Most elite boarding schools describe their college results in bands or simple lists. Lawrenceville prints numbers. Its college counseling page names every college where five or more Lawrentians enrolled over the past five years and gives the count for each: 42 at Cornell, 41 at NYU, 36 at Penn, 32 at Princeton. Seventy colleges clear that bar, and together they account for 886 enrollments.
The trade-off is that little else is public. We did not locate a profile for colleges, a test score summary, or a GPA distribution in the public sources we reviewed. This profile of Lawrenceville college matriculation and academics works from what the school does publish: the current five-year matriculation list and two earlier versions preserved by the Internet Archive, the 2026–27 course catalog, the 2025–26 student handbook, and the tuition and aid page. Calculated figures are marked as ours, and figures we could not locate in official sources are left blank.
For context on Lawrenceville’s peers, see our list of the best boarding schools in the US and our directory listing for The Lawrenceville School.
Lawrenceville at a Glance
Each row carries its source and year. We did not locate a current enrollment total on Lawrenceville’s website; the federal count below is for 2023–24.
| Measure | Figure | Source and year |
| Enrollment (2023–24) | 802 students, grades 9 through 12 and postgraduate | NCES Private School Survey, 2023–24 |
| Graduating class | 228 in the Class of 2026; 208 in the Class of 2025 | The Lawrentian (school magazine), 2025 and 2026 |
| Classroom teachers | 107.8 full-time equivalent; 7.4 students per teacher | NCES Private School Survey, 2023–24 |
| Tuition | $82,710 boarding; $68,060 day | Lawrenceville tuition page, 2026–27 |
| Need-based aid | More than 30% of families receive grants; the school meets 100% of demonstrated need | Lawrenceville tuition page, 2026–27 |
| College counseling staff | Director plus six associate directors | Lawrenceville online directory, viewed Nov. 2026 |
| Catalog listings | 263, of which 172 (65%) are 500-level courses | Course catalog, 2026–27 (our count) |
| AP courses | None labeled AP; some Honors courses prepare students for AP exams | Course catalog, 2026–27 |
| Class rank | Not located in the public sources reviewed |
We did not locate an official acceptance rate and have not reported one.
Lawrenceville’s tuition is comprehensive and covers most fees; families of Fifth Formers pay an additional $525 for senior-year events, scaled to their aid package. The tuition and aid page also publishes average grants by family income for 2026–27, which is rarer than it should be among peer schools:
| Family income | Average aid award | Average cost to family |
| Under $125,000 | $72,697 | $5,574 |
| $125,000 to $200,000 | $69,960 | $8,154 |
| $200,000 to $275,000 | $61,359 | $14,392 |
| $275,000 to $350,000 | $52,351 | $25,671 |
| $350,000 to $425,000 | $39,577 | $38,250 |
| Over $425,000 | $41,054 | $37,347 |
The school notes that the figures are averages for grants offered in 2026–27 and are meant as a reference only. They are not a net price calculator for any individual family.
How Lawrenceville Reports College Outcomes
The list on Lawrenceville’s college counseling page covers “institutions where five or more Lawrentians have matriculated in the last five years.” Three features shape how it can be read.
First, the counts are enrollments, not admissions. A student admitted to six colleges appears once, at the college they chose. Second, the list stops at five. A college that enrolled four Lawrentians over five years does not appear, so the list cannot show the full spread of destinations. Third, the page does not say which five classes it covers. We refer to it as the current five-year list, with graduating classes not specified. Archived copies suggest the list is updated once a year: the previous version is identical in every Internet Archive capture from July 9, 2025, through August 18, 2026, and the current version had replaced it by November 11, 2026.
For scale, the two most recent graduating classes numbered 208 and 228, according to the school’s magazine, and the federal survey counted 225 twelfth graders in 2023–24. Lawrenceville has not published the size of every class in the window, so we have not converted the 886 enrollments into a share of graduates.
Where Lawrentians Enroll
Chart 1. Colleges that enrolled 16 or more Lawrentians over the past five years.
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All eight Ivy League universities appear, and together they enrolled 210 Lawrentians over the five years. Because each Ivy is on the list with an exact count, that total is our sum of published counts, not a floor. The counts are uneven: Cornell (42), Penn (36), Princeton (32), Columbia (28), Brown (26), and Harvard (25) each enrolled more than Yale (13) and Dartmouth (8). Stanford enrolled 14 and MIT 7.
The 70 colleges fall into a handful of types. The groupings are ours, and the counts are five-year enrollments.
| Type of college | Colleges | Enrollments | Largest |
| Ivy League | 8 | 210 | Cornell 42, Penn 36, Princeton 32 |
| Other private colleges and universities | 29 | 420 | NYU 41, Georgetown 30, Tufts 21, UChicago 21 |
| Public universities | 14 | 123 | Michigan 19, UVA 11, UNC Chapel Hill 10, Texas 10, Wisconsin 10 |
| Liberal arts colleges | 17 | 120 | Middlebury 11, Bowdoin 9, Hamilton 9 |
| U.S. Naval Academy | 1 | 5 | |
| University of St Andrews (Scotland) | 1 | 8 | |
| Total | 70 | 886 |
NYU (41) and Georgetown (30) stand out among private universities outside the Ivy League, as do Lehigh, Syracuse, and Northeastern, each in the high teens. Liberal arts colleges are present but spread thin: no single one reaches 12, and the 17 together enrolled 120. Princeton, a short drive from campus, enrolled 32 Lawrentians, the fourth-highest count on the list.
For three of the colleges where Lawrentians enroll in the largest numbers, see our guides on how to get into Cornell, how to get into Princeton, and how to get into NYU.
What Changed Between the Last Two Published Lists
The previous version of the list is preserved in an Internet Archive capture from August 18, 2026. If the two versions are consecutive five-class windows and earlier records were unchanged, the difference in a college’s count equals the entering class’s enrollments there minus the departing class’s. The school has not confirmed either condition, and a shift of three or four students is a small difference within a list of 886 enrollments.
Chart 2. Change in five-year counts between Lawrenceville’s previous and current lists.
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Of the 67 colleges on both lists, 24 rose, 23 fell, and 20 did not change. Columbia gained the most (22 to 28), followed by Boston College, Boston University, and NYU (each up five). Lehigh fell the most (25 to 18), followed by UVA (16 to 11). The Ivy League total rose from 199 to 210. Barnard, Oberlin, and Rice joined the list at five each. Bates, Georgia Tech, Howard, and Washington and Lee each had exactly five on the previous list and dropped below the threshold.
An older version, in an Internet Archive capture from November 8, 2024, adds a third point of comparison. Across the three overlapping published lists, Georgetown’s count went from 42 to 34 to 30 and Lehigh’s from 32 to 25 to 18, while Cornell’s went from 22 to 38 to 42 and Columbia’s from 11 to 22 to 28. Because most graduates appear in more than one of these windows, these are changes across overlapping lists, not three independent results, and the school does not explain them. Lehigh remains among the larger destinations on the current list; see our guide on how to get into Lehigh.
Grades, Course Loads, and Requirements
Lawrenceville uses A through F letter grades on its transcript. The 2025–26 student handbook converts them to a 4.0 scale for GPA purposes (A = 4.0, B = 3.0, C = 2.0, D = 1.0, F = 0) and maps them to a 100-point scale, with an A at 94 and above and an A- from 90 to 93. The handbook does not describe additional weight for Honors courses, and we did not locate a class rank policy or a GPA distribution in the public sources reviewed. Our explainer on class rank covers how colleges read transcripts from schools that do not rank.
| Lawrenceville grade | 100-point range | GPA value |
| A | 94 and above | 4.0 |
| A- | 90 to 93 | |
| B+ | 87 to 89 | |
| B | 84 to 86 | 3.0 |
| B- | 80 to 83 | |
| C+ | 77 to 79 | |
| C | 74 to 76 | 2.0 |
| C- | 70 to 73 | |
| D+ | 67 to 69 | |
| D | 64 to 66 | 1.0 |
| D- | 60 to 63 | |
| F | 59 and below | 0 |
The handbook lists GPA values only for the whole letters, so the cells for plus and minus grades are blank. It also reserves the A+ for rare work that goes well beyond course outcomes.
The year is divided into three terms. The published 2025–26 handbook states that Second Formers (ninth graders) must carry and pass at least 15 courses a year and typically take 17; Third Formers typically take 18; Fourth and Fifth Formers must pass at least 14 and are expected to carry 15. Students entering in ninth grade must complete term credits across English (9 plus 3 in a humanities English course), history (6 plus 3 in a humanities cultural studies course), science (9), the arts (3), religion and philosophy (2), and interdisciplinary study (2), along with language through level 3, math through a full year at the 400 or 500 level, and a community service requirement. Summer or outside coursework does not count toward graduation.
The Curriculum: A 500-Level Catalog
Lawrenceville numbers its courses by level, from foundational 200-level courses to 500-level courses that, with two exceptions, carry an Honors designation in the 2026–27 course catalog. We counted every listing in the catalog’s table of contents by section and level.
Chart 3. Lawrenceville catalog listings by section and course level, 2026–27.
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| Catalog section | 200 and 300 level | 400 level | 500 level | Total | Honors |
| English | 2 | 3 | 52 | 57 | 52 |
| Language | 8 | 4 | 30 | 42 | 30 |
| History | 2 | 4 | 28 | 34 | 27 |
| Science | 3 | 10 | 21 | 34 | 21 |
| Religion and Philosophy | 1 | 11 | 14 | 26 | 14 |
| Performing Arts | 10 | 5 | 10 | 25 | 9 |
| Visual Arts | 9 | 10 | 3 | 22 | 3 |
| Mathematics | 4 | 5 | 12 | 21 | 12 |
| Interdisciplinary | 0 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Total | 39 | 52 | 172 | 263 | 170 |
The 65% figure needs context. A listing is a catalog entry, not a class section or an enrollment, and the catalog mixes term-long electives with year-long sequences. English accounts for 52 of the 500-level listings because Fifth Formers choose among dozens of one-term seminars, from Chekhov to Law as Literature, while a year of Honors Chemistry counts as a single listing. Several interdisciplinary courses also appear under the department that hosts them, as the catalog places them. Two 500-level listings lack the Honors designation on their credit lines: Honors Political Science, whose title includes “Honors,” which we treat as a source inconsistency rather than a ruling on the course, and an independent study in music or theatre.
Where the Catalog Reaches Furthest
- Mathematics: Honors Calculus BC and Honors Calculus-Based Probability and Statistics, plus a Number Theory seminar and courses in Python for machine learning and SQL
- Physics: Honors Electromagnetic Theory, a calculus-based, second-year course for Fifth Formers who have completed one of the Honors physics sequences, alongside introductory courses in mechanical, structural, and electrical engineering
- Biology: Research in Molecular Genetics, run with the Seung Kim Laboratory at the Stanford School of Medicine, in which students create and characterize transgenic fruit fly lines
- History and humanities: the Heely Scholars’ Advanced Research Seminar, which turns summer archival work into a senior thesis, and the Buechner Scholars seminar in religion and philosophy, which ends in published original scholarship
Those seminars belong to Lawrenceville’s research institutes, selective programs that pair a summer session with coursework and are each limited to 10 to 12 students.
Lawrenceville does not label courses AP. Several Honors courses are built around AP exams anyway: all students in Honors Calculus AB, Honors Calculus BC, and Honors Statistics are required to take the AP exam in May, and Honors Economics prepares students for both AP economics exams. Our guide to honors vs. AP classes explains how colleges weigh each kind of course.
Testing
We did not locate SAT, ACT, AP score, or National Merit summaries in the public sources we reviewed. Third-party sites list average scores attributed to the school, but without a year, a sample size, or a school document behind them, we have not reported them.
College Counseling at Lawrenceville
The Office of College Counseling is led by Director Holly Burks Becker, with six associate directors, an office manager, and a test center supervisor listed in the school’s directory. The school describes the process starting in the Fourth Form (junior year), when students begin standardized testing and a self-reflective process with a dedicated counselor, meet individually with that counselor, and build a list for research. Juniors attend on-campus college fairs with more than 100 colleges represented. In the Fifth Form, students work on essays and meet visiting admissions officers in the fall, then finalize their college lists with their counselors through November and December.
The 2025–26 handbook allows Fifth Formers up to three College Days in the fall and winter terms to visit campuses, plus three in the spring for admitted-student visits. We did not locate counselor caseloads in the public sources reviewed.
Does Lawrenceville Raise Your Odds at Selective Colleges?
The published list shows that Lawrentians enroll at highly selective colleges in large numbers: 210 Ivy League enrollments in five years is a substantial figure for classes of about 220. It does not show that attending Lawrenceville caused those outcomes. The school admits academically strong students, and enrollment choices reflect financial aid, binding early decision, athletic recruiting, legacy ties, and personal preference, none of which the list separates out. These school publications provide no matched comparison of otherwise similar applicants, so strong outcomes and an admissions advantage remain different claims.
A Counselor’s Read for Lawrenceville Families
The points below are College Transitions’ professional interpretation. They are consistent with Lawrenceville’s published data but not proven by it.
Use the counts to understand range, not to set targets. Cornell enrolling 42 Lawrentians in five years means roughly eight a year, out of classes of more than 200; it says nothing about any one applicant’s chances, and the list omits every college that enrolled fewer than five.
Choose upper-level courses for challenge and interest, not labels. Most 500-level listings carry the Honors designation, so the label alone distinguishes little; what a student takes in the Fourth and Fifth Forms, and how they engage at the Harkness table, is what teachers will be able to describe in recommendations.
Ask for the profile that goes to colleges. We did not locate a public copy, but schools typically send one with each application. The college counseling office can explain how grades, course levels, and Honors designations are presented.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which colleges enroll the largest numbers of Lawrenceville graduates?
Over the past five years, the colleges enrolling the most Lawrentians were Cornell (42), NYU (41), Penn (36), Princeton (32), and Georgetown (30). Seventy colleges enrolled five or more.
How many Lawrenceville students go to Princeton?
Thirty-two over the five years covered by the school’s current list. The previous list showed 30.
Does Lawrenceville offer AP classes?
Not under that name. Several Honors courses prepare students for AP exams, and in three math courses the exam is required.
Methodology
Sources: Lawrenceville’s college counseling page, read on November 11, 2026; two earlier versions of its matriculation list in Internet Archive captures of August 18, 2026 and November 8, 2024, with values transcribed from the archived pages and retained in our data file; the 2026–27 Course Catalog, updated September 4, 2026; the 2025–26 Student Handbook; the tuition and aid page; the research institutes page; the online staff directory; The Lawrentian’s 2025 and 2026 Commencement coverage; and the NCES Private School Survey for 2023–24. All sources were accessed November 11 or 12, 2026.
Dates differ by measure. College outcomes cover the five classes on the current list, which the school does not name. Enrollment and teacher counts are federal data for 2023–24. Tuition and aid figures are for 2026–27, and catalog counts describe the courses offered in 2026–27.
We matched college names across list versions where the school’s spelling changed (for example, “University of Texas” and “University of Texas at Austin”). Catalog counts come from the table of contents, with one entry per listing and multi-term sequences counted once; we excluded three LW listings that are not regular courses. Honors designations come from each course’s credit line, and our listing-by-listing tally is in the accompanying data workbook. Groupings of colleges by type are ours. We did not locate a profile for colleges, test score summaries, a GPA distribution, counselor caseloads, admission results, or an acceptance rate in the public sources reviewed, and we have not estimated any of them.
Lawrenceville is part of a series of data-driven school profiles. You can browse our other data visualizations.
Appendix: Lawrenceville’s Five-Year Matriculation List
All 70 colleges on Lawrenceville’s current list, with the count on the previous list for comparison. Names follow the school’s current list; a dash means the college had fewer than five on the previous list.
| College | Five-year count (current list) | Previous list | CT group |
| Cornell University | 42 | 38 | Ivy League |
| New York University | 41 | 36 | Other private colleges and universities |
| University of Pennsylvania | 36 | 36 | Ivy League |
| Princeton University | 32 | 30 | Ivy League |
| Georgetown University | 30 | 34 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Columbia University | 28 | 22 | Ivy League |
| Brown University | 26 | 23 | Ivy League |
| Harvard University | 25 | 26 | Ivy League |
| Tufts University | 21 | 20 | Other private colleges and universities |
| University of Chicago | 21 | 18 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Duke University | 20 | 23 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Northeastern University | 19 | 19 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Syracuse University | 19 | 18 | Other private colleges and universities |
| University of Michigan | 19 | 16 | Public universities |
| Boston College | 18 | 13 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Lehigh University | 18 | 25 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Northwestern University | 16 | 20 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Wake Forest University | 16 | 17 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Boston University | 14 | 9 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Bucknell University | 14 | 11 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Johns Hopkins University | 14 | 14 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Stanford University | 14 | 13 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Carnegie Mellon University | 13 | 13 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Southern Methodist University | 13 | 14 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Yale University | 13 | 14 | Ivy League |
| University of Miami | 12 | 11 | Other private colleges and universities |
| University of Southern California | 12 | 16 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Middlebury College | 11 | 10 | Liberal arts colleges |
| University of Virginia | 11 | 16 | Public universities |
| University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) | 10 | 11 | Public universities |
| University of Texas | 10 | 9 | Public universities |
| University of Wisconsin | 10 | 9 | Public universities |
| Villanova University | 10 | 8 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Washington University in St. Louis | 10 | 10 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Babson College | 9 | 9 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Bowdoin College | 9 | 7 | Liberal arts colleges |
| Hamilton College | 9 | 9 | Liberal arts colleges |
| Rutgers University | 9 | 8 | Public universities |
| Case Western Reserve University | 8 | 6 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Colby College | 8 | 10 | Liberal arts colleges |
| Colgate University | 8 | 8 | Liberal arts colleges |
| Dartmouth College | 8 | 10 | Ivy League |
| Davidson College | 8 | 8 | Liberal arts colleges |
| Indiana University (Bloomington) | 8 | 11 | Public universities |
| Purdue University | 8 | 8 | Public universities |
| Union College | 8 | 8 | Liberal arts colleges |
| University of California (Berkeley) | 8 | 10 | Public universities |
| University of St. Andrews | 8 | 8 | Outside the U.S. |
| William and Mary | 8 | 6 | Public universities |
| Williams College | 8 | 9 | Liberal arts colleges |
| Dickinson College | 7 | 8 | Liberal arts colleges |
| Fordham University | 7 | 7 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 7 | 8 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Trinity College | 7 | 7 | Liberal arts colleges |
| University of Richmond | 7 | 8 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Vanderbilt University | 7 | 7 | Other private colleges and universities |
| Amherst College | 6 | 6 | Liberal arts colleges |
| College of the Holy Cross | 6 | 5 | Liberal arts colleges |
| Penn State University | 6 | 6 | Public universities |
| University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) | 6 | 5 | Public universities |
| Barnard College | 5 | – | Liberal arts colleges |
| Clemson University | 5 | 5 | Public universities |
| Franklin and Marshall College | 5 | 6 | Liberal arts colleges |
| Lafayette College | 5 | 6 | Liberal arts colleges |
| Oberlin College | 5 | – | Liberal arts colleges |
| Rice University | 5 | – | Other private colleges and universities |
| Tulane University | 5 | 7 | Other private colleges and universities |
| United States Naval Academy | 5 | 5 | Service academies |
| University of Colorado (Boulder) | 5 | 5 | Public universities |
| Wesleyan University | 5 | 9 | Liberal arts colleges |
If your family is weighing how a school like Lawrenceville 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.
