High school outcomes
Occupations Employers Awards Sports

What do high schools' alumni go on to do?

A fingerprint of every US high school Wikipedia knows about, built from what its prominent alumni did with their lives — the occupations, employers, awards, and sports where a school's graduates show up far more often than the typical school's. It's the college outcomes explorer, pointed at high schools.

A caveat up front: Wikipedia's coverage of high schools is thin. Wikidata records a high school for only a small minority of notable Americans, and coverage skews toward well-known schools, athletes, and recent decades. Treat small numbers as anecdotes, not statistics — the tables below enforce minimum counts for exactly that reason.

5,684
high schools with 5+ noted alumni
84,547
people prominent enough for Wikipedia
87,960
person–school links

Schools with the most prominent alumni

Weighted toward people who came of age recently (25-year half-life), so schools that mattered lately rank ahead of ones whose fame peaked a century ago.

SchoolStateNoted alumni
Phillips Exeter Academy New Hampshire
835
Phillips Academy Massachusetts
651
Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School New York
241
Stuyvesant High School New York
304
Beverly Hills High School California
198
Harvard-Westlake School California
118
Professional Children's School New York
157
Interlochen Center for the Arts Michigan
132
DeMatha Catholic High School Maryland
100
Hunter College High School New York
161
Bronx High School of Science New York
201
Long Beach Polytechnic High School California
120
Bishop Gorman High School Nevada
69
St. Thomas Aquinas High School Florida
70
Cass Technical High School Michigan
141
Montverde Academy Florida
48
DeWitt Clinton High School New York
305
Kent School Connecticut
128
Choate Rosemary Hall Connecticut
126
North Hollywood High School California
140
Mater Dei High School California
64
Berkeley High School California
112
St. Albans School
125
Hotchkiss School Connecticut
197
Professional Performing Arts School New York
53
Shattuck-Saint Mary's School Minnesota
72
Northfield Mount Hermon School Massachusetts
117
Notre Dame High School California
78
St. Xavier High School Ohio
99
High School of Art and Design New York
141
Los Angeles County High School for the Arts California
60
Deerfield Academy Massachusetts
140
Scarsdale High School New York
103
Sidwell Friends School
86
Saint Ann's School New York
69
Saint Benedict's Preparatory School New Jersey
62
Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences California
59
Laurel Springs School California
43
Hollywood High School California
174
Susan Miller Dorsey High School California
83
Fairfax High School California
111
Palisades Charter High School California
79
William Howard Taft Charter High School California
70
American Heritage Schools Florida
37
Oak Park High School California
38
Dr. Phillips High School Florida
50
Erasmus Hall High School New York
192
St. Augustine High School Louisiana
60
High School for the Performing and Visual Arts Texas
59
Torrey Pines High School California
48

How this works. We start from Wikidata's "educated at" links for every US secondary school, keep people with at least one Wikipedia article, and compare each school's mix of occupations, employers, awards, and sports against the national mix across all noted high-school alumni. "3×" means the school's noted alumni are three times as likely to have that trait as noted alumni overall. Small schools are shrunk toward the national average so three people can't define a trend.

What this is not. A ranking. Fame on Wikipedia is a biased lens — it favors athletes, entertainers, politicians, and the already-famous — and a high school's noted alumni say as much about its neighborhood, era, and size as about the school itself.