Schools like Andover, Choate, Lawrenceville, Loomis Chaffee, Peddie could turn themselves into full-pay day schools tomorrow and be just fine if they wished.
Who are the (quality & full-pay) day student candidates at Kent or Deerfield or Blair? Besides few and far between.
For schools in upscale or upscale-ish suburban environs, look for the 2/3 boarding number, so basically somewhere between 65-70%. That’s a sweet spot for squeezing money from the locals and keeping a viable boarding student culture.
Loomis Chaffee has a high day student population–they have attempted to cut it recently, but the money is important. Rough and tough there are as many boarders at Blair as there are at Peddie, though Peddie has more students. When Choate shrank the school, the percentage of day students went down, and now they have that reciprocal faculty perk with Foote sucking up a big chunk of that smaller day student population. Some schools lower on the food chain make do with lots of full-pay day students and full-pay boarders from foreign countries, mostly Asia.
If this stuff is a concern, a key question to ask of any prospective school is when their day students arrive and when they leave. If you get a school where almost all the day students arrive between 7-7:30 am and leave between 9 and 10 at night, chances are you have a pretty integrated student body. If you see a flood of cars leaving before dinner, well, probably not so much.
SMS is a great school. My grandfather, father and brother all went there. My father and brother have been very active alumni. If it were not for the distance, I might have gone as well. The same holds for my kids. When my father and brother attended, the school was nearly all boarding and quite rural but now Southborough is considered to be a suburb of Boston and is experiencing some of the influence that GnarWhail describes above. If they are resisting, that’s great (IMO) but I can imagine that it is tough for a school to pass up very talented students in their backyard.
@Temperantia I had to wait until I could get my hands on my laptop to get to the SMS site (other than the mobile portal on my phone). I see where you got your numbers, so I asked DS on Skype about the percentage and numbers of day vs boarding. He says he thinks it is probably closer to 20% day. And he did confirm the stories of kids boarding because spots are limited for day…so maybe the site is dated…maybe the limited numbers are a new policy… who knows. I agree SMS is a great school that gets little publicity, but they seem to like it that way. Again, I apologize if I seemed contradictory- it wasn’t my intention.
I would say that many of the day students, albeit a small number to begin with, are full pay or near full pay. Don’t forget the five colleges are nearby and employ all sorts of people.