Tough question for Andover / Exeter parents/students. It would be great to get some real insight...

Prep School Admissions Prep School Parents
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Long time lurker, new poster here… We are on the cusp of diving into the BS world headfirst with a kiddo who is now in seventh grade, and wants to apply next year (for sept of the following year, ie. 9th). As a parent, I have some reservations about BS, but also have to acknowledge it seems like a good fit for zixzaxKid who needs waaaaayyyyy more of a challenge than we are getting locally. I know, from what I’ve been reading on CC, that admissions can be a pretty random for a qualified kid, since sooooooo many applicants are qualified… I also see the wisdom (often discussed here) of applying to a large enough group of schools that there is a decent chance something, somewhere, works out.

So, getting to my question… we are trying to make our list of schools, and while Andover and Exeter sound absolutely A.M.A.Z.I.N.G., they also sound (possibly?) more intense, more stressful, more (internally) competitive, with less downtime, than other great schools. Admittedly, I am basing this on very, very sketchy anecdotal stuff. My (sorely lacking) data points are from an online article I don’t want to re-post here, (because the embittered and deeply-anti Andover author/ PA graduate takes some very nasty and possibly anger-fueled jabs at the school) but nevertheless claims PA kids consistently have 5 to 6 hours of homework per night. The other data point is the number of reviews on Niche.com for Andover and Exeter that use language like “stress” / “tough” “competitiveness” “workload is gruelling” etc. While it is not a large percentage of reviews that use this sort of language for A. and E., this category of descriptors is virtually entirely absent from the Niche.com reviews of (for example) Choate, Deerfield, Middlesex, St. Paul’s, and Thacher.

Thus, I really want to know, are A + E (relatively speaking) meat grinders? Is there a significant difference in the workload / stress levels of kids between A + E, and the GLDCHMS/Hidden Gems?

Of course, I know it all comes down to fit, and we won’t really understand that until we go tour schools next year, or possibly even until revisit days, and who knows, maybe at the end of the day zixzaxKid’s eyes will light up like a kid on Christmas while there and will want that A/E experience, but still, as we put together our preliminary list, I’d like to try get a handle on this aspect of the school culture… thus, if anyone could give me some straight shooting, honest answers-- the good, bad, ugly, or not-- I’d be very grateful…

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Sorry for horning in on the A/E discussion, but I wanted to emphasize that the boarding school years are more important than college in forming your child’s lifelong habits and views of the world. As you determine what school is right for zixzax kid, be sure to look past the shiny objects like facilities, or size of course catalog, or college admission stats to cultural clues like attrition, attendance at games and events, stories in the school paper about the health and happiness of the school community, your own observation of attitudes and relationships while on campus etc. Your choice of school is as much about WHO your child will become at the end of four years as it about academic accomplishment. We wanted an overtly happy environment with what we perceived to be a highly supportive culture and a balance between academic rigor and outdoor life. Everyone is different however and you’ll have to decide as a family team what the best environment would be for your child to become a happy, kind, productive and accomplished young man.

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With a data point of one school, I would say no. Note that some of the stress that kids feel is internal and/or from external sources other than the school. If you read some of the posts from some of the more helicopter-y parents here, you’ll see.

With that said, I second @ThacherParent .

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My kid is a 9th grader at Andover and spends about 3-4 hours on week nights on homework and is getting 5’s and 6’s. Perhaps there is a ramping-up that may be happening but so far the load has been manageable and only a bit more than my kid experienced in middle school. There’s still time for sports, music and community service, and Netflix.

I very much agree with @ThacherParent . When we were on the search my DH and I were very much on the lookout for supportive environments. Kiddo was 13 at the time and we believe in letting kids be kids. Which means they will also goof up and that’s where meaningful growth can happen. The overall message we got from Andover’s administration is that balance and wellness is an institutional priority for both the sake of the students and the faculty. We felt very good that the team of adults that our kid would have at Andover would genuinely care and look out for our kid. So far that has been the case. Kid has suffered personal loss at home in the past few months and experienced some disappointments with tryouts that didn’t pan out, but the adult team has helped kiddo work through those challenges. There was also the beginnings of what could have turned into an ongoing bullying situation but my kid felt comfortable speaking up and a member of the team got involved and helped bring about a very good resolution for all concerned.

On the note of competitive environment, this is a topic that’s been on my mind lately following a conversation DH and I had with parents of a student who attends another BS. According to Boarding School Review the school has about a 1 in 4 acceptance rate. Those parents said their kid finds the environment very competitive. Because the family is from an area where many kids go to BS, their kid has friends at several other boarding schools, not Andover or Exeter, and those kids also claim that their schools have very competitive environments. So this is to say that I have very anecdotal evidence which suggests that competitiveness is not exclusive to PA and PEA. Furthermore, my kid has not remarked at all about competitiveness in the classroom at PA, just mentions that discussions are very good and talks about the relative strengths of the various teachers. Perhaps my kid is just oblivious. I also wonder if having been in competitive sports for so many years has dulled my kid’s sensitivity to competitiveness.

Is competitiveness a matter of perception? What is it about competitiveness in the classroom that is off-putting? Is it the concern that competitiveness and collaboration cannot coexist? That competitiveness and compassion cannot coexist? That competitiveness and joy/delight cannot coexist? I am very interested to hear what others have to say about this topic.

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Having had children at private day schools, public G&T ,general public and now PEA I can say nothing has been like PEA. Rule of thumb is an hour of homework per class per night. Extremely intense. Exonian articles address sleep deprivation. Very competitive atmosphere. However, these schools have been preparing their students for the work world and /or university for a very long time. You just have to be very realistic about your child and what they have demonstarted they can handle thus far. Further, the pool coming out of PA or PEA will be very competitive. They may be in the middle of the class instead of the top. Etc

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While not an PA or PEA parent, I will weigh-in surrounding another acronym school that my children attend–Choate. I think much of these perceptions depend on the individual child. With my entirely un-scientific sample of two (one in 9th and one in 10th), I can tell you that organizational skills and self-efficacy play a large role in the students’ perception of how “Hard” a school is. For example, one of our kids is a “I can figure it out on my own at the last minute” kind of kid who “will just remember the discussion in class and does not need to take notes” kind of student. This DC definitely finds the school MUCH harder, yet is equally as intelligent as our other DC who does not find the work that hard (and is also placed in more rigorous classes). This other DC is the type of student who plans ahead (literally spending an hour on Sunday afternoons laying out the week’s schedule!), takes copious notes in class, and asks his/her teachers to preview work before submitting it. The latter has so far been more academically successful than the former, and also (at the moment) seems to be less stressed about the homework load and the rigor of his/her classwork.

I think this would hold true across any boarding school setting; definitively so in the more rigorous schools.

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I agree with everyone above, but would like to add one point: I think that the workload and expectations in terms of the caliber of that work, really ramp up in junior year. DD is in 11th grade at Cate and has close friends at all of the schools that you mention, and this feeling has been universal. Most of her friends felt pretty comfortable academically in 9th grade, but not one would say that now LOL. The demands of high-level coursework, standardized testing, increased leadership responsibilities and college applications just around the corner make for a stressful environment at all of the top schools as you get older. This is not exclusive to A & E, not by a long shot. I think that a lot of this pressure is “self-inflicted” however - this is a population of achievement-minded kids that we’re talking about here! So my advice is to talk to juniors & seniors when you’re asking this specific question.

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I think the top BS do have a different atmosphere. Maybe more freedom and a little less hand holding. At SPS there are no study halls or lights out. Its up the the students to figure out when to study, sleep, eat… The first year is more about learning how to manage ones time, juggling academics with sports and other school commitments. Many of the schools have pass/fail the first grading period to allow for this adjustment. My daughters class at SPS seem to be all over the place when it comes to readiness- both in terms of maturity and academics. The first term she used her free periods to study and was done her homework by 8pm every night. In contrast, my kid says her upper form mates are studying all the time and up very, very late. But late hours are not only due to homework- students are studying for SAT’s, writing college applications, doing work for academic clubs, attending meetings, preparing for a student run function… These students are busy! BS is much more than just academic classes. It seems to us that the more adjusted students are fully involved on campus and not just studying all the time in the library. The student is not going to have a very good 4 years if they have to study all the time to just keep up. Another thing to consider is that not every 9th grader is taking the same classes- different levels of math, languages, and even sciences can change ones workload drastically. A lot of stress comes from comparing oneself to others- instead of focusing on your own path. Ask your kid theses questions- Are you really ok with not making straight A’s (or 6, HH…)? How will you feel if you’re not at the top of your class anymore? Are you ready for a lot more work if it means you will be challenged?

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@GMC2918 – that is an excellent point. Junior year is especially a bear in the BS environment.

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My daughter averaged 4 hours per night at NMH - one of the more “relaxed” school cultures, and managed it very well overall. I think the quantity of work is similar across the board at most of the schools- all BS kids are busy 24/7 and have several hours of homework every night, but the school cultures are very different and this can be the source of the competitiveness and stress as much as the actual academic and ec demands. That said, I think it is a good idea to make a sample class schedule for your child with ecs and see exactly what their day is like - if for example, your child plans a sport and then potential rehearsals on top of this in the same semester, you may see in advance that one school’s schedule will work better for him or her than another schools. Back in the day, I had play rehearsal during study hall (sports were required every semester and drama only replaced them in the winter) and as I was not disciplined enough to hanker down to homework in the theater, it made for a lot of late nights. If rehearsal had been in the afternoons, I would have gotten a lot more sleep! Schools block schedules vary quite a bit.

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Having had 4 kids attend Exeter, here are some of my thoughts on your question.

  1. Your post seens to blend the notion of being competitve with challenging.
    2 Exeter is an extremely challenging academic environment. Even for this kids with ridiculously high IQ’s who have never had to study a day in their life. It challenges students in unique ways. Coming prepared to Harkness to discuss topics you find uninteresting daily can be a huge drag (a few of mine really dislike humanities courses). Struggling to solve math problems without the formula handed to you and then being asked to present your solution at the board to the class can be excruciating to a perfectionist ( have some of those too). Spending hours developing deep philosophical arguments to develop a thesis for a paper on historical incidents in France in the 18th century can be exhausting for a 14 year olds brain. But for the right kind of kid, all of these type experiences help them stretch and grow into someone who can sit patiently through a boring topic, laugh at themselves when they make a mistake and consider points of view of many types of people.
  2. Exeter is the least competitive environment between students I had ever seen. No parents are around to push and intervene on behalf of the kids on a daily basis. It is a community of kids who really look out for each other. They help each other with subjects one struggles with, they don’t gloat over high scores on tests. When college admission times roll around, they never discuss class rank, standardized tests scores or what colleges they are applying to. I have seen kids get accepted ED to Harvard hold back on announcing to their friends- due to wanting to give them time to process their own ED rejections.
  3. The people my kids have met ( staff, students snd visitors), the work they have put in and the experiences they have had are priceless to the people they are becoming.

I am sure this is true of many prep schools you are looking at/ but Exeter is all I can speak to. Good luck to your family on finding the right school for your child.

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Son got into both A and E. However he chose to attend another school. We spoke to many former and current students and knew about the environment. The pressure and amount of homework is about the same at all top BS.

Going to another school won’t necessarily be any easier. In fact I know of many public high schools where the pressure is higher than at A/E.

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Based on personal experience, I can attest that what @vegas1 said about Exeter is very much true with Andover. I couldn’t have said it better.

One thing I want to add is that if there’s something in A/E that’s “inheritantly” different than other schools in terms of competitiveness, it is that they are very selective larger schools and as a result potentially the peer group is naturally more capable and competitive. To the right kids and families they are perfect “controlled environment” to receive rigorous training, and to learn how to compete and cooperate with peers, how to fail, how to advocate for themselves, and how to compromise etc etc. at a young age.

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As I understand Andover, the intensity has much to do with the student, both in terms of personality and choice of extracurriculars, and also in terms of courses that were chosen. In theory, a course has about 45 minutes of homework each night, but many courses have a disclaimer stating that the course can require more than that. For a student taking many of the 500 or 600 level courses, there can be a lot of homework as those courses tend to have more than average homework needed. The higher level courses can be taken by 9th graders or 12th graders, depending on background of the student coming in and the student’s choices. Some students take 6 classes instead of 5, which can add to the time commitments. Students can be in orchestra or theatre or sports that can take up a lot of time. There can be 5 hours of homework a night and if you don’t start that until 8 pm because of sports or music or other ECs, it can be a lot to manage. When my child took 6 courses and had music and sport commitments, there were late nights. Those doing fewer or less intense ECs, or those taking fewer courses past AP level can have less work. There are kids who spend a lot of time on video games and seem to manage doing well enough to stay there.

There are changes coming next year to Andover to minimize homework time. The goal will be that fewer courses will meet each day, so a student will have homework for only 3 or 4 courses each day. This should decrease the total homework time on any given day.

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Extracurricular commitments certainly are a huge factor and will be at any school regardless of rigor.

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@gungablue Good point. There’s a saying on this forum, “school is what one makes out of it”. Even in a most rigorous school, one can get by by taking the easiest classes and meeting the bare minimal requirements for graduation. On the other hand, one can stretch themselves to the fullest even in a mediocre school if they choose to. In that sense, whether a school is “competitive” really just means whether you’d have more positive peer influence (or peer pressure) to stretch yourself and whether the bars to cross to stand out are high. Believe it or not, despite their “pressure cooker” reputations, the majority of kids in A/E and other rigorous schools are “comfortable” enough there and enjoy the challenges and opportunities they wouldn’t get in their alternative school options. They are however, as said many times here and elsewhere, not for everyone. Good luck to OP in finding that happy medium that works for their kid and their family!

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@zixzax , I agree with almost all that has been posted. A student at a nearby public HS may study 2 hours a night for AP European History (which is like drinking history from a fire hose) when they are in the 10th grade. I don’t think my kid who graduated from Andover last spring ever had to study that much for a course at Andover.

So, it varies on the workload, the child, the year (11th grade is indeed tougher), etc. My kid always took 6 courses at Andover.

And, she took full advantage of Andover’s policies regarding too much work due at one time. If she had more than two tests in a day, she had the option of asking the third teacher to delay/defer her third test. And, as she got older, she had more available “cuts”, i.e. the ability to ask for permission ahead of time to miss a class. She employed these excused absences (maybe 2 to 4 a semester) to work on a paper or study for a test. I was very grateful Andover had these options so that she didn’t feel overly pressured.

At first, I was concerned she might be too “soft”, but over time I began to see it actually enabled her to make wise choices when it came to time management. She can juggle with the best of them, and is becoming a great negotiator. She has a clear sense of priorities, etc.

I would never categorize Andover and Exeter as “meat grinders”. Anything but. Most kids love being engaged in dynamic conversations during classes. The schools may be rigorous, but fair and concerned deeply with their students’ well being. I think the same can be said of the Gladchems and Thatcher.

One more thing about “competitiveness” I was to emphasise. When you child applies to college, he/she will be competing against his/her high school class. As @Center wrote, even if your child is very bright and a great student, they may only be in the top 25th or 33rd or 50th percent of their class. So, it would be very helpful if you, as a parent, can help your child to understand their uniqueness from the outset of this journey. This will help them later when they are writing their college essays, and more importantly help them to find their niche in college. You don’t have to graduate at the top of your class to attend an Ivy League school (well maybe you do for Oxford and Cambridge), and the top BSs have exceptional college placement offices. Your kid might be extraordinary at lacrosse or debate or classical Greek or Ruby on Rails. With your help, they will likely hone in on their passions and their gifts and be able to express that to themselves and others so that even if they are not graduating in the top 5% they will land well for college. My kid refers to this abstraction as finding your “pencil point”.

Furthermore, at Andover, I would say Mr. Palfrey (the Head of School), the administration, and the faculty strive for it to be a COLLABORATIVE environment versus COMPETITIVE. My CallieKid very much appreciated this distinction and thrived in it. I trust when and if you visit the BS schools with your child you both will be able to sense vibes of the schools and look out for this nuance too.

When you visit the schools, your kid will most likely “know” what schools he/she loves. Honor that, encourage them to clarify and express why, and you will be able to guide them.

You sound like a great parent. Best of luck! What a fun ride!

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I have a son–a “prep” (aka freshman) at PEA. There is absolutely no getting around it: The workload is intense. I would say that PEA has always had a reputation for forbiddingly grueling academic work, both in terms of quantity and quality. My strong sense, based both on my experience and that of my son’s, is that, while all schools of PEA’s type are very demanding, PEA is exceptionally so. I am in no way saying that PEA’s academics are better–and one could argue that in fact the intensity of the academic demands that PEA places on its students makes for a worse education–but PEA is really in a class by itself. The hour per subject rule is honored more in the breach than the observance: Teachers will usually say that his or her class is especially demanding and therefore requires more than the “average” amount of work. My son is a quick learner and is quite well organized. He is a three-season varsity athlete and is involved in a lot of clubs, radio, choir, and dramatics. He averages 5 to 6 hours sleep per night. The academic experience at Exeter was long regarded as first and foremost a character-building experience: To endure the scholastic bootcamp that is PEA calls on tenacity, perseverance, stamina, an ability to demand the utmost from oneself, and, quite frankly, the ability to withstand a fair amount of pain.

Having said all this, though, from my experience and observation PEA students are not at all competitive with one another–there’s a pervasive sense that they are all in this boat (on particular rough seas) together and that all of the them are exceptional–though some might be particularly gifted in certain subjects, and others in different subjects. They are truly supportive of one another.

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Andover announced that the changes to the schedule are being postponed and not happening next year. I guess this means that 5 hours of homework per night can continue.

I agree with @CallieMom that the headmaster focuses much on balance and collaboration. This does matter and helps the intense academics get supplemented with rest and rejuvenation. I appreciate the sleep challenge where students are asked to sleep more than the headmaster over a period of time with awards to the winners.

20

Palfrey was an Exeter alumnus. I have a feeling (heard him talk once about how he wanted to change the unnecessary pressure and sleep deprivation kids are going through) that he “knew the pain” first hand, so he wants to do something about it. From my perspective, Andover experience was mostly OK for my kids except maybe the upper year (but that’s a tough year across the board). I’m glad that it was not “easy as a breeze” for them 'cause that wouldn’t have been what I paid for! But if there’s a common complaint in the school community, then it’s best to be addressed.