Early years and developing reputation In 1891,
Maria Hotchkiss, the heir to her late husband
Benjamin's armaments fortune, founded Hotchkiss School in her hometown of Lakeville, Connecticut. Although Hotchkiss had intended to establish a small school of roughly 50 students that would educate local boys for free, her chief advisor,
Yale University president
Timothy Dwight, wanted to use Hotchkiss' millions to establish a
feeder school for Yale. He hired key staff from
Phillips Academy (Andover), a traditional Yale feeder school, and placed several members of the Yale community on the board of trustees. The school focused heavily on preparing students for Yale's entrance exams, and by the early 1920s Hotchkiss was consistently beating Andover's scores at the
College Boards. The newly constituted Hotchkiss School was an instant success, and the graduating class of 1896 sent twenty-eight of its thirty graduates to Yale. That same year, Hotchkiss enrolled its first international student, the Catalan-Puerto Rican
José Camprubí; in addition, Chinese students have attended Hotchkiss since 1912. Buoyed by its college placement record, the school grew rapidly. In 1902, the school had 145 students. By 1909, it already had a national student body, attracting 223 students from 29 states; of that year's forty-six graduates, thirty went to Yale. By 1926, Hotchkiss already enrolled 333 students. The school remained at roughly 300–350 students until the advent of coeducation in 1974. From the start, Hotchkiss offered what was (for its day) an extensive scholarship program; through the 1920s, approximately 10% of Hotchkiss students were on full scholarships. (Today, 9.6% of Hotchkiss students are on full scholarships, and another 27% receive some amount of financial aid.) However, scholarship students and paying students were not treated with total equality: as late as the 1970s, only the scholarship boys were required to perform chores on campus. Ohio newspaperman
Paul Block donated the chapel; and automobile magnate
Walter Chrysler paid for the infirmary. By 1920, the reputation was sufficiently established that Minnesota native
F. Scott Fitzgerald's
This Side of Paradise poked fun at Hotchkiss and its athletics rival
Taft for "prepar[ing] the wealth of the Middle West for social success at Yale." The school's history speculated that Hotchkiss developed these ties because older New England boarding schools "looked askance at first- or second-generation wealth, especially if its possessors resided beyond the Northeast."
The disciplinarians and the gentlemen Over the years, the school acquired a reputation for gentility, fostered by long-serving headmaster George Van Santvoord, a former Yale professor and 1908 Hotchkiss graduate who ran the school from 1926 to 1955. Van Santvoord said that at his Hotchkiss there was only one school rule: "Be a gentleman"—a principle he inherited from his own Hotchkiss headmaster, Huber Buehler. (The phrase dates back to an 1893 student publication. Hotchkiss continued to send large numbers of students to Yale; sociologist
Jerome Karabel calculated that in the 1930s, "more students came to New Haven from Hotchkiss than from the combined public school systems of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia." Van Santvoord found an ideological ally in Yale president
James Rowland Angell, who declared at a Hotchkiss alumni dinner that college entrance examinations were "disastrous" for secondary education. When Van Santvoord announced his retirement in 1954,
Time magazine stated that "of all U.S. prep schools, few, if any, can beat the standards Hotchkiss has set". (The man in charge of
Time was
Henry Luce, a Hotchkiss fundraiser and former Hotchkiss scholarship student.) Under Van Santvoord, Hotchkiss became the first of the post-1884 American boarding schools to accept black students when Marcellus Winston '55 matriculated in 1951. He also abolished
hazing in 1930. However, Van Santvoord strongly opposed
co-education, and due to his continuing influence over the school's board of trustees, Hotchkiss did not begin accepting girls until nearly two decades after his retirement. Under his leadership, Hotchkiss' financial aid resources "largely went to the nouveau poor, well-to-do families who had taken their lumps during the
Great Depression." He also opposed (unsuccessfully) proposals to start a summer school for low-income students. Neither did Van Santvoord fully dislodge the school's no-second-chances approach to student discipline, which was facetiously compared to "
Stalag 17". Recognizing this reputation, Hotchkiss invited a former student,
C. D. B. Bryan, to write the introduction to the official history of the school, in which Bryan recounts how Hotchkiss expelled him "for having an electric coffeepot and smoking a Lucky Strike."
Modernizing Hotchkiss A. William "Bill" Olsen became headmaster in 1960 and proceeded to relax many of the austerities of life at Hotchkiss. He introduced new holidays to the school calendar (at the time, only seniors were allowed to go home for
Thanksgiving), allowed students to keep radios in their dormitories, legalized smoking and drinking (in Connecticut, eighteen-year-olds may drink alcohol
under specific circumstances), and moderated the system of punishments and expulsions. He also abolished compulsory Sunday chapel attendance in 1970; although Hotchkiss had been nonsectarian since its founding, the extent of its ecumenicism had been to allow Catholics to attend Sunday Mass at 9:00 a.m. as long as they attended the school's official Protestant service later that day. The school also took steps to diversify its student body. In 1953, with Hotchkiss' help, Hotchkiss alumnus Eugene Van Voorhis '51 established the Ulysses S. Grant Foundation to assist minority
New Haven students with the prep school application process. Hotchkiss has also participated in other recruitment initiatives from the 1960s onward,
Prep for Prep, and the Greater Opportunity (GO) summer program for inner-city students. In 1974, Hotchkiss began admitting girls (but not before certain board members nearly succeeded in firing Olsen to prevent it), and as of 2014 there was an approximately 50–50 gender balance in the student body. Hotchkiss is a member of the Global Education Benchmark Group (GEBG), Today, 42% of U.S. Hotchkiss students identify as people of color, To recruit U.S. students from "historically underrepresented" backgrounds, Hotchkiss pays for certain prospective applicants and their guardians to visit the campus during the admissions process. 14% of the student body is international. == Finances ==