<p>I wanted to apply to boarding schools for sophomore year, but my mom wants me to do a summer program at a boarding school or college first. Junior year is the most important to colleges, so I am skeptical about making it my first year in boarding school because the adjustment to such a new and different environment might be hard. </p>
<p>Also, friend groups are pretty much already finalized by junior year, I don't want it to be hard for me to make friends. At most boarding schools, how many and what percentage of students join in junior year? thanks!</p>
<p>I would check schools’ websites, they sometimes have breakdowns between grades. It varies by school.</p>
<p>Choate is one of the bigger schools (865 students), broken down this year (FWIW) as follows:</p>
<p>9th - 165
10th - 212
11th - 242
12th - 246 (includes PGs)</p>
<p>Lawrenceville’s class of 2015 was overenrolled with 82 new sophomores last year so this year only 1 new junior was accepted - a male hockey recruit from Canada. :)</p>
<p>U can find the number of students in each grade for different schools:
<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pss/privateschoolsearch/school_detail.asp?Search=1&SchoolName=choate&State=09&NumOfStudentsRange=more&IncGrade=-1&LoGrade=-1&HiGrade=-1&ID=00233261[/url]”>Search for Private Schools - School Detail for CHOATE ROSEMARY HALL;
<p>It is difficult to be admitted in junior year. Some schools admit a disproportionate number of int’l kids as new juniors. Some schools admit almost no juniors at all.</p>
<p>Plus junior year is the most challenging year academically. U will need to hit the ground running because u will not have freshman & sophomore grades at the new school to cushion and average out any GPA shocks, w college applications just around the corner.</p>
<p>At my kids’ school (Concord) the target class sizes are 80 for freshmen and 100 for the other classes. They will typically be looking for 10-20 new sophomores and 1-2 new juniors. Last year they received 49 applications for 2 junior spots, so it’s not easy to get admitted (this detailed information is not on the school web site itself, but was published in an April edition of the school newspaper, which can be downloaded from the website). They don’t actively recruit athletes, so the primary criteria is academic ability and likelihood of thriving in an independent school environment (although other factors help, such as artistic ability, athletic ability, being a great person, etc.).</p>
<p>Although friend groups are generally set at that point, existing students look forward to meeting the new students, particularly in the junior class since there are so few new members. With a reasonable amount of effort you can integrate pretty quickly into the community and make friends.</p>
<p>Looking at increases from 10th to 11th can be a bit misleading because you don’t know how many 10th graders didn’t return. </p>
<p>As GMT noted, many new juniors are international students. I believe my daughter and her roommate are the only new domestic juniors at her school. I don’t know exactly why this is. I think it has something to do with the overseas system more than anything. But I was told that most new juniors were internationals from all three schools my D applied to last year. The information was offered; I didn’t ask.</p>
<p>
I assume approx 5% attrition of the previous class</p>
<p>GMTplus7, the info you linked to was for the 2011-12 school year, which was two years ago. I would not rely on that information to predict whether any particular school would admit juniors in the current year. Some schools plan to add juniors, but others only add juniors to fill spots opened when students leave the school–and that is unpredictable.</p>
<p>For the OP, would you and your parents consider repeating sophomore year at a boarding school?</p>
<p>
Two learnings in this: </p>
<p>1) When there is a one-stop shop of information for a number of different schools (the U.S. Dept of Ed website I linked covers EVERY school in America), the data may not be the latest. For the latest data, you need to check directly with the school.</p>
<p>2) Junior year new entrants are a very small sample size. The number of new entrants can vary wildly from year to year. But the bottom line is that very few juniors are added, as compared to the considerable expansion of class size in the sophomore year.</p>