Against the Odds: How a Small, Outgunned School Rose to the Top
Sometimes it’s most instructive to take a fairly uncomplicated example of success to understand the mechanisms of success. Here, in a lesson for small liberal arts colleges, we’ll look at a K12 school.
Pierrepont School is a small private school in Westport, CT. It’s ranked highly everywhere and was recently ranked the #1 private K12 school in Connecticut.
That’s no small feat. Connecticut is full of very wealthy private schools with long traditions and deep-pocketed alumni, and Pierrepont is disadvantaged in nearly every way. Just across town from Pierrepont is Greens Farms Academy, which sits on the Vanderbilt estate, overlooking the water. Fifteen minutes away is King School, and a little further than that are Greenwich’s Brunswick, Sacred Heart, and Greenwich Academy. Brunswick doesn’t just have an upper school campus; it has an entirely separate athletic campus.
While Pierrepont is ranked #1 in Connecticut, it’s #43 nationally, besting the likes of Princeton Day and Buckingham Browne. These are the kinds of schools that have $100M endowments and install $10M artificial turf fields (which Buckingham literally just did).
And all of these schools, including Pierrepont, charge around $55,000/year for high school tuition. Pierrepont doesn’t attract students because it’s cheap. But how does a school with barely $6M in revenue and essentially no endowment deliver at such a high level? How does a school with no athletics program and limited financial aid not just survive but thrive in a region teeming with such wealthy, established competition? Pierrepont is outgunned in every traditional competitive metric.
Pierrepont is an anomaly, not just for successfully competing in what’s possibly the most competitive education market in the country, but in every other way. Pierrepont doesn’t have grades (of any kind). Most students graduate with six or more years of Latin and ancient Greek. It groups students according to proficiency, not age. And it produces graduates who attend the nation’s most competitive colleges — consistently. There is simply no way to coast through this school. There’s also no other option if this is the kind of school you want. Pierrepont is a nerdtopia like no other.
Lesson 1
So Pierrepont charges the same tuition as its competitors, but it concentrates all of its resources on a singular goal: very traditional and rigorous academic success. If a student (or parent) is interested in what Pierrepont has to offer, then there really isn’t another choice. Lesson: don’t be all things to all people; focus and stop spending money on areas outside of your core differentiator. Pierrepont isn’t going to install a $10M turf field, but it does focus all its resources on hiring the best K12 teachers possible. This intense focus of limited funds actually enabled Pierrepont to outmaneuver its competition.
Lesson 2
Such a rigorous academic program only succeeds with the right kind of student. Pierrepont is remarkably selective in choosing those students (every student is interviewed and tested in person). To a significant degree, Pierrepont’s success is a product of its admissions process (which can be said of nearly every school). Aligning students with the program not only improves outcomes but also massively decreases student support costs, which enables the school to continue to focus resources on its singular differentiator.
In the final analysis, Pierrepont attracts customers (students) with substantial differentiation and focuses resources on meaningfully delivering this differentiation. Pierrepont is very direct in its brand messaging and finicky in selecting its customers. That customer profiling enables the school to consistently deliver on its differentiation.
