The College Preparatory School

The College Preparatory School (CPS), often referred to as College Prep, is a four-year private coeducational day high school in Oakland, California. The school's motto is mens conscia recti, a Latin phrase borrowed from Vergil's Aeneid that means "a mind aware of what is right."

The school's strict academics and small size have translated into an admissions rate lower than many American colleges and universities. In turn many students from College Prep go on to study at America's top universities, and approximately one-third of each graduating class matriculates into Ivy League schools, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or Stanford University.

College Prep has received a number of accolades for the quality of its faculty and its academic rigor. A 2007 Wall Street Journal article ranked College Prep as the sixth best high school in the world in terms of its students' "success rate" in enrolling in America's most selective universities, a statistic calculated by collecting information from college admissions offices records of their freshmen classes. In April 2010, Forbes Magazine ranked College Prep as the seventeenth best private school in the United States in terms of caliber of instruction, quality of facilities, and overall academic achievement.