Within the city proper, the 168-year-old St. Louis Public School District controls the many schools in the public school system. With more than 38,000 students, the district is the largest in the state of Missouri and the 108th largest in the nation. The district consists of 55 elementary schools, 20 middle schools, and 17 high schools, as well as 5 special schools, and a large selection of magnet and early childhood schools, Many smaller public districts are defined throughout the wider St. Louis area. The MAP, or Missouri Assessment Program, is a system of standardized tests which students take yearly; not so much a measure of students' individual aptitude as an overall assessment of their schools and districts, scores are used as indicators of the institutions' efficiency, and many factors, especially distribution of public funds, are determined based on student performance.
St. Louis also has over 150 private schools both secular and religiously affiliated, including a multitude of Catholic schools. The St. Louis Metropolitan area has the largest amount of Catholic High Schools in the nation, and a host of other denominational secondary private schools. The city holds approximately 10 private preschools, 90 elementary-middle schools (Grades pre/kindergarten to eight), 11 schools covering the full grade range from pre/kindergarten to grade 12, 40 high schools, and many more schools of varying grade ranges and focuses, including the Moog Center for Deaf Education.
Almost 209,000 students are enrolled in the nearly 40 colleges, universities and technical schools that call the St. Louis, Missouri area home. Washington University in St. Louis is one of the top research universities in the nation, internationally known for its schools of Medicine, Architecture, Social Work and Law. In 2006, almost a third of the associates degrees granted to students came from the St. Louis Community Colleges. As the largest community college system in the state of Missouri, more than half of the households in St. Louis have at least one member who attended or attends the college. The University of Missouri-St. Louis is the major comprehensive public university in Greater St. Louis and more than 20 percent of all St. Louis area residents with a bachelor degree attended UM-St. Louis. The city has a diverse range of other institutions of higher learning, including the Jesuit Catholic Saint Louis University, which is the oldest university west of the Mississippi, and Concordia Seminary, which is one of the primary Lutheran seminaries. |