Academic Life

College Counseling

Avenues will help place students in important colleges, universities or other higher-education institutions. Avenues’ students will be especially well-prepared for college, having had the benefit of a rigorous curriculum taught by dedicated teachers.

Colleges want students with a demonstrated area of excellence and depth, whether in photography or physics, chess or cello, architecture or demography, poetry or playwriting. Avenues’ Mastery Program is organized to encourage students to dedicate themselves to developing excellence in a particular area, culminating in an appropriate work product.

Colleges also want students who are fluent in a foreign language and have deep international experience. Chinese fluency is particularly appealing. Avenues students will be uniquely well-prepared in this regard. With language fluency stressed starting in the very early years, with serious time spent in Avenues’ campuses abroad, with summer in China and other countries providing language immersion, with a curriculum that covers global issues in depth in a spiraling World Course curriculum, Avenues students will graduate as true global citizens.

Avenues will also provide its students with serious and sophisticated college counseling. Starting in the ninth grade, each student will discuss his or her college options with an Avenues professional. For students of Avenues: New York, Avenues’ chairman, Benno Schmidt, a former president of Yale, will provide guidance. Students will be encouraged to develop their special interests and academic profiles to match the special character of the individual college campuses.

Avenues’ global footprint and international character will also give Avenues’ students knowledge of, and access to, highly-selective colleges outside the United States. Many of these institutions are eager to admit American students, especially ones with global experiences and language proficiency.

The best colleges in the world already know Avenues’ leadership, as Ty Tingley, Skip Mattoon and Gardner Dunnan have spent their careers working with selective colleges as they led preparatory schools with some of the finest records of college placement in the country. They, along with Benno Schmidt, will build upon such relationships, being sure that the best colleges and universities in the world know Avenues and the special qualities of an Avenues education.