" We think of BS as a series of experiences that are forming our kids. That is our focus. "
Exactly. That should be everyone’s focus. 
Because my kid’s happiness and goals are not tied to attending an Ivy (nor are my parental expectations of success), it is very easy for me to say: choose the school that makes you happy. Choose the school that meets your everyday needs not some calculation for attending a specific set of colleges. As I have said before, and will no doubt say again, you cannot know what your kid will “be” four years hence. You can only make decisions on what you think is best FOR NOW. Four years is an exceedingly long time for a teen to be unhappy, overworked, and stressed. Good luck, OP!
1000 likes on @london203’s comments.
I, for one, like threads to stay on topic. Maybe it is futile in this forum, I don’t know. But let’s try.
Back to the topic, I think what I’ve been trying to say is not so much about how a top tier BS will help people achieve their Ivy dreams rather to debunk the myth that somehow all the differences in college outcomes between schools were nothing but the effect of the vaguely defined “hooks”. As for what each individual family expects from their kid’s school, there is no point of arguing for a consensus except there is such a thing as kids thrive and happy in a top tier BS that does meet their every needs, and then move on to a great college.
Thanks for all the top tier BS expertise and myth- busting ( I think we all learned a lot ) but I’ll bet the ranch that the Lawrenceville School sticker is already on the car.
Which is great and I wish OP all the best! Go Big Red!!
OP
I cannot express enough regret that DS opted for big name school over a school he would have done better at. His college chances have been damaged by this choice, not to mention all the stress it has caused to our family.
One of our friends, being honest about their child’s habits, turned down big name for a school w better balance. How I envy them.
The truth is 99.9% of people haven’t heard of any of these boarding schools. The big name school is not a default ticket into HYPMS. The competition in them is INTENSE for EVERYTHING-- academics, sports, leadership roles, social status. A large fraction of the HYPMS admits get in for non-academic reasons-- it’s not because of the school.
FYI
online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/PolkGrotonGrads.htm
I agree to some extent with @GMTplus7 and am wholeheartedly grateful that my kids are at a school with “a better balance” and thriving there. However, I don’t think you can completely assess before high school who your children will be once they get there or how they will react to a given environment. You can guess, but you can’t know. So GMTplus7 should cut herself some slack on this point. We are all just doing the best we can at each moment. For myself, I don’t think my children’s college prospects would be appreciably changed by any high school. And I most definitely don’t see high school as just a conduit to the college-of-the-highest-possible-rank. If there is a choice - and all of us with kids in private schools have that choice - go with where you think your child will be happiest. You may be wrong, but then parents should be used to being wrong.
@GMTplus7 I agree that big name boarding schools are typically competitive and stressful. So are the top academic magnet schools and competitive public schools. I also agree that the competitive schools are not for everyone, and some kids are better off in a school with “better balance” and particularly if stress is high on their list to avoid.
Specific to college chances, however, I don’t agree that a kid that couldn’t handle the academics and stress most successfully could have a much better college result in a less competitive school. Here’s why. When you look at where a student would end up being in the middle of the pack (or the mid 50% of the graduating class), you will find that in a top BS they do quite decently. It probably would take a higher class ranking in a non-top tier school to achieve the same results. Does the school help? Of course we can only draw conclusions from our own experience, and mine is that it does. Obviously, it’s a point hard to prove, but let’s look at it in a different context. Suppose a student in the middle of the pack in a top tier BS chooses to attend a less competitive school and does very well. In fact, he ends up the valedictorian from his school. Do you know how many valedictorians in this country are rejected from tipsy top colleges each year? But it would be a rare exception for a top student (doesn’t have to be valedictorian) from one of the big name schools (be it BS, PS, magnet…) to not end up in a tipsy top college unless they choose not to. And it’s not a stretch to apply the above observation to students in other positions in terms of class ranking in different schools.
Of course, it is not easy to achieve a high class ranking in top schools, but I think what we are saying here is that it’s not easy to be in an advantageous position for selective colleges wherever you are. I don’t think anyone here is arguing that “The big name school is a default ticket into HYPMS.”. In fact, no one even said it’s a default ticket to a top college. Students need to walk the walk. The school’s role is to maximize the opportunities for a given student in their own circumstances, and I think the top schools (or the ones I’m familiar with) do it very well.
To illustrate my point that how challenging it is to achieve a much better college result in a less competitive school, here’s the Ivy admissions/matriculation stats published by a school often mentioned here but probably considered a non-top-tier school.
3 year running total
College Accepted Matriculated
Brown University 11 10
Columbia University 6 5
Cornell University 15 10
Dartmouth 5 3
Harvard University 2 2
Princeton 1 1
University of Pennsyvania 5 5
Yale University 5 5
The school’s graduating class size is around 200 (including PGs) every year. As you can see, the yield for most of these schools are VERY high (with the except of Cornell). Assuming Ivy league schools don’t exchange notes about prospective students, it tells me that the majority of them are admits from early rounds. Who gets in in early rounds? Here’s some idea. In other news, for 2015-2016 school year, this school has “almost 2 dozen basketball alums playing NCAA basketball including 11 in the Ivy League… 2 players on the rosters at Harvard, Yale, Brown, PENN, Dartmouth and one at Princeton.” Of course, the school’s basketball team is particularly strong, but still chances are there are at least some recruited athletes in other sports. Since it is a prestigious BS, I suppose the typical “hooks” of legacy, faculty kids, and an occasional development case still occur fairly routinely? You do the math. Just how many non-hooked academic stars would take the rest of the spots? And mind you, the school may be non-top-tier, but I think it’s far from “a walk in the park” to be the tipsy top student there.
Being a tippy top student at boarding school has a lot to do with smarts, yes, but also with many other attributes - how well that student was prepared coming into boarding school, how driven the student is, study skills, organizational skills, mental and physical health, interpersonal skills, maturity level, time management, I could go on. As a parent of students who were not among the tippy top students in their top tier boarding school, I am not certain that choosing a school a step or two below the one they attended would have resulted in them rising to the top academically as some of the other factors certainly factored into their standing rather than native intelligence. Maybe, maybe not. I do know their experiences provided them with opportunities and experiences that would have been unlikely at our local public school. Both are in college now at small LACs that provide a top notch education and are well regarded in academic circles although the average American has never heard of them which I know from getting the blank look from most people when they ask where my kids go to college (but the average American only knows some Ivies and Big Sports universities). Both have been well prepared for college. Both can write extremely well, something they learned at BS. Both passed on applying to Ivy schools because they were not a good fit and also a reach admissions wise. My point is one cannot make the assumption that a student in the middle of the pack at a top tier school would be at the top at a “hidden gem”.
I’ve said it before but I think its worth repeating: Look at the ENTIRE matriculation of a given BS. There are big differences among schools and there is no guarantee your child will graduate at the top of any of them.
As @GMTplus7 knows, the Henry Park story (#66) has lessons that are still relevant, and eighteen years after his high school graduation from Groton (a tippy-top school) there is the benefit of the long view.
Staying on topic, if the OP is still reading, I too will always prefer “fit” to “tier”. Both have degrees of subjectivity, but what really counts is whether, being on campus with the folks there, a kid can see herself welcoming each new day when leaving the bed.
Daniel Golden’s book is “The Price of Admission”, adapted for the Wall Street Journal article linked by GMTplus7. To summarize, Henry Park’s mother was distraught after Henry, supposedly fourteenth in his class and with an SAT of 1560/1600, failed to get into four Ivy League schools plus Stanford and MIT. 34 out of 79 classmates were admitted to Ivy schools, which is the kind of stat many posters caution readers from fixating upon in making decisions, especially in today’s environment. Henry had plenty of brainpower but was not a legacy, recruited athlete, URM or development case. His classmates, only three of whom there were Asian Americans, voted him most likely to “never be heard from again” as they found him aloof. His mother said, “I have thought many, many times why Henry failed. It was just devastating.” Reading Golden, it is clear how the college outcome was the driving rationale for the family to pay his tuition at Groton. Afterward, Henry attended Carnegie-Mellon before transferring and graduating from Johns Hopkins, then going on to the University of Kansas for medical school. Henry told Golden that, at Groton, “I don’t think I really fit in . . . I just felt it was a very homogenous population”. The word “isolated” is used, which does not imply a happy experience for Henry even if the report cards were outstanding.
Nobody knows how the MIT holistic admissions review actually looked on Henry (the file was destroyed), but Golden quotes the Dean’s email to him from 2003. For one, Groton probably “just wasn’t supporting him [Park] as strongly” as its other students. She went on that, possibly, “Henry Park looked like a thousand other Korean kids with the exact same profile of grades and activities and temperament”, one who “wasn’t involved or interesting enough to surface to the top” and therefore looked like “yet another textureless math grind”. As the competitive dynamic has accelerated since 1998, we can be thankful at least for fewer comments using outright stereotypes. However, insiders like Peter Van Buskirk describe a “hidden agenda” that hasn’t changed, in which academic merit is not the only consideration when agents of the sending school and the receiving school are balancing their own interests as well as those of the boarding student and those of his or her classmates.
I googled Park. It seems he became a specialist in neurosurgery and he is in a prestigious north Jersey practice not far from where his family lived. This appears to have been his career interest all along. The failure to get a “first tier” admission has hopefully felt less disquieting to the Park family over time. Evidently, there are many paths that will get you where you want to go, and lots of “successful” people are not graduates of Ivy plus S and MIT.
The Park story demonstrates that even a highly intelligent student may “suffer” in college admissions at an “elite” boarding school for reasons that include intense competition among hooked classmates, while GMTplus7 offers that a poor fit may be detrimental more broadly. I’d conservatively guesstimate that 20-40% of the students at these schools have one, or more, of the classic hooks, making them extra desirable to highly selective D one or D three schools. At Lawrenceville, it would be entirely possible to be a very good student, top third in the class, and still have to “settle” for Hopkins, or Hamilton, or Trinity, or Boston College. You’ll never know your ultimate destination four years beforehand, and ymmv.
To reiterate, all students, whatever the school, should strive to cultivate their interests, old or new, and to be contributors to the well-being of the community, limiting their study time as a result. As did ChoatieMom’s son in #4 and the offspring of many other posters here. Live fully in each moment at a good boarding school for you and let the college chips fall in due course. ~O)
Let me rephrase OP’s question this way: Would Park have done better in say St. George instead of Groton? The answer is there is absolutely no reason to believe that. If you want to attend St George for other reasons, go ahead but it’s dillusional to think because St George is supposed to be “easier” than Groton, you will be able to attend a tipsy top college you wouldn’t be able to attend from Groton. That’s OP’s question and the answer they are supposed to get.
Awesome post, @Charger78 ! ~O)
Thanks for the enlightening analysis. I think I have never been naive to believe that going to a top college would be easier by going to either a top BS or a lesser known BS for a none-hooked student. But seeing the analysis it’s more clear. Fortunately that has never been the priority purpose of applying to BS.
I saw a top candidate be rejected and less competitive kid get in. They are from the same competitive boarding school. They both had no legacy or no hook. While the college admission looks like a black box, I tend to think that every kid has a legit reason to be accepted or rejected by a top college. I believe that the college admission is more than the numbers. It includes the personality, fit and some luck. (I am not saying numbers are not important. In fact, they are the most important factors because they summarize the academic competence of an applicant.) But they are not everything. Harvard rejected 95% of applicants this year. And those who were accepted must have had more than the numbers could indicate.
@jyc, I agree. I guess at least 20% of Harvard applicants should be a valedictorian and have near perfect scores and numbers.
Thank you all for your replies! My son has decided to take up the challenge and enrolled himself at the harder school.