The demographics of Chicago’s elite private schools

At a recent kids’ concert I saw this flyer from Francis W. Parker School that highlighted its demographic diversity:

That got me curious about the ethnic and racial composition of Chicago’s three elite private schools – Parker in Lincoln Park, UChicago’s Laboratory Schools in Hyde Park, and Latin School of Chicago in the Gold Coast.

These certainly aren’t the only desirable schools in Chicago – some public neighborhood schools (my own kids attend a CPS neighborhood school) and especially selective enrollment programs and parochial schools are also hotly sought-after – but they do seem to be in a class of their own in terms of prestige. The backgrounds of the families sending their kids to these schools can tell us important things about the city’s socio-economic elite (though it’s also the case that plenty of these students attend with financial aid, so not a perfect mapping).

Below is a chart I made comparing Chicago’s ~2020 demographic makeup with the numbers reported by Parker, Lab, and Latin; these are city-wide schools so a city-wide comparison seems like the right starting point. It’s important to note a caveat that how the Census counts these categories may be different than how schools report them [also, no, I don’t know why the Parker flyer offers slightly different data than its website, but I used the latter because it says it’s the 2024-25 student body].

	Chicago	Latin	Lab	Parker
White	31	54	39	50
Hispanic	30	9	5	8
Black	29	6	9	9
Asian	7	15	19	10
Multi-Racial	3	14	19	17
Unspecified or other		2	7	6

For each school, I bolded the categories that are over-represented compared to the all-Chicago averages, and italicized those that are under-represented (they are the same across the schools). Again, there are caveats about possible differences between school and Census measures of identification (plus a couple have a decent % of Unspecified/Declined to Specify/various other categories), but the basic finding feels pretty plausible given what we know about wealth and race/ethnicity in Chicago.