University of St. Andrews 4 Outside the US
University of Texas at Austin 1 Public
University of Texas at San Antonio 1 Public
University of Virginia 5 Public
University of Wisconsin, Madison 4 Public
Vanderbilt University 1 Other private
Vassar College 1 Liberal arts college
Villanova University 1 Other private
Wake Forest University 1 Other private
Wartburg College 1 Liberal arts college
Washington University, St. Louis 2 Other private
Wellesley College 5 Liberal arts college
Wesleyan University 4 Liberal arts college
Williams College 4 Liberal arts college
Worcester Polytechnic Institute 4 Other private
Yale University 6 Ivy League

If your family is weighing how a school like Andover shapes a college list, or you want an outside read on a transcript from a demanding school, our college admissions counselors work with students at every stage of high school.