Where are you getting your numbers?
Nearly 100 schools are listed on the Choate matriculation list of schools where 3 or more students have matriculated in the last 5 years. Your math of suggesting 50% of students end up at top 25-ish schools is simply incorrect.
That is absolutely wrong. The top schools report 5-10% of students are admitted from boarding schools. Even if you want to pull in the Harvard-Westlakes from the “independent school category”, it is far south of 35%.
The term prep actually refers to college preparatory. To wit, Catholic Schools with often have names like Fordham Prep. It has become shorthand for boarding schools over time but as a term of art it includes most private schools, with some notable exceptions.
You can’t really compare admission percentages between prep and public schools. In addition to the points many others made…you can’t assume that the public school kids have the same interest in going to an ivy as the prep school kids. In our town, very few (if any) get admitted to ivies - but very few apply. Guidance counselors encourage applications to schools like Penn State, UKy, UF, Temple, UMaryland, UDelaware, UScranton, UNH, Sacred Heart, Marist, URI, SUNY schools and the local state schools. Some kids go to trade schools but, overall, large state schools with big football culture are the preferred colleges.
Thanks for the vocabulary lesson, but I’m very familiar with the term prep. That’s why I mentioned H-W. The term “elite prep” does not include all prep schools. Even if you sum the % of boarding, independent and religious schools, it is less than 35% at the top colleges. Further apply the term “elite” at your discretion and you are far south of 35%.
35% of Havard class comes from private 25% independents and 10% parochial. That’s actually low compared to some of the other Ivies like Brown where about half the class comes from private with parochial again making up about 10% of that.
I think you main point misses some of the basics of a BS education. That aside, I’d add this. We decided on a BS education for our kids because it was the right fit for them.
We never intended a BS education to be a pipeline into an Ivy league (or any other college). We wanted our kids to be their best selves, to develop their intellectual, spiritual and community interests. And we hoped ( and hope) that their journey will be great.
We opted for BS instead of our highly rated, high public school. It wasn’t easy. But we think we did the right thing. BTW, I have perspective having been very low SES and our family having attended public, private and BS. We love the BS community which is diverse in so many ways. It’s not only kids from every SES level, it’s kids from many countries, perspectives, and states. So very few kids are wearing wide wale corduroys and smoking cigars ;). It’s not the old boys club you might think.
For those who seek the Ivy pipeline, the comparisons are fraught with inaccuracies IMO. Colleges are looking for the best people. Not a subset of GPAs, scores and whatnot. So when you start to make comparisons, it’s a long shot. And there are so many great and wonderful kids and not nearly enough slots.
Since kiddo went to a public middle school in a great school district with loads of legacy parents, I can say confidently that there are plenty of amazing kids in our public high school that will never have a shot at a T20. Kids that are interchangeable with bs kids.
The difference is the amazing resources that are thrown at bs school kids - teachers, classes, extracurriculars, counselors, enrichment opportunities, all easily accessible, no commuting required. Plus the bs environment makes for more independent kids that “can hit the ground running at college”, as said up thread.
Kiddo is no different than the average excellent public school students out there. He is just at a school whose mandate is to maximize the potential of each student, not just to meet certain thresholds. Lucky him.
I am in the camp of bs being an end to itself, and am fine with wherever kiddo ends up for college. He will choose wisely. But I don’t doubt for a second that bs students have an advantage in the elite college game.
It is reasonable to assume this study is correct for the reasons it mentions especially with suburban public schools. In our town, there is a huge percentage of high honors and honor students yet few national merit scholars. The top students usually get admitted to top schools but it falls off very quickly and, IMO the reason for the grade inflation boils down to money, specifically at budget time. It’s not lost on school boards and teachers that asking for more money when the kids are getting less than stellar grades is a non starter in order to attract yes votes on the budget. That, more than where the kids go to college is the driving force IMO, and I realize that not every school system is the same but it sure happens in ours. BTW, we had 2 graduate from suburban public schools and one from BS. The BS grades were far more indicative of actual performance which is a large part of the reason why our 3rd went to BS.
I have no data to support it, but my anecdotal evidence is that grades are much more inflated at prestigious day schools in my city than in the boarding schools that some of those kids end up leaving to attend. It probably varies school to school with BS more than I am aware.
Good grief, I stepped away from my computer for a few hours and this exploded.
Here’s my personal experience. It doesn’t mean much, but it does as much as anyone elses. 4 kids, 3 at LPS, #4 applying for BS, I will have more info in 38 days. If she gets in great, if not she will go to the same LPS her siblings went to.
Kid #1 zero interest in selective colleges, he is exactly where he wants to be. Kid #2 at an Ivy, Kid #3 ED to Amherst this year.
I gotta be honest, I think #4’s best shot at a selective college is NOT boarding school. We are at a HS that sends a few kids to Ivies and other highly selective schools every year. But 98% of the kids I’m pretty sure aren’t going because they aren’t applying. Not that the majority would be qualified, they wouldn’t. But at least one kid in D’s class has a top 1% rank, a bunch of AP’s, a couple extra sememsters of calc beyond what the HS offers that he takes at the local directional U, and a 36 on his ACT. He is headed to a college where he is an auto-admit if he is in the top 50% of his HS class. That is pretty typical. He could be at an Ivy or MIT, but he didn’t apply. That is part of the numbers disparity. These kids either don’t want to go or don’t realize that they can.
Circling back to my family, I’m pretty confident #4 could have a top 1% rank here, and should test well enough that she would be very competitive for selective colleges. Since we are an underrepresented state, and very few kids from her HS will be submitting competing apps, I feel pretty confident she would have good results. If she goes to BS, she will most likely be a very solid student, but NOT a standout one. Largely because most of her classmates would have been standout students at their LPS. If you take the vast majority of your kids from the top 5%, you are going to have a class where the median student would be in the hunt to be valedictorian at a typical HS.
So why are we doing this? Because even though my guess is that it is a slight negative for which college she gets admitted to, it is a huge positive for how well she will be equipped to handle that college. And even more importantly, it will be a much better experience over the next 4 years, both socially and academically.
Students at elite boarding schools engage in serious academic exercises. May not result in the highest standardized test scores, but high standardized test scores is not the mission of these elite prep boarding schools. The depth of analytical thinking required on a daily basis is impressive & lasts for a lifetime.
Fwiw, only about half of kiddo’s class signed up for the test prep class. It does cost extra, but I still would have expected more.
^^Agree with this 100%.
Also, to address an earlier question, Mercersburg switched from Naviance to Maia (sp?) Learning last year. And all students participate in the test prep program; the cost is built into tuition - i.e., no additional cost is billed. It consists of work built into the English classes each year (starting in 9th) and with individual tutoring beginning in 11th, focused on test strengths and weaknesses.
Agree that being the top kid at an LPS will probably be an advantage to the middle of the road kid at an elite BS when applying to top colleges. However, our son went to a middle of the road BS but was a top student there and was accepted to some of the best schools. The quality of teaching was great but I obviously don’t know how it compares to the elite BS. The added benefit of any BS though is that it prepares you better for college life in many ways. College interviewers often make the comment that BS kids don’t suffer that initial shock of being away from home for the first time because Mom and Dad aren’t around to make sure they get up in the morning, feed them, etc. 
“Not sure why people with no experience of boarding schools are so certain they know more about boarding schools than people with actual experience. . .”
Maybe because a person went to one? Maybe because a person has contact with people who have gone to them, more recently? Maybe because a person reads the very data that the boarding school has made public?
But forgive me, people who don’t go to boarding school really don’t know anything…
Are we sure that BS’s have grade inflation? We are already aware that BS’s take the top students across the nation, for the most part (see SSAT scores threads/site). So, if you take the top academic students across the board and throw them into a class- are you saying they suddenly have to be C students? IF they master the material (after all, they were top of their class at middle school), why would you give them a C? Why shouldn’t everyone be able to master the material in a given class if the instructor is competent and doing a good job educating?
When I entered into Dartmouth Medical School my very first day, we were told – look around you. Every single person here has always been at the very top of their class. That will change. It did. Someone was at the bottom of the class when we graduated. But I don’t know of a single one that didn’t master the material they were given to learn, nor a single one that graduated with less than a B+ average. Does that mean Dartmouth inflated grades? Or that they did their job instructing/educating us to learn the material we needed to know to be successful?
I will choose the latter…and my success in residency and board certification would second that.
Hey, I know that guy! His name was Doctor.
Sorry…I couldn’t resist. 
I do know that some BS’s have grade inflation. This comes from my work experience. I have worked with kids who have 95+ averages at certain schools, but can’t write a cohesive essay and/or whose math scores, as well as verbal/vocabulary scores, on standardized testing is average or below. The reality check is when they hit college and can’t keep up with the work, or can’t organize the abstract material of their courses. I do know that many of us on here have kids who go to schools that demand much and that provide the experience of working through college level material.
Recently, I have worked with several college students who (for a variety of reasons) did not get accepted at their target (not reach) schools. They went to schools with higher admin rates or schools that have different admit rates for “in state” students. Several of these students were miserable because the tell me the college courses were “too basic”, “kids were not serious students”, “school had too much of a party atmosphere”, “courses were not as challenging as BS”, or they were “too bored by classes”. For some students who have attended BS, college is actually a let-down in different ways. As I have shared before, I believe that boarding school is more “collegiate” than many colleges are today.
+1000 for college preparedness as the reason to go/send your kids to BS.
I remember when I got to college and academically hit the wall. Hard. I’d coasted to a top ranking and grades/scores at a local high school, expending zero effort along the way and thus developing nothing but bad habits. But it got me into Dartmouth.
I’ll never forget when I finally connected the dots between the kids around me at college who very obviously had hit the ground running with their high schools listed in the face book. I’d never heard of Choate Rosemary Hall, Deerfield, Andover, Exeter…any of them. But it sure made an impression on me. Those kids already knew how to do college when they got there.