<p>agree with goaliedad, very well stated</p>
<p>Just to add, we are already seeing some of the benefits goaliedad is suggesting will come from BS. My son recently refused any help with a writing assignment (you know the 5 paragraph essay). Typically I would offer to do some light editing, looking for spelling or punctuation, grammatical errors (that sort) etc. He said “no thanks,” he’d better start getting used to the idea of doing it for himself…maybe allow some peer editing only. He was so thrilled with himself when he came home with his graded paper. Now, these days he’s already made the switch. My main job is to keep providing the hot meals and a quiet work space. And I’m likin’ that! I think the blossoming has already started.</p>
<p>Exie, you believe what you believe and I believe in what I do, which is that a top BS should be a combination of high quality of education, ‘phenominal transformative’ experience, and the right college outcomes. College may not be on the top of that list but it is part of the equation.</p>
<p>Benley, what happens if your child isn’t accepted to an elite college?</p>
<p>redbluegoldgreen, you ask, " is it worth $200K just to put him with other kids who have a love of learning? " For our eldest child, yes, it is. Our public schools expect advanced students to tutor other students during class time. Oddly enough, our eldest does not resent the special needs students, as they usually are working very hard. That respect does not extend to the students who could do the work, but choose not to. It is a tremendous gift to allow our child the gift of challenging academic material, presented at a challenging pace. 12 students in a class, rather than 25 to 30, makes a huge difference.</p>
<p>How are you defining “college admission chances?” In my opinion, a student with respectable SAT scores, whose parents can pay full tuition, will be accepted to many good colleges. Especially in this economy, colleges need to pay their bills, too. </p>
<p>How do you know that your local public school is a great school? College matriculation is a terrible yardstick by which to measure any school. Our local public high school is rumored to have garnered some Ivy admissions in the early rounds–but it’s also rumored that the students who were accepted are star athletes. Unless you know the accepted students well, for any school, you can’t interpret college admissions results with any accuracy. Thus, in my opinion, it’s best to aim for the best high school experience available, however you wish to define that for each student, and let the chips fall where they may.</p>
<p>Well, first of all, to me elite colleges are not just HYP, but they are not just any school he got admitted and labeled with a “fit” either. The 4 years of high school is a dynamic process. Where he is academically, how much effort he is making and what passions and capabilities he has developed will determine the expectations. If, in the end, it becomes clear that a boarding school does become the “bottleneck”, e.g. recruited athelets, URMs, and other special cases take up all the “spots” and not only my child but many other students of stronger capabilities and qualifications (to reduce the randomness factor) get turned down, I would be unhappy about the college outcomes. I may still find that balance point because of the education of high quality and the transformative experience my child has received, but I wouldn’t exaggerate and make it sound like perfect. Fair?</p>
<p>First - there is no bottleneck. That’s the problem with trying to read into stats. After a while it just sounds like making an excuse for why “so and so” didn’t get in.</p>
<p>They just weren’t that “into that kid” period. A lot of good athletes, scholars, URM’s, international, legacies don’t “get in”. More are left out then get in. Which is why it is a problem for parents looking for a “pipeline.”</p>
<p>Note: More often than not, a good student’s chances are actually hurt by an overly involved parent (well meaning, but with misplaced priorities). It makes Adcoms wonder whose goal a college is - parent or student?</p>
<p>The decision to send a child to boarding school is a personal one. But I’ve been following the threads for a while - a long time before I posted, and I know from personal experience there are a lot of people who believe their children would not have advantages any other way who pin their hopes and dreams and “paychecks” on the wrong goal.</p>
<p>I have seen kids try to commit suicide or drop out at boarding schools because they weren’t allowed to fail, or live in the moment. They were pressured to constantly think about the goal. And the goal never changed even if the student did.</p>
<p>I saw parents vote with their checkbooks instead of their hearts and try to micromanage a process that doesn’t need to be managed.</p>
<p>Do I think my daughter will get a better education at her new school? Yes - because she will be in a class of 12 not a class of 33. Because the teacher’s have time to focus on her as a whole child. And because she’s ready, she wants it, and she’ll think about college later. Because she’s already had exposure to the other PS benefits and wants more.</p>
<p>One need only look at the stress caused on the thread about the kid whose parents were pressuring her to double up on science in order to get into a good school. You only need to look at kids who are made to feel like failures because they didn’t get into their top choice (or any choice) given the odds are so low.</p>
<p>Boarding schools cherry pick the students they want. It’s a seller’s market. And every year the climate changes. One kid can get in this year, but not another.</p>
<p>So I worry - more than anything - that those of us who have gone through the process (there are many BS alums and parents on the boards) and come out the other end, get challenged by parents who want to believe in pipe dreams and fantasies. That despite three decades of interview and Adcom work, and living with another Adcom people will still claim some vast superior knowledge of the system based only on limited published information. </p>
<p>Let’s face it - it’s an Adcom’s job to “whip parents into a frenzy with false hopes and meaningless stats” knowing that it will reject the vast majority of them even if they are qualified. And it will make those that got in feel blessed and annointed.</p>
<p>I don’t run that way. I don’t give false hope, or encourage rote adherence to a bunch of statistics that may or may not apply to the person reading them. It’s a lot of money and a lot of wasted years if you are there hoping for a rainbow and a pot of gold at the end.</p>
<p>Even Exeter’s viewbook has an entire page devoted to not all kids want or get into Ivy’s. Because they’ve heard it all, and like me are kind of sick of that being the focus. It breeds a certain type of applicant who may be very disappointed at the end when the IVY’s aren’t knocking down their doors to admit them. </p>
<p>I feel lucky to have choices for my daughter. But we’re going to something immediate. The future will take care of itself whether it be an IVY college or a state college or some other path in life.</p>
<p>from Periwinkle: <<how do=“” you=“” know=“” that=“” your=“” local=“” public=“” school=“” is=“” a=“” great=“” school?=“” college=“” matriculation=“” terrible=“” yardstick=“” by=“” which=“” to=“” measure=“” any=“” school.=“” our=“” high=“” rumored=“” have=“” garnered=“” some=“” ivy=“” admissions=“” in=“” the=“” early=“” rounds–but=“” it’s=“” also=“” students=“” who=“” were=“” accepted=“” are=“” star=“” athletes.=“”>></how></p>
<p>College matriculation is at least one yardstick; others include our PS students consisently (for years) score the highest SAT scores in the state of Massachusetts on the SAT in Math. We also have lots of enrichment programs paid for by parents who earn on average 7 figure incomes, yep that’s right 7 not 6. The average cost of a home in our town is $1M and parents give freely and have a very organized approach for fundraising to support poets in residence programs, writing workshops, author visits etc. We also have an Olympic sized (?) pool at the middle school which boasts a champion swim team, a town crew team, and an observatory. Most of our kids take private music lessons at the town’s day prep school and then compete for state districts from their public school. It IS missing though diversity for my minority kids who frequently are the only Asian kids in their respective classrooms and a sense that being smart is cool. I will grant you though that the stats about getting into ivies are opaque. It’s quite possible that many are athletes with hooks. It’s also possible looking at it from the other side that the percent of kids getting into ivies from our PS is artificially low because it includes all the kids who go to that public school, not a subset of self-selected high achievers similar to ones that go to prep schools. In other words, if you only looked at that group of students, maybe the stats are similar to prep schools.</p>
<p>Exie, I guess some of us may be curious. Did your daughter in the end choose Governor’s or Taft? If you can say, or even if you can’t specify, can you say what made the school she chose the best fit for her?</p>
<p>She chose Taft. Hardest decision she’s ever made and I watched her really think hard about it for days after the revisits. Harder since people at the other schools were campaigning hard and both did personal outreach.</p>
<p>Taft seemed to be a good mix of Andover’s rigor and Governor’s small size and hands-on nurturing. It came down to fit and gut feel.</p>
<p>She talked to former summer school classmates who are now currently at each of the three schools and gathered opinions from people she trusted. All loved their schools (and many warned her away from mine - lol!)</p>
<p>So no science - in the end I tried to get specifics, but she just kept saying Taft felt “like the best fit”. My husband is an Adcom and sat in on classes and was impressed with the rigor. She stayed late for Latin and loved it. Spent time in the dorm getting to know other girls and said when students in the hallway saw her class “year” on her badge she was immediately welcomed as “one of us”. Good enough for me. I could tell that she loved it starting with the interview visit but had to keep my mouth shut because she wanted no interference from me.</p>
<p>We are quite happy with the outcome. But we would have been happy at any of the others as well. My husband sent me a text during the revisit that said "The way I see it, she can’t lose no matter which of the schools she chooses.</p>
<p>Amen!</p>
<p>Exie and redbluegoldgreen, I found your posts very interesting.</p>
<p>Redbluegoldgreen (exie, your abbreviation RBG2 was so cool! I wish I have that imagination), I’d ask myself the same questions even though we did not have to pay a dollar (my daughter received a merit based fin.aid). So, I believe the questions that you raised are even deeper than just “is it worth 200K”. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>BS and college admission.
I would probably be that person honestly NOT voting for “ivy league college education as the BS outcome” due to our specific case. My daughter was entering a BS in an 11th grade – a challenging setting. At that moment, realistically, she already had very good chances to get into top colleges: USAMO qualifier, research on Number Theory with Harvard professor whom she met at MathCamp, letter of recommendation from Stanford professor, in sport she competed on national level … I don’t want (at least not at this time) to brag, but I just try to support my statement that leaving a good public school (by good I mean that every year they send a fair number of students to the top ten universities) and entering a new BS in 11th grade being only 15 was a risky decision for us from future college admission point of view. Clearly, not everyone entering a BS is increasing his or her college chances. But some probably do.</p></li>
<li><p>The main value of BS experience in our case.
Then why we allowed our daughter to undertake that risk? Because she wanted diverse and intellectual environment that we actually had in CA, and that she just did not find at her new public high school in AZ. She did find that unique environment in her BS, no questions. So, that was a clear “win” to her – her friends, including a lot of international students. Again, just to avoid unnecessary comments – we came from Europe ten years ago and my daughter mainly grew up in US and never attended foreign schools.</p></li>
<li><p>Academic rigor. This part probably will be the most controversial one.
When you are a mature and independent person with a strong passion for say poetry, or theater, or math you would prefer to spend your time on that passion, and just do well in other subjects. Now, in most BS kids are smart, and very motivated to get high GPAs and to succeed in ALL subjects, and… to go to a good college. I just think that it is very hard to succeed in all subjects while spending a lot of time on your passion. Somehow my daughter managed to get good grades in all classes, but I feel that she was not very happy with that (her own) choice (choice or necessity… given overall competitiveness and student’s sense of self-esteem?) to compete for grades and to succeed in every class. Being extremely busy and sometimes stressed does not mean being in “love with learning”; it’s very far from “love”. This is why I assumed in my initial post that a person with strong interest/passion might do at least as well in a good/diverse public school simply having more time to spend on their intrinsic interests. How to keep that “love” and do not spoil that with grades obsession? I frankly don’t know the answer. But my older daughter, a college senior, always used to call me a few minutes before her most difficult exams just to hear me saying “Don’t worry, your grades don’t matter”. This was our secret ritual. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Finally, in our case there is something else what unexpectedly turned out to be a very positive BS experience. My concern about my BS daughter was that she was a sort of too rational, too ambitioned, too determined to succeed. I knew that she was smart, but I also wanted to see a unique personality and an open-minded person. This year she applied to colleges; and was lucky to get accepted to many good schools. So, when her choices were narrowed down to Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford, she told us that she does want to work hard and to explore new subjects, but she does not want to talk/think about grades all time, and she does not want to be driven only by “prestige”, so probably she would choose Stanford (her sister is graduating from Princeton this year being quite successful with research/job/grad schools admission, so she decided to try her own way and to attend a different school; other than that we have a very positive experience with Princeton). I’m personally very happy with this transformation in my daughter; this was something that I did not expect at all.</p>
<p>I’m glad that your daughter had a happy outcome, Mashaa, but with all due respect I can’t see Stanford as being even an iota less prestigious than Princeton or Harvard.</p>
<p>I’m glad that you said that. But our D faced a lot of peer pressure to choose Harvard exactly because of prestige. I’m not talking about our own perception, but “overall perception”.</p>
<p>which BS did she attend?</p>
<p>she is a senior in andover</p>
<p>mashaa, I agree that your daughter’s success in college admission had little to do with the school she attended. She was already very ready before entering her 11th grade at the BS. Many students might be in the same boat as her in terms of motivation, maturity and goal setting, but her advantage in awards, research projects, etc. pretty much set her one foot in the door already. As long as she kept good grades in any school she should be a shoo in to the highly selective colleges. So, she actually gained some different experience by attending the BS without losing anything major (except - maybe some sleep and a little “happiness”?). Congrats on her achievement and to you for a job well done as parents!</p>
<p>Did she apply as an international student? How do the colleges define international students nowadays? Doesn’t having a green card (if she does) make her domestic? Any difference did her being internationl make?</p>
<p>yes, she is international, at the moment when she applied to colleges she did not have a green card, and she was a citizen of another country. i’m not sure how colleges define internationals (nonresident and/or noncitizen?), but i know that addmission rates for internationals are very different (for example, MIT admission rate for int. is around 3-4% or something like that).</p>
<p>It’s hard to get into Harvard undergrad (all the prestige). Not that hard to get out. :-)</p>
<p>Good point, we forgot to consider this at all. But some time ago i chose uc berkeley for my phd degree (hard to get out) instead of uchicago (much stronger in my area, but not that hard to get out) exactly for this reason; at least i was able to finish my dissertation while having three kids (my youngest one was born right after my first midterm; I was taking an exam and my husband was waiting in a car outside)… I miss berkeley so much, we had unbelievable 5 years there. But this is not really related to the topic, sorry.</p>
<p>mashaa, just sent you a PM.</p>