Presidents, actors, coaches, and a king, and what their range says about what Andover is actually selecting for.
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Quick Answer for Busy Parents
Phillips Academy Andover has graduated two United States presidents, a reigning monarch, Academy Award winners, a legendary football coach, and the founder of a Japanese university. The list is unusually broad rather than concentrated in one field. That breadth is the point, and it reflects an admissions philosophy that has consistently favored range and character over a single narrow measure of promise.
The Political Line: Two Presidents and a Senator
Andover is one of very few secondary schools anywhere to have educated two presidents of the United States. George H. W. Bush graduated in 1942 and enlisted immediately; he later served as the 41st president. His son George W. Bush followed him to Andover and became the 43rd president. Their overlapping presence in the alumni directory is the fact most families already know about the school.
Less famous but worth noting is Lincoln Chafee, who served as mayor of Warwick, United States Senator, and Governor of Rhode Island. John F. Kennedy, Jr., who attended Andover before Brown and NYU Law, went into law, journalism, and magazine publishing rather than electoral politics, which is its own kind of comment on how these paths actually run.
The pattern here is not that Andover produces politicians. It is that Andover has spent two and a half centuries placing graduates in positions where the motto Non Sibi, or “not for self,” gets tested in public.
Arts, Letters, and an Unlikely Run of Actors
For a school best known for public service, Andover has an odd density of performers. Humphrey Bogart attended and was famously expelled, which has not stopped the school from claiming him. Jack Lemmon graduated in 1943 and went on to win two Academy Awards. Olivia Wilde graduated in 2002 and has built a career as an actress, producer, and director.
On the literary and scientific side, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was a physician, poet, and essayist whose influence on nineteenth-century American letters is hard to overstate. Benjamin Spock, whose book on child-rearing reshaped how a generation of American parents raised their children, graduated in 1921. Ming Tsai has spent his career as a chef, restaurateur, and television personality.
What connects them is not a shared discipline. It is that each built a public body of work in a field that rewards judgment and voice rather than credentials alone, which is a reasonable description of what boarding schools look for in an application profile in the first place.
Global Reach: Andover Beyond America
Andover’s founding charter speaks of educating “youth from every quarter,” and the alumni list bears that out earlier than most people expect. Joseph Hardy Neesima, the school’s first documented Asian student, went on to found Doshisha University in Kyoto, one of Japan’s most significant private universities. He enrolled in the nineteenth century, well before international education was a category anyone marketed.
More recently, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, the reigning King of Bhutan, spent part of his secondary education at Andover. Today international students make up 18 percent of the student body, and 61 percent of students are students of color. The global character of the alumni list is not a recent development bolted onto an old school; it is continuous with how Andover has understood itself for a long time.
What would your child contribute to this list?
We help students find the thread that makes their application specific rather than merely strong.
What the Alumni List Actually Tells Applicants
It is tempting to read a list like this as a promise. It is not one. Most Andover graduates become accomplished professionals whose names never appear anywhere, which is true of every elite school. The list is useful for a narrower reason: it shows what the admissions office has historically been willing to bet on.
| Alumnus | Field | What the Selection Suggests |
| George H. W. Bush | Public service | Character and duty valued over academic dazzle alone |
| Joseph Hardy Neesima | Education, Japan | Global reach taken seriously from the nineteenth century |
| Humphrey Bogart | Film | Admitted students are not uniformly compliant, and never have been |
| Benjamin Spock | Medicine and writing | Cross-disciplinary range rewarded over early specialization |
| Bill Belichick | Athletics | Postgraduate year as a legitimate and productive route in |
| Olivia Wilde | Film and directing | Creative ambition treated as seriously as academic ambition |
Bill Belichick is worth pausing on. He came to Andover for a postgraduate year, a route many families overlook entirely. Andover enrolls 23 postgraduates within its senior class, and for the right student, particularly a recruited athlete or a late-blooming academic, it is a genuine option rather than a consolation. Our overview of how to showcase leadership and extracurricular activities covers how those cases are best presented.
The practical lesson for an applicant is unglamorous. Andover has consistently admitted students who were distinctly themselves, sometimes inconveniently so, and who had something they cared about beyond grades. That is why we push families toward authenticity over polish and toward extracurricular depth rather than breadth. A student who reads as assembled is competing against a two-hundred-year institutional memory of students who read as real.
Before You Apply
Reading an alumni list is a pleasant way to spend an evening and a poor way to plan an application. The useful version of this exercise is asking what your own child would be doing at Andover that nobody assigned them, and then building the application around the honest answer.
Start with who your child actually is.
Tell us about your child and we will give you a candid read on what an Andover application should be built around.
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