Son applied to 2 GLADCHEMMS (accepted at one, waitlisted at the other) and three other schools that focus on his EC (accepted at all). We are leaning away from GLADCHEMMS acceptance. Cultural adjustment will be major nowhere Jr. attends (we don’t live in NE). Our experience with first child (attending local private day school) has been that being a relatively large fish in relatively small pond has lots of advantages.
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For those who thrive on consistently high pressure at a young age, GLADCHEMMS are right up his/her alley, but for everyone else, there appear to be lots and lots of kids who get lost in the shuffle based on a review of college matriculations at all of the GLADCHEMMS.
Point: high school is not the end game, but one step in the process. What am I missing?
Nothing! Neither of my two older kids chose the most competitive school to which they were admitted. They both went on to have strong HS records and have both been admitted to a school that would have been a stretch even if they had attended the prep schools everyone was telling us we couldn’t possibly turn down but did.
Choose the school that’s right for your child. What’s the point of making them unhappy for 4 years in the vague hope that they’ll get into a better college?
Thank you for this post. We are about to send contract in to a boarding school which we feel is the best fit for our son. His SSAT score is 25 percentile points higher than the average admit score and he was admitted to more selective schools but on revisit day this school felt just right to all of us.
@Sue22 I agree that every student and family should find the best fit, but I don’t really understand what you mean by “lots of kids who get lost in the shuffle based on a review of college matriculations”?
@TheStig2, that was from Helmetsport, the OP, not me, so I’ll leave it up to him/her to explain.
I’m not sure I see a lot of kids at top boarding schools getting “lost in the shuffle”. These schools work hard to stay connected to the kids in their care, and their college matriculations are strong. But that doesn’t that all kids thrive at super competitive prep schools. I live in a community that sends a lot of kids to such schools, so I’ve heard both sides-kids who feel truly challenged for the first time and happily rise to the challenge, and kids who feel ground down by 4 years of slogging. I remember discussing college results with the mother of a kid at a GLADCHEMMS school. My child had just been accepted to a school ranked higher than the one to which hers had just been wait listed. I understood her disappointment for her child, but when she said, “We went through 4 years of hell at [GLADCHEMMS school] for this?” I reflected that her feelings were so different from mine about my child’s high school experience. Even if he’d ended up at his safety school I would have felt that mine had had a wonderful high school experience. His time at a lower-stress school gave him the room to grow and explore his interests, among them one that became a true passion. I know that’s a phrase that’s overused here but in his case it’s true. It’s probably what he’ll end up doing as a career.
We had the chance to send him to a GLADCHEMMS-level day school, but chose not to, thinking he’d probably be miserable. It’s a great school, just not a great school for a kid like mine. His best friend went there…and dropped out to return to the local public school before the year was out.
