A university-preparatory school or college-preparatory school (also known as tertiary preparation and usually abbreviated to preparatory school, college prep school, tertiary prep, or prep school) is a secondary school, usually private, designed to prepare students for a college or university education. Some schools will also include a junior, or elementary school. This designation is most common in North America.
In many parts of Europe, such as Germany, the countries of former Austria-Hungary, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, secondary schools specializing in college-preparatory education are called gymnasia and/or in some countries athenaea. College prep schools are usually a secondary school along with work for a host school, to help get into a desired college. Most students attend a college-preparatory school but also accomplish the host school's work for a high school diploma.
Famous quotes containing the word school:
“After school days are over, the girls ... find no natural connection between their school life and the new one on which they enter, and are apt to be aimless, if not listless, needing external stimulus, and finding it only prepared for them, it may be, in some form of social excitement. ...girls after leaving school need intellectual interests, well regulated and not encroaching on home duties.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)