30-20 Thomson Avenue, Long Island City, NY, 11101
No, Bard High School Early College is not a private school. It is a public early college high school operated through a partnership between Bard College and the New York City Department of Education for New York City residents.
No. While BHSEC Queens shares some characteristics with charter schools, such as autonomy in hiring administrators and faculty, BHSEC Queens operates as a partnership between Bard College and the local public school system. As a college, BHSEC does not use a lottery-based admissions process. BHSEC is governed by a Memorandum of Understanding between Bard College and the NYC DoE.
No, Bard High School Early College Queens is not a specialized school. However, BHSEC is a selective school and all students who apply must meet all of our criteria to be considered for admission.
Through a Memorandum of Understanding between Bard College and the NYC DOE, BHSEC Queens shapes its curriculum, first and foremost, as a rigorous course of study in the liberal arts and sciences that meets Bard College requirements for a general education during the first two years of college. While students take local standardized assessments, those assessments do not drive the Bard curriculum or the material taught in the classroom; to the extent possible, state and local required assessments are given during the 9th and 10th grades so that they do not interfere with the associate in arts degree curriculum taught in the 11th and 12th grades. Students have choice over courses within the academic disciplines offered at Bard: Division of the Arts, Division of Languages and Literature, Division of Mathematics and Sciences, and Division of Social Sciences. Our Fall 2020 course catalogue is available here.
The Bard High School Early College model allows all enrolled students the opportunity to earn an associate in arts degree from Bard College, worth approximately 60 transferable credits, completely free of charge. This saves students and their families up to two years of college tuition, fees, and related costs. While there are additional costs of providing a college program in high school, Bard relies on funding from public and private sources to ensure that costs are not passed on to students and families.
For general information about Bard Early College, click here.
New York City residents. Please check our admissions criteria.
You must register and take our in-person assessment. You must also include our school on your application as one of your 12 choices.
The application is available in your MySchools account. Private and parochial school students should ask their guidance counselor or high school placement counselor for assistance.
The code for the Manhattan campus is M51A and the Code for the Queens campus is Q74B. The code for our newest Bronx school is X49C.
You will only need to fill out the assessment registration and take the assessment once. However, you need to indicate on your assessment that you are applying to all four schools in order to be considered for all. You must also list BHSEC Manhattan, BHSEC Queens, BHSEC Brooklyn, and/or BHSEC Bronx as four separate choices on your DOE High School Application.
There are three parts to the assessment: humanities, math, and an interview.
You may only take the assessment once during the academic school year. If applying to all four campuses, students only need to take the exam one time.
Students will be notified of their interview status 4 weeks after they take their assessment.
Official notification of acceptance to all New York City public high schools is sent by the Department of Education. Notifications will be sent Thursday, March 6th, 2025.
Students who are not accepted to the 9th grade may reapply the following fall for the 10th grade, if space is available. Students who are not accepted to the 10th grade are not eligible to reapply. As a cautionary note, however, very few 10th graders are admitted each year and the number admitted is dependent upon the number of students admitted into the previous 9th grade class.
We welcome students applying to 9th grade to visit our school during the scheduled tours.
Yes. You are not required to visit the school to be considered for admission. We do not give preference to students who attend an open house.
On the website, you can find information about our mission, curriculum, faculty, college office, extra-curricular activities, admissions, and much more.
The DOE system will match students and programs/schools: a student will be matched to only the highest choice school which also accepted that student to its program. Thus, students will not be notified of their acceptance or denial to all 12 schools; they will only know about their highest choice school to which they have been matched. Click here for more information on the DOE high school admission process. We will consider all qualified students regardless of where they rank BHSEC. However, if a student is serious about applying to BHSEC, we encourage her or him to place BHSEC at the top of her or his DOE priority list. It is also important that students meet the DOE’s admissions deadlines. BHSEC cannot consider any student for admissions who does not apply through the DOE and satisfies its application guidelines.
