When Martin Quiñones was starting high school, he and his parents looked at several Boston-area private schools before settling on Phillips Academy. It was one of the most expensive schools they considered, with annual tuition of $23,400, not including room, board and other fees. But with Martin's sights on getting into a top college, his family figured it was worth it.

They're about to find out if they were right. This weekend, the coveted fat envelopes -- and the dreaded thin ones -- for Ivy-League and other top universities are in the mail. Thousands of families across America are anxiously waiting to learn whether their huge investments in private education -- or moves to expensive neighborhoods with good public schools -- have paid off with acceptances to elite colleges. Martin Quiñones hopes for a nod from Harvard and other big names, and his family has made sacrifices to pay for his high-school education, such as driving older cars and taking fewer vacations, with that goal in mind. "If you go cheap, you're not going to get what you're hoping for -- an Ivy-class school," says Martin's father, Ricardo Quiñones, a computer consultant in Gloucester, Mass.

For families dreaming of sending their children to a prestigious university, the stakes have never been higher. Competition has intensified as the kids of baby boomers reach college age, and tuition at private schools -- believed by many parents to be the best insurance for college admission -- is soaring to record levels. Now, tuition of $20,000 a year is routine, with several of the best-known private schools topping $25,000. But do the most expensive schools really offer more bang for the buck than cheaper competitors? And just how do these pricey schools compare with highly successful public high schools?

Curious about the link between money and admissions success, Weekend Journal studied this year's freshman classes at 10 of the nation's most exclusive colleges -- including Harvard and other Ivies, and places like the University of Chicago and Pomona. We tracked down the alma maters of each entering student -- some 11,000 kids in all -- and came up with a list of high schools that had graduating classes of at least 50 students and sent at least 20 of them to our chosen colleges. For each high school, we then calculated what percentage of its graduates went on to those colleges. Finally, we compared tuition costs.

Though all the high schools in our survey have outstanding reputations, the success rates at some were astonishing. The best-performing high school on our list sent a staggering 41% of its senior class to our 10 colleges -- 30 kids out of a class of 74. (Hint: It's the private school where Academy Award-winner Jennifer Connelly went.) And that high school wasn't nearly the most expensive on our list.

Indeed, among private high schools, Weekend Journal found some surprising bargains. Germantown Friends School, a Philadelphia Quaker institution dating back to 1845, charges $16,675 in base tuition (plus an estimated $675 more for books and senior fees). But it did even better in our review than Buckingham Browne & Nichols of Cambridge, Mass., where tuition runs nearly $8,000 higher.

Determining tuition requires a balance, says Richard Wade, head of school at Germantown Friends, who adds that schools "struggle not just with what parents can afford, but also what teachers can afford to live on." In the case of Germantown, the school made a decision in the 1970s to increase the number of students per classroom (the average is now about 18) in order to raise faculty salaries while keeping tuition down. Of course, it doesn't hurt to have money in the bank: Germantown has an endowment totaling $27 million.

Costs Add Up

At Buckingham Browne & Nichols, spokesman Woodie Haskins says the school's tuition in part reflects its expensive region, and the need to keep faculty salaries competitive. "The cost of living in the Northeast is certainly high," Mr. Haskins says. In addition, he says, the school's endowment is less than some of its competitors, since the school -- founded in 1974 after a merger of two other schools -- is younger than some of those competitors. Finally, he says, the cost of running Buckingham's three campuses adds up, including such expenses as utilities and shuttle buses between locations.

Public schools obviously offer the better bang for the buck -- assuming you don't count the high housing costs generally associated with better-performing districts. But in our survey, public schools were in the distinct minority, with the best-performing school sending fewer than a third of its graduates to our choice colleges. And a number of the better-performing public schools were small, highly selective "magnet" schools, meaning that students whose families live and pay taxes in the area don't necessarily get to attend. For example, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Va., last year sent 10 graduates to Harvard alone.

Thomas Jefferson, which had a graduating class of 401 last year, draws students from five counties and two cities in Northern Virginia, based on their performance on aptitude tests covering both mathematics and verbal skills. The high school has seven full-time guidance counselors, who are assigned to students when they enter as freshmen and stay with them for all four years of high school. Besides Ivy League colleges and the University of Virginia, engineering schools like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology are popular with students, says Nina Pitkin, who oversees the guidance program. "We're encouraging students to broaden their search," she says.

For parents, the calculus can be complicated. A few years ago, when financial analyst Bruce Marsden was transferred by his company to New Jersey from California, he and his wife, Leslie, spent months looking at public and private high schools in their new state before buying a house. They scoured school rankings, interviewed principals and compared SAT scores and advanced-placement class offerings. They looked at highly regarded private schools like Pingry School in Martinsville, N.J., and nearby Newark Academy, and tried to assess the schools' college-placement records.

Ultimately the family chose a public school, Millburn High School, even though they figured houses in the district cost 40% more at the time than similar homes in neighboring suburbs. "Twenty thousand seemed like a heck of a lot of money to pay for high school," says Leslie Marsden. Already, their gamble seems to have paid off: Yale accepted the Marsdens' daughter, Jessica, during the "early action" process in December. (Other Yale hopefuls were able to log on to the college's Web site beginning last night to learn their fates; Yale also mailed out letters yesterday. Online notification by colleges is increasingly common.)

Millburn High School did well in the Weekend Journal survey too. Of its graduating class of 245 last year, 32 kids -- or 13% -- went to our college picks, including six to Princeton, three to the University of Chicago and two each to Brown and Dartmouth.

Extra Fees

The cost of a private education has soared to unprecedented levels. According to the National Association of Independent Schools, the average tuition at private schools increased an inflation-adjusted 4.2% for the academic year 2003-2004, to $16,298. That's up more than a third from a decade ago (also inflation-adjusted). And tuition figures don't tell the entire financial story. Nearly all private schools charge some variety of extra fee, whether it's for books, meals, laboratory materials or even mandatory laptop computers. These inevitably add more to parents' bills -- sometimes a lot more. At New York's Trinity School, for instance, parents paying $23,475 in tuition can expect to spend about $1,250 in fees for meals, parent-association dues and other services.

The schools attribute the rise in prices to efforts to raise teachers' salaries and other improvements. Many schools say they spend huge resources on the college-guidance process, from hiring more counselors to organizing college tours.

For example, Saint Ann's School of Brooklyn, N.Y., the school with the greatest success rate on the Weekend Journal list, says its annual tuition of $20,500 is justified in part by the personalized effort the school makes to help each student get into the best possible college. Headmaster Stanley Bosworth says he writes a "personal statement" for each of Saint Ann's graduating seniors -- who numbered 74 last year -- sometimes mailing the letter separately to college admissions officers and sometimes including it in the students' applications. Mr. Bosworth says he sometimes telephones academic departments and even individual professors at certain universities, rather than leaving matters to the admissions office, to call attention to standout students. He has even been known to fly to an out-of-state college to deliver a student's portfolio of artwork or tapes of musical performances. Though originally started as part of an Episcopal church, the school is now secular.

"Nothing is a lot of money if you're educating a child," says the 76-year-old Mr. Bosworth, who is retiring at the end of this school year.

Heavy on Ivies

No approach to ranking schools is perfect, of course. In setting up this study, Weekend Journal picked as our 10 colleges a group that included but wasn't limited to the Ivy League. Based on recommendations from admissions experts and guidance counselors, plus lists of SAT scores and acceptance rates, we narrowed our choices to seven Ivies -- Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell and Brown -- supplemented by three of the most exclusive colleges in the West, Midwest and South. These were Pomona, the University of Chicago, and Duke. (We were unable to get data from an eighth Ivy, Columbia University, or from one of the most exclusive colleges on the West Coast, Stanford University. However, Pomona also has impressive selectivity rates and SAT scores.)

For matriculation data from the high-school class of 2003, we relied on college face books and interviews with colleges and high schools. However, a handful of high schools didn't return our calls or wouldn't confirm our numbers. Our decision to include only schools that sent 20 or more students to our choice colleges was made to help the survey be more manageable.

As an additional check, we compiled the admissions data for three prestigious small colleges across the country, Williams, Amherst and CalTech, to see if our survey results would change significantly with those schools included. They didn't.

Our numbers thresholds, to be sure, excluded some small schools that had an extremely high admissions success rate. For example, New York's Collegiate School -- which John F. Kennedy Jr. once attended -- fell just below our minimum class-size requirement, with a graduating class last year of 49 students. However, a whopping 25 of them, or 51%, went to our college picks; that would have made it No. 1 in our study. Among the other elite schools with famous names that fell below our class-size cutoff were Roxbury Latin School in West Roxbury, Mass., and Nightingale-Bamford and Brearley in New York. All had impressive acceptance rates that would have put them high in our rankings. Notably, Roxbury Latin, with tuition of $15,200, is also an exceptional deal among private schools. Its 40% acceptance rate was almost as high as Saint Ann's.

Then again, it's important to remember that a secondary-school education shouldn't just be judged on whether it gets you to the gates of Harvard Yard. Even as high schools tout their admissions successes, they also emphasize to parents that the name at the top of the diploma can never be a guarantee of entry to a top college. For their part, A-list colleges say they pick students based on individual merit, and they say they don't give preference to particular alma maters.

Top colleges also say the obsession with feeder schools has become both excessive and misguided. "We admit students, not schools," says William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions and financial aid. "We are looking for the best people we can get."