Phillips Exeter Academy in the context of "Need-blind admission"

A private school or independent school is a school not administered or funded by the government, unlike a public school. Private schools are schools that are not dependent upon national or local government to finance their financial endowment. Unless privately owned they typically have a board of governors and have a system of governance that ensures their independent operation.

Private schools retain the right to select their students and are funded in whole or in part by charging their students for tuition, rather than relying on taxation through public (government) funding; at some private schools students may be eligible for a scholarship, lowering this tuition fee, dependent on a student's talents or abilities (e.g., sports scholarship, art scholarship, academic scholarship), need for financial aid, or tax credit scholarships that might be available. Roughly one in 10 U.S. families have chosen to enroll their children in private school for the past century.

Lewis Cass (October 9, 1782 – June 17, 1866) was a United States Army officer and politician. He represented Michigan in the United States Senate and served in the Cabinets of two U.S. Presidents, Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan. He was also the 1848 Democratic presidential nominee. A slave owner himself, he was a leading spokesman for the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which at the time held the idea that people in each U.S state should have the right to decide whether to permit slavery as a matter of states' rights.

Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, he attended Phillips Exeter Academy before establishing a legal practice in Zanesville, Ohio. After serving in the Ohio House of Representatives, he was appointed as a U.S. Marshal. Cass also joined the Freemasons and eventually co-founded the Grand Lodge of Michigan. He fought at the Battle of the Thames in the War of 1812 and was appointed to govern Michigan Territory in 1813. He negotiated treaties with American tribes to open land for American settlement as part of a belief in "manifest destiny" and led a survey expedition into the northwest part of the territory.

Dennis Lee Johnson (November 19, 1938 – December 20, 2018) was a mathematician and minimal composer. He is the namesake of the Johnson homomorphism in the study of mapping class groups of surfaces.

Johnson’s early talent for mathematics earned him a full scholarship to the Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, where he completed high school. He enrolled to study mathematics at the California Institute of Technology in 1956. But after a year he became disillusioned, and although he had studied the piano only casually as a child, he decided to transfer to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to study music.

Exeter is a town in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, United States. Its population was 16,049 at the 2020 census, up from 14,306 at the 2010 census. Exeter was the county seat until 1997, when county offices were moved to neighboring Brentwood. Home to Phillips Exeter Academy, a private university-preparatory school, Exeter is situated where the Exeter River becomes the tidal Squamscott River.

The urban center of town, where 10,109 people resided at the 2020 census, is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as the Exeter census-designated place.