In a recent post we discussed the potential security breaches that can result from publishing alumni lists online. Today, we examine the ’safety’ of alumni data that resides behind the firewall.

Phillips Exeter is one of country’s preeminent boarding schools. Mark Zuckerberg is even an alumnus. With an endowment of $1 Billion Exeter has, by all accounts, sufficient funding to afford the best alumni networking practices in the universe. Unfortunately, Exeter chooses to manage all its technology in-house, including its alumni systems. The following is representative of the paradox of many wealthy schools that think they are being ‘safer’ by not outsourcing tech. In most cases, they are wrong.

The Question: How easy would it be to impersonate an Exeter alum by accessing the network (likely the school’s biggest asset)?

Answer: It’s so simple we did so in about 5 minutes. [Please note, we have deleted all accounts and are alerting the network administrator to fix this security faux pas].

First we went to the alumni portion of the website. Exeter actually lists “missing” alumni, or those persons who have not been heard from in years. So we arbitrarily selected a person from the class of 1998: Pajo Sanjin.

Next, we created a fake Gmail email address: pajo.sanjin.com

Finally we ran a search in the alumni director for Pajo Sanjin, found the name and claimed our identity.

Access granted. Scary, isn’t it?

Update: To clairfy,PrepNY did not ever actually access the PEA database. While we easily could have, the point of this exercise was simply to inform schools of the dangers certain security flaws represent and what ‘could happen’ if the problems are not addressed.

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In September, Andy Guess of Inside HigherEd discussed trends in web strategy and marketing for academic institutions.  One of schools’ primary needs is what Andy refers to as “the Facebooking of college Web sites,” i.e. using social media technology to create an engaging and ’social’ user experience. According to the article, schools are looking toward variations on social networking to keep in touch with students after they graduate and maintain databases to optimize fundraising.

Furthermore, schools are starting to realize that there is no all-encompassing web solution. Web strategy must leave room for future improvements. Recognizing that redesigning web sites is a multiyear, multi-step ordeal, administrators must understand that along with surface improvements, the content management systems underlying them often need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Our Take: Finding the ‘best’ solution is more important than finding ‘a’ solution. In addressing a school’s online needs, too often the most important factor is low cost and ‘putting out fires.’ The fact is that implementing a poorly designed and un-engaging web solution can cause more harm than good. When a new website or application is launched, schools often only get one chance to impress.

Make it count.

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Via Forbes

…Some theorize it’s the “Tiffany Effect” that keeps private school prices so high–the idea that people associate a premium brand with a premium price. That concept would surely induce wealthy parents to take pride in spending $30,000 or more per year to send junior to an elite boarding school that has graduated the likes of John F. Kennedy (Choate) or Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Groton).

“People think that if something is priced lower it’s inferior,” says Columbia University professor Henry Levin, who has studied the private school industry.

Others point to the campus building wave of the past decade or so–a kind of arms race that has scads of private high schools showing off state-of-the-art computer labs, athletic buildings and performing arts centers. All these should be big drivers of higher costs to students’ families, but that’s not the case. Big capital projects are almost always funded by generous benefactors like businesses and wealthy alumni, meaning they have little to no effect on a school’s operating budget.

While elaborate facilities have become a must to attract families, it’s today’s higher demand for instruction in arts, human development and other extracurriculars that’s requiring increasing amounts of time and money, according to Bill Morris, head of school at Friends Academy, an elite private school in Locust Valley, N.Y…

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According to an editorial from Choate Rosemary Hall’s student newspaper regarding the new television show Gossip Girl:

“While the wealth and parties are realistic, they manifest themselves on the show in a much more ostentatious manner than that of the real world… The least realistic aspect of the show is the narrative blogging superimposed on the basic plot line. No one, anywhere, is that obsessed with one blog specifically directed at a certain group of people. Similarly, nobody—even in New York—spends that much time checking his or her sidekick for updates. The blog portrayed in Gossip Girl is no facebook.com: it is a genuine blogging site devoted to gossiping about a specific friend group—one phenomenon that has yet to plague the upper-east elite of non-TVLand.”

**If there is even a ‘hint’ of reality to the sex, drinking and drug infested parties portrayed on the television show, administrators and parents might want to pay a bit more attention

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According to the Independent Schools Admission Association of Greater New York, around 300 more students wanted kindergarten seats last year than New York City independent schools had places to offer. About 2,700 4-year-olds took the Educational Resource Board tests required for entry at most schools, and the schools offered an estimated 2,400 spots, Isaagny’s chairman, George Davison, said.

Mr. Davison, who also heads the Grace Church School in Lower Manhattan, said that increased wealth in Manhattan and more families staying in the city — there were more than 30% more children under 5 in Manhattan in 2005 than 2000, census figures show — lead him to believe the gap will widen. “I wouldn’t be surprised this year if we saw it being 2,900 kids taking the ERB, and then all of a sudden you get a bit more of an issue,” he said.

One solution, he said, is building new schools, as entrepreneurs such as Michael Koffler, the CEO of a private company that opened Claremont in 2005 and runs several nursery schools, have already begun to do.

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List provided by the Washington Post

James Agee attended St. Andrews Sewanee, an Episcopal boarding school on a scenic mountaintop in Tennessee. His mother, a widow, married a bursar at the school. After the family moved to Maine, Agee attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

Edward Albee was born in Washington D.C. and adopted at the age of 2 weeks by a millionaire couple near New York City. At age 12, he entered Lawrenceville School, a boarding school near Princeton, New Jersey. Three years later, he was dismissed for cutting classes. Hoping to install some discipline, Albee’s father enrolled him in Valley Forge Military Academy in Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he was dismissed within a year. Somehow, the struggling student managed to be admitted to Choate, a boys’ boarding school in Connecticut that merged with a nearby girls’ school in 1974 and became today’s Choate Rosemary Hall. Albee graduated from Choate in 1946.

Elizabeth Bishop was raised by her grandparents and other relatives. She spent her high school years at Walnut Hill, a boarding school in Natick, Mass. Her career as a poet began with writings published in her school’s literary magazine.

Pearl Buck grew up in China, where her parents were missionaries. At age 15, she went to boarding school in Shanghai-her first formal education.

Truman Capote attended several private schools, including Trinity School and St. Johns Academy in New York. Although he taught himself to read and write at age 5, he disliked school and did poorly. He later credited his English teacher at Greenwich High School in Connecticut with being the first person to recognize his writing talent and provide guidance. He wrote poems and stories for the school paper, The Green Witch, but he never graduated from high school and never went to college.

John Dos Passos spent a year at Sidwell Friends School before going to boarding school at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. T.S. Eliot attended Milton Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts.

F. Scott Fitzgerald attended the Newman School, a Catholic boarding school in New Jersey, from 1911 to 1913. Fitzgerald’s great great grandfather built the house that is now the central building of Maret School in Washington, D.C.

John Hersey was born in China, where his parents were missionaries. He attended Hotchkiss School, a boarding school in Connecticut. John Irving, author of The World According to Garp and A Prayer for Owen Meany, is a graduate of Exeter. He also grew up on the campus, since his stepfather taught history there. Irving reportedly “became a bookworm despite having dyslexia.”

John Knowles grew up in West Virginia. His brother attended Mercersburg Academy in nearby Pennsylvania, but John found a brochure from Exeter lying around the house and decided to apply. An impressive essay helped get him admitted, but Knowles was so poorly prepared that he was asked to repeat a grade. At Exeter, he learned how to study and fell in love with the school.

One of his characters in A Separate Peace is modeled after his classmate Gore Vidal. Like the boys in the novel, “We really did have a club whose members jumped from the branch of a very high tree into the river as initiation,” says Knowles.

Mary McCarthy, author of The Group, was orphaned at the age of 6. She attended the Annie Wright Seminary (now Annie Wright School), in Tacoma, Washington-the oldest boarding school in the Pacific Northwest.

John McPhee spent a year at Deerfield Academy, a boarding school in Massachusetts, after graduating from high school. His book The Headmaster is about the man who ran the school for 66 years.

J.D. Salinger was raised Jewish and spent ninth and tenth grade at The McBurney School, a New York City private school affiliated with the YMCA movement. Like Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye, Salinger was captain of the school fencing team. He spent his last two years of high school at Valley Forge Military Academy and graduated in 1936.

Susan Shreve graduated from Sidwell Friends School in 1957.

Harriet Beecher Stowe spent her teen years at a boarding school in Hartford, Connecticut run by her older sister. Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary was considered one of a few schools “where a young woman could get an education equivalent to a young man’s” in the 1820’s.

Gore Vidal spent his early school years at Potomac School in McLean, Va., then at Landon School in Bethesda, Md. Concerned about his poor classroom performance, his mother moved him to Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. for grades 3 to 5. Despite his leadership on the playground, his mother continued to be worry about his poor academic performance and moved him again, this time down the street to St. Albans School. Vidal spent the next three years there and became one of the school’s youngest boarding students. He loved to read but apparently didn’t do his homework. His grades were poor even in English, where he disliked the focus on memorization and rote learning. Vidal’s mother then sent him to Los Alamos Ranch School, despite the objects of her ex-husband, who was forced to pay the extremely high tuition. Vidal intentionally managed to get himself dismissed within a year. In 1943, Vidal graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Los Alamos Ranch School closed when the U.S. government took over to develop the atom bomb.

Thomas Wolfe attended North State Fitting School, a private school in Asheville, North Carolina. Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, who ran the school, were models for Mr. and Mrs. Leonard in Look Homeward Angel.

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From the Wikipeda entry for Education in New York City:

There are approximately 900 additional privately run secular and religious schools in the city.[7] These include some of the most prestigious private schools in the United States, among them the Brearley School, Buckley School, Collegiate School, Dalton School, Spence School, Chapin School, Nightingale-Bamford School, Horace Mann School, Trinity School, Saint Ann’s School, Convent of the Sacred Heart, Regis High School, Ramaz School, Ethical Culture Fieldston School, Poly Prep, and Riverdale Country School. About 30,000 students attend private schools in New York.

There are several parochial schools, serving elementary and secondary levels of students. Main denominations or religions operating these institutions are Roman Catholic, Jewish -Orthodox and some non-Orthdox, and Muslim. The Satmar Jewish community of Brooklyn operates its own network of schools, which is the fourth largest school system in New York state

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According to the New York Times, teenage use of alcohol and drugs dropped significantly in New York City in 2005 compared with past years, and is lower than the national rate.

However, because use of alcohol and some drugs are more prevalent among white and affluent students, the city’s surveys may understate the overall rate since private school students were not included in the survey. Private school students currently account for ~20% of the total New York City teenage population.

Still, city officials say they are confident that inclusion of private school students would still show lower rates of drug and alcohol abuse in the city than nationwide. In particular, the most recent national surveys show binge drinking almost twice as common nationally as in the city, and methamphetamine use two to three times as common.

In all, 8,000 students took the survey in 2003 and 2005, with only 1,500 students taking the survey in earlier years.

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Horace Mann, one of New York’s top private schools, educates 1,605 K–12 students, a fifth of whom receive some financial aid.

The school generates annual revenue of $62.26 million ($6.376 million is profit, which the school invests at its discretion). Revenue is derived from two sources of income: Tuitions are 72% of the school’s money and donations (plus interest) the rest, or 28%.

Via New York Magazine

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