Hi all, thanks for checking out this thread. I hope this does not violate any rules the admins established.
Now down to the real deal. I am an upcoming 11th grader thinking about applying to boarding school for 12th grade. Do y’all think it is feasible? And, what is up with PG? What kind of people apply for it and why they do so? Sorry I am not really educated lol.
Thanks again
From Me
Very very few schools accept applications for 12th grade. Most who apply as current juniors repeat 11th grade. Which makes sense for college applications, since a new 12th grader will unlikely make meaningful contributions to their EC’s, nor be able to get strong recs in 4 months time
PG’s have completed HS and are repeating 12th grade before starting college. They are usually, but not always, athletes who want another year of HS development before playing in college. And again, not all schools accept PG’s.
My daughter originally was looking to apply for 12th grade. A few schools said they allowed applications for 12th but when pushed admitted they had not offered any spots the previous year. She ended up applying as a repeat 11th grader. Got in and is loving it, wishing she had applied sooner.
Adding to what’s said above, while many non-ISL boarding schools will accept applications for 12th grade, it is probably the most difficult pool to be applying through and many years schools won’t even take any one-year seniors. This is for both the school’s sake and the student’s sake–it needs to make sense for both parties. The one-year seniors at the school I went to came for very compelling reasons, like athletics (sport getting cut at their current school and for whatever reason like age or already being held back can’t repeat 11th), family relocation to the area (in that case they’d be a day student), or were an extremely talented student and had quite literally exhausted meaningful courses in the curriculum (this is even rarer, as this is harder to do than one might think). In general, unless you fall into one of these buckets, you probably won’t get in.
Unless you are an athlete, you’ll face similar challenges as a PG applicant. Very few spots are reserved for “normal” applicants, and frankly, it seems like coaches/admissions already have an idea of what their PG class is going to look like even before the application deadline.
Without knowing more of your circumstances (and likely also even if we did), your most viable option is to try to apply as a repeat 11th grader.
Thank you so much for the reply! CC fr an awesome site. Also thanks to Ski and the user above as well.
I got a quick question, so does the admissions office care if I don’t really have a decent reason to repeat? And, I entered school late and if I repeat I might graduate when I am 20:grimacing:
. Does it sound feasible?
In your application, one way or another you’re going to have to articulate why you want to go to boarding school, and you’ll also have to explain why you want to repeat your current grade. If you can’t present good reasons for either, then you probably won’t be admitted.
The age thing is a bit more tricky. In general, the absolute age limit for boarding school seems to be 20 (where I went, that’s what it was), but I am aware of some notable schools that will not accept students who will turn 20 prior to graduation. It varies a lot from school to school, and you’ll have to reach out to each of the places you are looking at to see what their rules are. I can imagine it working against you though since you’d pretty much be the age of a “typical” college sophomore during your last year.
Much of this also depends on what schools you might be looking at, as there is a large amount of variation in the selectivity of boarding schools. If you really want to go to boarding school, you may want to reach out to some places and see if they’d consider a late application for this coming fall.