Optimal Size of a Boarding School . . .

@ChoatieMom @payn4ward Given the experience of their peer schools, I think that making the school smaller would be a fantastic thing for Choate. Not sure why they didn’t do it years ago when they made the initial drop from the 1100 or so students. I understand they used consultants and other “experts” to decide on the size. Reducing the size of the school will probably mean cutting those long-commute day students; fewer students would bump up the endowment per student as well. St. Paul’s, Hotchkiss, Deerfield, NMH are pointing the way.

@Gnarwhal: reading all of your posts and your PMs, you have a definite bias against day students with long commutes. Let each family make their own decisions. My DD has a friend from Kenya who would commute 2 HOURS to get to his school in Kenya. All over the world, concerned, loving parents are doing what they can for their kids. HURRAY! Let parents make their OWN choices.

I have no ‘bias against day students with long commutes’ but I do think it’s a sign of weakness on the part of any school allowing such absurd commutes. Choate is not in the middle of a 10,000 square kilometers of barren scrub, and as I said before, those long commuters almost certainly drive right by excellent, expensive, private, fancy, schmancy schools much closer to their houses. Parents can do what they want. Good for them; their awards are in the mail. But when Choate makes the school smaller to compete better with Deerfield, it is highly unlikely they will reduce the number of boarding students since they already have the beds. When Choate is in a position to cut the number of full-pay day students, that is a great day for Choate–not because I hate day students or parents or schoolkids in Kenya but because it will be a sign that Choate is finally growing the endowment.

A two-hour commute to school in the rain both ways up hill with bare feet is not the standard by which we should be judging elite boarding schools in the US.

Huh? Why would any school care about anyone’s commute times? That is solely a family decision. Commute time is not an admissions selection metric and has no reflection on the strength or weakness of Choate or any other BS.

Choate is not reducing its student population to compete better with Deerfield – where in the world did you hear that? The school is considering a reduction to right-size the student population for its revised campus and education goals which were not developed with Deerfield in mind.

i personally think schools with high endowment/student should gradually increase enrollment somewhat. They are too exclusive as they stand now. It’s a waste of resources including acres and acres land reserved for the campus. Obviously, we shouldn’t expect them to become huge but to educate a few more within reason may not be a bad idea. The smallness may indeed be some schools’ selling point and some consumers’ cup of tea, but come on isn’t it a bit excessive? Groton and SPS, I am talking about you!

SPS won’t be increasing enrollment. It’s limited by the number of seats in chapel and the morning chapel 4x a week, which serves as a community wide connection and school meeting, is a very important part of school and community life. Also, when you take into consideration that all faculty and there families live on campus as it is a 100% residential community, it really isn’t that big. Think of it as a small town as much as a school.

I’m not sure why you find it excessive, @panpacific? Yes, the school has a few thousand acres but many are kept as conservation land, including land used by the Audubon Society so it even benefits people in the broader Concord and NH community.

Regarding Choate, I could not disagree more. It is absolutely the in the best interest of a truly elite school to care about idiotic commutes for their day students. A school with sufficient resources would not need to take so many day students as essentially free money. Commute time is absolutely an admission metric, just as overall day student percentage is a measure of a school’s financial strength. I completely understand if you take something said about your kids’ school personally–it’s human nature–but that doesn’t change reality. And it really shouldn’t matter. Either somebody’s kid had a good overall experience at a school or not no matter what anyone else might say about the school for good or for ill. The financial standing of a school and the behind-closed-doors reputations amognst the peer schools in this tiny world are NOT the most important considerations for students or families, nor should they be.

Also, Choate is also absolutely attempting to get smaller and richer to compete with Deerfield especially. Yes, CRH is competing with the other top schools, but Deerfield’s the worst for them. At one time in the Choate/Deerfield rivalry, Deerfield was a dump, drab and tired, and no boy in their right mind would choose Deerfield over Choate. But then Deerfield got with the coed program, starting soaking up all that lovely alumni money, and poof! Now Choate is lagging behind in the endowment race and has been on a profligate building spree to get back in the facilities arms race, which is great for the students and teachers and whatnot. Right-size? I got nothin’ for that. The reality is that every step is taken with the rival schools in mind every time. A school may use phrases like “right-size” and “campus goals” but the truth of the matter is that they are competing for a very small number of applicants. Now I’m not contending that every decision is right or wise or timely, but the boarding school world is small and the elite boarding school world is smaller still.

Choate has an endowment problem and has since the merger. We know they took the school from 1100ish students to 850ish to make the operation more manageable. Much work has been done for many years behind the scenes at Choate–and sometimes not so behind!–to raise that endowment level, and they have been somewhat successful, though not anywhere close to their goal. That’s one reason why Shanahan’s obscene bonus a few years back caused such heartache–and outrage–for some of the people working their tails off the hardest to raise the money just to have it wasted in such a tacky way. Word gets around! On the other hand, Choate benefits greatly from its legacy as one of the most elite prep schools from way back, so even if they are not as flush as their rivals, they are in no danger of having to sell off chunks of the campus to stay in business.

I also gotta say that SPS is not a small school. 550 students is right there in the Goldilocks Zone where the livin’ is so fine. Groton, well, Groton has always been Groton, and they have no desire to change. Groton’s always been that other school, as elite as they come, but not one of the big schools, sort of sideways from the other top players. And they like that. The legacy of Groton is a massive strength. If they lose some applicants, some families, some new history because of the size, because of the (probably mistaken) perception of a dearth of certain opportunities, so what? It’s working for 'em. And the industry insider reputation of Groton is second to none.

@GnarWhail I don’t have a dog in this hunt, but you sure do act like you’re the only one with a take on reality. Off-putting.

@panpacific and @doschicos, it’s the same thing with Groton. It’s hard enough to find seats in Chapel as is, and kids who’ve been here for years say the dining hall lines are excessive.

I take nothing personally, @GnarWhail, but I sat on the Parent Advisory Council at Choate for three years, and I can tell you with confidence that if Choate is looking to surpass any of the other schools, it’s looking higher up the rung. But the new master plan is more about re-inventing what it means to live and learn sucessfully in these information-rich times and how to equip socially conscious students to succeed and fail purposefully. The focus is inward on the student experience with an eye outward toward becoming a new kind of boarding school, one more relevant for our time. The headmaster is not looking to generate “more of the traditional same,” but to build a new paradigm for students and families who may be looking for something different than what can be found elsewhere. There is a new vibe at Choate; it is attempting to separate itself from the pack and feels that it will accomplish this best with a smaller student population. But, last I heard, this reduction would take the school down only about 50 slots, to around 800.

In three years of council meetings, I never once heard a discussion, negative or positive, of the day-student population.

I have been curious in general about people’s feelings regarding “percent boarders.” When I first thought about bs I assumed the higher that number the better. I was thinking partially in terms of the schools ability to monitor what is going on with the students. Then I have heard about the contribution of day students to the vibe of the school that they add something extra just as international students do. Of course there is no right or wrong view hear just curious for the insiders real life view of how day students can add or detract.

I am not suggesting any school to just increase their enrollment overnight without infrastructure updates. Obviously, it’s not about logistics but about missions/philosophies of school administration and board memebers. And it’s a higher order because nowadays these schools don’t rely on tuition revenue to run so they need to find other motivations to expand access.

Schools like Choate and NMH are not super rich in the first place. They did try a bigger school model and it didn’t work so well so they scaled back. Even so their FA programs for example are noticebly not as good as some industry forerunners.

@ThacherParent Thanks so much! I’ll be sure to make a note that. Right there!

@ChoatieMom I’m very glad for you. Really. That parent advisory thing has made you feel really great about the school and has probably done much to keep you involved in the “community” after your children are rotated out. And that is exactly what it is supposed to do. Is it reality? Some would say no. Some would say it is all about making people feel good about the school. Maybe they’re wrong. Or not. But what the parent advisory council thinks and what the administration thinks and what the folks who do the teaching think are usually three disparate things. In general, the last people to get the truth on anything are the parents. They pay the bills, after all!

All the “information rich” “inward on the student experience” “new kind of boarding school” “new paradigm” is nonsense.

The only “new vibe” at Choate–or any of these schools–came when they started admitting girls and made the first clumsy attempts to choose more kids who were not complete dullards. Not to be reductive, I agree that was a patented BIG DEAL to actually turn away some of the traditional students and bring in a more diverse student body who were smarter than the average high school kid even if they needed financial aid. In fact that was THE big deal which turned these schools into the things we all love so much. But that was 1970 rough and tough, so any talk of new vibes is marketing speak and has no basis in reality.

Not to say all these schools are alike in every way. They are not, but gosh it is a startlingly small bubble universe that we are discussing.

Frankly, in 2015, Choate would do well to match Deerfield in anything. Especially the endowment per student, but we’ve been there before. If the administration is telling their staff or their parents that they are “aiming higher”, well, I’m sure everyone wishes them luck. But I wouldn’t believe it for a second.

800 students makes sense for Choate with their boarding capacity, but 800 students does not do what they need to get done, but, as I said, all decisions are not necessarily smart or wise or timely. I understand why they floated at 850ish for so long, but I do not think it’s a great spot to be in given the situation at Choate.

In some ways, many ways, this genteel, historic, privileged, elite boarding school universe is a nasty and petty cutthroat business, and the people in it the universe are wicked far from being saints. Choate has much going for it, but they are in brutal competition with four–now five–top schools (and Groton, sorta) for a particular, small cohort of students. The school which has done the most to improve its lot in this last generation is that new number five, Deerfield. Don’t think that everyone in Wallingford and Lakeville and Concord and Exeter and Andover doesn’t understand exactly that.

What is impressive–and a sign of vitality at Choate–is the way the parents and students defend their school from any and all criticism, with all the umbrage and poutrage any girl could ever want! Choate is a great school, and I know that many kids love it and that many parents are proud of those kids. But Choate’s strong enough to survive some criticism and doesn’t require such a spasm of resentment when someone fails to properly worship the power and the glory of a new paradigm inward focused information rich relevance for the 21st century. The folks in charge at Choate understand what’s what; at least some of them do. They are the people working hard, and they know the stakes. And they’re not kidding themselves about where they stand.

@sadieshadow Day students often represent free money to the schools. After all, day students don’t require dorms or any of the other expenditures desperately needed to keep the boarders present and accounted for, but they come with checks pinned to their mittens just like the faraway kids.

In general, the smaller the percentage of day students, the better the financial situation at the school, and the more selective the school. (We’re not talking “school culture” or “vibe” or “school spirit” or “cohesiveness” because those things are way subjective, often to the point of absurdity.) But there’s always a but…

One key difference in boarding/day percentages is the location of the school. If your school is sufficiently isolated, you simply don’t have all the kids with checks pinned to mittens to pick from and naturally have a lower percentage of day students, but if your school is in a wealthy suburban area, you can pick a truly diverse group of eager, self-selected, homogeneous, full-pay, upper-class day students from right in your back yard.

The people who love day students at boarding schools are parents of day students at boarding schools. Their view is that they have an extra-special opportunity to enjoy the benefits of famous, selective, fancy, expensive school without having to pack up their offspring and ship them away. That’s what we call a pretty good point. For some folks, it’s a darn good situation.

But, when schools are coming up in the world and are becoming more selective and desired–Loomis Chaffee is a good current example, along with many of the NJ and PA schools relatively recently–the first thing they do is cut the percentage of day students. The schools become more confident about consistently attracting the necessary number of applications from the full-pay boarding cohort, build more dorms, and then talk up their cohesive boarding culture and weekend activities.

The people who don’t like that are the parents of prospective day students at these schools–instead of getting hundreds of kids accepted from their local towns every year, they see the selectivity shoot up and the numbers go way down. (Plus the day student kids sometimes detect some second-class citizenship issues cropping up, but that’s another discussion.) The folks who love it are the parents of prospective boarding students at these schools. One guess who gets a happy ending.

@GnarWhail LOL! You are way too cynical. Do know that parents on this forum are atypical. Many are zealous about their schools and they post with a purpose. That’s all. As for day students, not so complex. Elite schools in cities and suburbs have a town gown relationship to tend to. Selective schools try to balance boarding/day ratio but to have a certain number of day students is essentially mandatory.

I do not know much about Deerfield, but I can say that Choate gives a fair amount of FA to day students. That is representative of the fact that they accept the individual due to the talents and skills they can bring to the school. There are boarders whose homes are in Wallingford (the town Choate is in) and day students who live an hour commute away. It should not matter how long the commute is, that is a decision that the school should not take away from its applicants. It is Choate’s decision to allow the student the opportunity to study at Choate. It is the student’s responsibility, along with their parents, until they are able to drive themselves, to arrive to classes on time and prepared. Who are you to decide what is in Choate’s best interest? Are you a trustee, admissions officer, or the headmaster? As far as I know, no you are not. Choate admits people who fit the criteria, whether they live across the country and will board or they live forty-five minutes away and are day students. It is from that admission decision that the students and their families decide whether they are willing to make the choice to go or not. That includes that “dreaded” commute that passes many “fancy, smancy” schools. Obviously, those schools are not considered peers to Choate by those that chose Choate. Again, it is a matter of choice. written by a Choate student

@panpacific Atypical is certainly one way to put it.

@mexusa I’m glad you like your school and stand up for it no matter what.

Also, in regard to boarders at Choate being more “desirable” for cost purposes than day students, the only service that day students do not get is a bed. EVERYTHING else is the same. Food (3 meals all seven days), showers (unlimited at the athletic centers) study locations, study time, sports, clubs, activities, volunteer opportunities, health needs, including preventative care, entertainment, face time with teachers, advisors, coaches, use of shuttle busses to movies, malls, away games, dances, parties, etc.,etc. etc. SAME. SAME. SAME. So, the expenditures are essentially the same, except for that
ONLY difference: where you lay your head at 10:30 at night. (that is, when you are not sleeping over at a friend’s dorm for the weekend, at no cost to the student!) As far as FA, boarders often get more FA than day students to compensate for the extra 14K for sleeping there.