13. Stuyvesant
Within walking distance to the World Trade Center, located on Manhattan’s West Side along the Hudson River, Stuyvesant High School has long been regarded as one of the best high schools in New York City. Stuyvesant is one of the eight specialized public high schools in NYC, with an academic mission focus of Science, Mathematics and Technology, catering to academically gifted students.
Business Insider in an article entitled The 10 Best Public High Schools In New York City refers to Stuyvesant as “an academic powerhouse” that serves to educate some of the brightest students in the U.S.
Entrance into Stuyvesant is based on the SHSAT, where eighth and ninth grade students from New York’s five Boroughs compete for the highest scores and to earn the right to attend.
The New York Times reports that of the 28,000 students throughout the five boroughs who took the SHSAT, only approximately 20%, or 5,701, earned a seat in New York’s specialized schools, including Stuyvesant, where the ratio narrows to 3.2%.
The NY Post refers to Stuyvesant as a “perennial top performer”, and 98.7% of the close to 3,300 student body go on to college, with SAT scores averaging over 2100 according to FindTheBest; Stuyvesant’s A.P passing rate tops 97%, quotes the same source.
Four Stuyvesant alumni have gone on to win the Nobel Prize from the years 1958 through 2004 in the fields of physiology, medicine, chemistry, and economics states Alec Klein in the book A Class Apart – Prodigies Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America’s Best Schools.
The NY Historical Society states that Stuyvesant High School was established in 1904 as an all boy training school, and it wasn’t until 1969 that a 13-year-old girl by the name of Alice de Rivera filed a lawsuit against Stuyvesant for discrimination based on sex.
Rivera won and that school year, the New York Historical Society recounts, nine female students were admitted (not including Alice de Rivera who had since moved away). Today the once-all-boy school student body is 41% female, according to U.S. News.
The complete list of Specialized High Schools in New York City include Staten Island Technical High School, Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Latin School, Brooklyn Technical High School, the High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College, High School of American Studies at Lehman College, Queens High School for the Sciences at York College, and Stuyvesant.
