The Lawrenceville School

At a Glance

The Lawrenceville School was founded in 1810 and sits in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. It is a coeducational boarding and day school for grades 9 through 12, plus a postgraduate (PG) year for students who want an additional year after finishing high school. The school reports an enrollment of 830 students drawn from 39 states and 34 countries.

Harkness and the House System

Teaching at Lawrenceville is organized around Harkness. A Harkness class seats students around an oval table and puts them, rather than the teacher, at the center of the discussion. The school calls the Harkness table the cornerstone of learning at Lawrenceville and describes the method as collaborative learning that builds intellectual effort and social-emotional skills through discussion, experimentation and critical review.

Residential life runs on a parallel structure. Every student belongs to a House, which serves as a dormitory for boarders and as a home base on campus for day students. Houses are grouped by year: one set for ninth graders, one for tenth and eleventh graders, and one for twelfth graders. The school does not publish a student-faculty ratio or an average class size, so families should ask the admission office for both.

Applying

Applications are due January 15 and decisions are released March 10. Testing requirements vary by entry point. Ninth-grade applicants submit SSAT (Secondary School Admission Test) or ISEE (Independent School Entrance Exam) results. Applicants to grades 10 and 11 may submit SSAT, ISEE, PSAT, SAT or ACT scores, and applicants to grade 12 and the PG year submit PSAT, SAT or ACT scores. TOEFL and IELTS are optional. An interview is required, and international applicants may complete it online through Vericant, a third-party video interview service. Transcripts not in English must be translated. The application fee is $50 for domestic applicants and $100 for international applicants.

Cost and Financial Aid

For 2026-27 the school publishes boarding tuition of $82,710 and day tuition of $68,060, and states that tuition is inclusive of most fees. More than 30 percent of current families receive need-based grants, and the school says it meets 100 percent of demonstrated need. Aid applications go through the Clarity platform, due January 15 for new families and December 15 for returning families. The tuition page does not state whether international students are eligible for need-based aid, so ask admission directly rather than assuming either way.

For Families in Irvine

Boarding at Lawrenceville means a fourteen-year-old leaving home for a campus on the other side of the country. Day-to-day supervision comes from House faculty, which is why guardianship, break-travel arrangements and an emergency contact plan should be settled before enrollment rather than after. New Jersey runs three hours ahead of California, and school events follow Eastern time. Flights between Orange County and the New York area are transcontinental, and Thanksgiving, winter and spring break tickets belong in the annual budget alongside tuition.

EDUBUS is based in Irvine. We work on school selection, SSAT preparation, essays and interview coaching, scheduling backward from each school’s published deadline. To judge whether boarding fits your family at all, start with private school planning and SSAT preparation.