The words are whispered under a cone of silence in moneyed Manhattan: cutthroat, ruthless, Darwinian, cruel.
Whispered, too, are the shimmering prizes: the future keys, it’s said, to Harvard, Princeton or Yale.
Welcome to the quest to win a spot at New York’s Baby Ivies, the private preschools and kindergartens where big money and bigger egos clash over whose three- or five-year-old will gain the first edge.
The recent college-admissions scandal has only confirmed what the Baby Ivy crowd has long known: Some wealthy parents will do just about anything to get their kids into the “right” school.
For New Yorkers willing to drop $50,000 on kindergarten, few rites of passage can seem as anxiety-inducing as the annual running of the toddlers. Affluent parents hire admissions whisperers, test-prep consultants and more to polish their sticky-fingered applicants. Like the Grownup Ivies -- which send out their admission decisions on Thursday -- the Baby Ivies cull the weak, interview the hopeful and decide which lucky candidates slip past the velvet rope.
How intense is the competition? Trinity School, on the Upper West Side, stopped accepting applications for the current academic year once they hit 642 for its 60 or so kindergarten spots, according to Kevin Ramsey, director of communications.
That puts its acceptance rate at about 10 percent, roughly the same as Cornell University’s. Trinity’s tuition, at more than $52,000 for the K-12 school, exceeds Harvard’s -- albeit without room and board.
Other New York Baby Ivies such as Horace Mann, Collegiate, Dalton and Brearley generally don’t reveal their acceptance rates. Horace Mann provided a glimpse into its numbers in filings related to a 2017 bond issue: On average, its kindergarten receives 346 applications for about 36 spots.
Spokespeople for the schools either declined to comment or didn’t return emails.
Given the unofficial code of silence, parents are afraid to speak openly about admissions. The schools’ reticence, meantime, only adds to their mystique.