Hunter College Elementary School is a publicly funded K-6 school that caters to intellectually gifted kids. They word "college" in the schools name shouldn't mislead you. They admit 4-year-olds and not young adults.
The schools is administered by City University of New York's Hunter College and if you think getting into NYC's elementary school's is grueling because of the sprawling kindergarten admissions workshops, then you haven't heard how Hunter College Elementary screening process.
Hunter College Elementary chooses 50 students per year according to the website Inside Schools. That's a chosen roster of 25 girls and 25 boys selected from all over Manhattan and hand-picked from a pool of an estimated 2,500 applicants.
In numeric terms, that translates the school's acceptance rate to 2%. Harvard University's acceptance rate for the class of 2020 was 2.5%.
To add more to Hunter College Elementary School's exclusivity, a student's only point of acceptance is at kindergarten. This means that if a child was not accepted the first time, there's no more chance to re-apply. If a senior student was not accepted into Harvard as a freshman, he has the opportunity to transfer into the university later on.
The acceptance process for the school begins with a formally administered Stanford-Binet IQ test. The kids' parents are informed and prohibited from preparing the children for the exams. Preparing for the tests disqualifies a student.
Two hundred fifty children with the highest test scores are then pooled and called in for further evaluation which includes interacting with other children and a one-on-one time with teachers.
Final decisions are made by the Admissions Selections Committee without knowing the students' names or other information about the applicants' identities.
Apart from being free of any tuition charges, being equipped to teach talented and intellectually gifted students, Hunter College Elementary has a reputation for providing an amazing learning experience which makes getting in really difficult.
