Hey now…I should be the one pouring cocktails. Every year, for the past seven years, I have had a kid applying to either prep school or college. That’s right. For SEVEN freaking years I’ve dealt with this crap. Every fall, visiting and testing. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, essays. I deserve to beatification for this.
Next year there will be no essays over Christmas and maybe we can actually do something on New Year’s Eve.
But then, the year after that, my youngest will be applying to prep school.
@neatoburrito, Beatification definitely in order. Makes me glad I have twins. We go through each phase only once. Well, twice in the case of prep school applications…
Twinsmama - just curious, did your twins apply to the same schools at the same time, or to different schools??
Do you think it reduced their chances of acceptance being twins? Did they get similar responsesfrom same schools? It must be twice as stressful, no?
@Britmom5, it was and is indeed very stressful. My son applied to more schools than my daughter, but she did not apply to any that he wasn’t applying to as well. The results were similar - lots of waitlists. It’s hard to guess how their twinship factored in. I certainly don’t think it helped. We need substantial FA, and that is an immense amount to give to one family.The situation might be reversed for full-pay families; two excellent applicants from the same family might be considered a bonus. Who knows?
I was also wondering about the effect of twins since I have more than one set of multiples. This year it is only my singleton daughter applying so I have it “easy”.
A lot weighs on the interviews, and how well they do. Also where you live and if the school has too many kids from one state or another. Also if they need more students in one extracurricular, they will seek those applicants.
You don’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need. Safety schools are good too. You can’t really say you graduated from a “bad” boarding school ever. They are all good in their own right and it’s what you put into it that you get out of it.
God bless you, Marathon 21! “More than one set of multiples” and a singleton to boot! You are a better woman than I!! Thanks for the response, Twinsmama - love your philosophical attitude!
In response to the idea that twins might be seen as a bonus from a full pay family, actually the opposite is true. Schools prefer to have kids from more families as it is more people contributing to the annual fund etc. Most people with twins aren’t giving 2x as much as parents of one so its lost fundraising dollars…
^^ I would think so too, but St. Andrew’s has graduated one set of twins and will graduate another set all from the SAME family! (FP if only one or two of the four was private tuition, but four is a lot) Exceptions to every rule . . . ~O)
I am not suggesting that they won’t take them, only that it is not viewed as a positive to get a “2 for 1” from an admissions/development standpoint. I have multiple kids in private schools and they have never had a class without at least one set of twins
These schools seem to do a good job of balancing their financial realities with their educational mission. Obviously, they depend on private funding and good stewardship of their resources. But (also obviously - I’m the queen of obviousness!) they aren’t guided entirely by the bottom line in their admissions decisions, or there would be very little financial aid. From my perspective, they provide a real service by making a great education available to some children who really need and deserve more than what public schools can provide, and they do it without regard for whether they will ever be able to fully pay back what they are given. I’m sure the school culture encourages alumni to give back, and we have already begun to mention that our son should give back to his school when he can, but if he ends up an evil Grinch or a wino in the gutter and won’t or can’t repay, no collection agency will come after him. He and many others like him are receiving a great and powerful gift, and the only strings attached are emotional. Come to think of it, that’s probably why this carefully balanced system works.
Also, (sorry for the three posts) I do not think they are morally obligated to repay what they have been given. The schools and the entire community benefits from having a range of kids and experiences which would not exist if the only pool they were choosing from was the very very small pool of kids who’s parents don’t need any form of FA. I think it is wonderful to support your school after graduation and you will want to do it because you feel so strongly about your commitment to the place once you leave, I definitely support mine. But I do not think that it needs to be thought of as a repayment as though it is a debt. They aren’t giving the FA away to just do good service to kids who need it, they are doing it to have the best, most diverse, most interesting class and community they can have.
OTOH, @LifeLongNYer , the schools we’re discussing (almost all) spend more per student than the full-pay tuition, the so-called “gap”. Annual fund drives now routinely point out that all students, including the full-pays, are benefiting from the fact that endowments are being tapped to meet the bottom line, far beyond the financial aid budget. Various constituencies built up these endowments over time as a sort of trust emanating from their own “feeling” for the school, though tax advantages can play a role too. Remember that donors can specify whether their gifts are for FA or a multitude of other school costs. From that standpoint, I think all graduates (for whom this is the situation) should recognize a numerically calculable “debt”. The alma mater might feel like the “nourishing mother” of the graduate, but regardless of whether that closeness exists (as it does for both of us), there is another “hard” reason to give based on past expenditures. Which of these reasons may be considered “moral” and which might not is an interesting question to me.
@charger78 I hear you and understand your point, I just don’t like the idea of the kids feeling like they are indebted to the school in some way other than the way we should all feel indebted whether we were full pay or not from the benefit of having been at the institution.
I actually think the tuition gap represents, in simple terms, the degree to which the expenditures outpace the revenue. The revenue is reduced because approx 35% of kids at every school are getting FA, it is not that the school spends more on each kid than full pay parents pay it is that overall the revenues do not equal expenditures per student because a third of the students are not full pay….
@LifeLongNYer, I don’t think you’re right about the tuition gap. When a school talks about the “true cost” of educating a student, what they’re doing is taking the annual operating expenses and dividing by the number of students. Let’s say a school’s annual operating expenses are $45 million. If that school has 600 students, then the “true cost” (or more correctly expense per student) would be $75k. Now theoretically, a school could set its tuition at that amount and then just plan on giving out way more FA (both in terms of # of students and total dollars). But that’s not viewed as being very palatable in the market, so what they do is set it at, say, $50k. So even for FP kids, the school has to find the extra $25k from somewhere, and of course for every dollar in actual FA the school gives, they have to find that money from somewhere too. The fact that the school has to find more dollars to cover the cost of the FA kid doesn’t mean that they’re not still covering part of the cost of a FP kid.
Congrats to all the neatokids and cheers to you! You certainly deserve a rest.