It’s not your typical public high school experience but most kids are very happy and I don’t think they feel like they are missing out. Each student does have control over how much they want to excel/study. You don’t need to be pushing for the top of your BS if you don’t want to. My nieces/nephews who went to public HS felt tons of pressure, too, if not more because there was much more focus on class rank and GPA than my kids felt at BS. All of them could spend 3-4 hours per day on homework.
At BS, you live with friends, have activities and dances on the weekends, you play on teams with friends, and eat with friends. You talk about the typical goofy teenager stuff but have intellectual conversations, too. If that’s an atmosphere that appeals to you, than how are you missing out?
I attended a comparable prep school (think Trinity, Horace mann, Collegiate etc) not too long ago and had friends who attended Andover and Lawrenceville. It is very competitive but also an amazing preparation for college and life in general, if you are tough enough to make it through. The HYPS chase mentioned above is a very real thing, mainly due to peer and parental pressure. Most students in the top 20% of the class have a HYPS or bust mentality during freshman, sophomore, early junior year but the bubble is burst by mid to late junior year. Some find out that they will have to make do with non-HYP ivies ( oh the horror…) and some end up having to make do with a non-ivy/ivy-equivalent altogether (oh the even bigger horror…). LOL. Not gonna lie, I enjoyed my time there and my HS really prepped me for the rigors of a top college BUT these places can become hyper-competitive and ultra-elitist bubbles, so it is important not to lose perspective while you are in it.
There are two sides to the coin, @cardhastle. If DC were in a local school, DC would feel like they were missing out on the chance to experience high school in a way that relatively few do and missing out on the chance to grow and learn among and from an impressive and diverse group of peers. Importantly, none of the kids are going through this process alone; each is surrounded by other kids who are going through this experience with them. And I’ve never met a kid who doesn’t want to have fun (though what is regarded as fun varies in any population of kids).
I think it really is a personal choice, and I think the kids who attend should be informed about the challenges but still really want to be there. We talk a lot about “fit” on these boards, and to my mind, there are at least two levels to fit–whether boarding school in general is a good fit, and then, which school is a good fit for a given student. Everybody wants to find their people, and for some kids, they are more likely to find their people in a boarding or similar environment than if they stayed at home.