Hello, I live in the Boston area near many private schools. I have heard that some schools give discounts or even free tuition to full time staff employees. I noticed on Milton’s website that they specifically state that employees are welcome to apply for financial aid, meaning no discount! However, I have also heard that some schools are more lenient in giving aid to employees. Has anyone heard anything on Milton? Or any other area schools that they wish to share. This is definitely a perk worth researching as I begin my job search. Thx.
Most do I would say. Where my daughter is going I believe tuition is 90% off. I work in higher education and this is typically a benefit at most private colleges and universities. In fact, a good number of them are part of a network where dependents have can have access to 100s of other institutions. They must of course apply and be admitted and some of them are very competitive.
Exeter has it.
Total financial aid awarded…$19,334,752
(includes tuition, mandatory fees, support, plus other
assistance. Does not include remission recipients)
Students receiving need-based aid…45.7%
(48.6% if tuition remission for faculty and staff children is
included)
I think Andover has something similar.
Well, for most employees at the boarding schools absent some top administrators, they would qualify for at least partial need based aid anyway. They aren’t making enough to be full pay. So, there’s that.
I heard from one faculty member at SPS that it was a 90% discount for full-time employees.
Consider, however, that there are no guarantees that faculty/staff children will be accepted. At SPS, it was quite competitive for the handful of spots open to employees’ kids each year. One year, I heard that 27 students in this category applied and 5-6 were accepted.
No guarantees is reasonable. But 5-6 out of 27 sounds very harsh!
THis is a benefit that usually does not become available for several years ( at the prep school I worked at, it was a 5 year required employment period before eligibility). That is typical… otherwise, imagine all the soon-to-be boarding school parents who would be applying for jobs alongside their kids applying for admission!
@SculptorDad If the info I was conveyed was accurate, my guess is it might have been a tougher year than most but the main point is that admissions for staff and kids is far from automatic.
So this probably extremely qualified teacher works five+ years at a top bs, and her more likely than not smart and well bred son lived on there majority of his childhood hoping to study there, and he still has 30% chance?
In my view “no-automatic” should mean something in the line that the child still need to have enough academic ability but should be given a better slack otherwise.
Well, 27 faculty kids applying in one year is a LOT. When you consider the small average class sizes, it could be challenging to add those 27 freshmen in. The more selective schools seem to have clearly put an end to what used to be automatic admission for faculty and staff kids… They really do have to be just as qualified as the other admits.
No one at a BS wants any kid to not do well or risk failure. They definitely wouldn’t want a faculty/staff child to be in that position when there family is living in community. Who wants to flunk out or get kicked out and then have to continue living at the school?
Also, when you consider that the acceptance rate for the most selective schools is 10-15% and even less for those needing major FA, 30% with a substantial discount is quite a bit higher.
Agreed, @doschicos. I know a staff member who began working at a fine prep school when her kids were toddlers. She hung onto the job she really did not love, through all sorts of changes and challenges, because she really wanted them to go to school there. The older kid was a high achiever, but made a very bad choice as a freshman and was expelled. The younger kid was NOT a high achiever and was not admitted.
Our career paths might have been very different if we had known more about boarding schools when our children were small! 
I think many schools are more forgiving on admissions for faculty children than what has been quoted above. I can’t imagine Mercersburg wouldn’t admit a faculty child who had grown up at the school, unless said child were deeply stoopid or seriously messed up or had no interest in learning, none of which would be likely for a kid who grew up there!
From the interactions with my kids school, while it hasnt been explicitly said, I have the impression that faculty kids especially of those who have been teaching at the school for a significant number of years (or those who are qualified based on the duration of their tenures) are usually admitted if they choose to apply. That being said, when I chatted with faculty members, at least two of them volunteered to tell me that one or two kids of theirs didn’t apply because they didn’t think they would fit in the schools where they teach. So, it’s really a two way choice. Admission is not automatic but the intention to apply is not automatic either.
This is not only done at boarding schools but most colleges/universities too. Look up the term fac-brats. The advantage in admissions to faculty kids is huge, more than legacy. Probably comparable to development cases.
^^ Not sure if faculty kids in super selective colleges have as much an advantage or “guarantee” of admission as faculty kids of BS (even the most selective). The two kids in my son’s class who I knew were Harvard faculty kids did get in H, but at least one of them still applied or were prepared to apply to a great number of other colleges before he got in H early. A few Stanford faculty members once in a gathering expressed uncertainty and “pessimism” about their kids’ prospect of getting to attend S, indicating even among faculty kids the competition can be fierce.
The fac brat advantage at top colleges is well known. See article below from NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/16/education/edlife/the-other-legacies-fac-brats.html
^^From the above article
Everyone in the article makes statements like “all else being equal, this would be a tipping point” or, as above, that it’s equal to or slightly better than being a legacy. Far cry from being the equivalent of a development admit.
I have known faculty children who wanted to go to other high/boarding schools for whatever reasons. Sometimes the school will help foot the bill, and I believe a number of similarly wealthy colleges do the same, in lieu of a reduced tuition at their own institution. In response to changing demographics, like a spike in the number of faculty children, some BS will put rule changes through to address a perceived problem. A prospective employee should see or inquire what the rules are early on in the hiring process as it is a big deal; and might gauge interest by how quickly the school let’s them know!
I have worked at several boarding schools. All have offered tuition remission and it is a pretty open “secret” that fac-brats have preferential treatment in the admissions process. Also, the assumption that boarding school teachers can’t afford the tuition is pretty close minded. We have a child who has received tuition remission because said child chose the school I worked at. Other child is full-pay at another boarding school. Some teachers teach because they love to teach, not because they need the paycheck.
Fac-brats and their parents/families were a huge part of the greatness of AppleKid’s private school at home. I was a college fac-brat and I know first hand how much faculty are in it for the kids. Admin can be great or even not, and so too the student pop, but the faculty are who really define a school.