We never considered it but the idea of repeating as a freshmen but that may have been a nice option. As a sophomore, he has so little time to process so much and not enough time to take advantage of everything his BS has to offer.
Question: do you think if you come from a public school and there are others applying to the same BS their chances of acceptance will be lower? This is certainly the case with many colleges. Are the admissions dynamics different?
Started new thread on related question
Found old thread with wisdom
Thanks, Payn4ward!
The candidate pool may not be restricted to geography, but let’s not forget that the boarding tuition costs 50k. Most families in the US will struggle to pay the tuition even w FA; therefore, it’s unsurprisingly the students are overwhelming higher economic status.
@GMTplus7 I agree, unless you’re coming from a private day school, then BS will probably be more economically diverse. They have more FA to give.
Depends where you live, actually. Private schools (both boarding and day) give financial aid. Affluent suburbs don’t.
We live in NYC, and I grew up in Boston. Financial aid is certainly given generously at all of the private schools that I’m familiar with here. But even with that, “economic diversity” is tough to achieve in some areas, no matter how hard the day schools try. They tend to have disproportionate representation at both ends of the spectrum, and not as much in the middle. I think that boarding schools do a better job of this, because they can draw from a larger geographic pool.
^^^ I suspect that the boarding schools with robust financial aid and “a larger geographic pool” are drawing about 30-40% of students from what could reasonably be called “the middle” (generously conceived as household income of $70-140k).
Mini rant: one top school has 13% of kids on full FA. Other schools advertise full FA for kids whose income is less than 75K. Thus, it can be deduced (sorry for the geometry vocab) that 13% of kids come from incomes under 75K. Suddenly, that 13% doesn’t look so generous, because you realize that 87% of kids come from the top 25%ile of national household incomes.
@stargirl3, You know that already. Please don’t ever let the rampant and perpetual unfairness of life affect your joy in your own accomplishments or cause you dissatisfaction with wherever you end up (and I don’t only mean school).
@stargirl3 I think I might know what school you may be referring to - starts with the letter “E” ends in the letter “R” and has “XETE” in the middle…right?
I think that Exeter is generous, even though only 13% come from lower income families (defined as <75K).
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They gave $7.9 million in aid. - when doing the rough math, that means that they are giving the equivalent of full tuition to 168 kids spread out over 200 or so kids that enroll. So there is a lot of aid given to the >75K crowd averaging to about 85% aid. More math - when taking the 13% who get 100% aid, that works out to be about 80% for the remaining 34% getting FA yielding an Exeter education for 10K per year. not bad.
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If you are saying that there should be an equal representation of the sub 75K income families at Exeter as there is in the country, one must consider that many kids from sub 75K families have never heard of Exeter and are not exposed to the opportunity to begin with. In fact, the 13% figure (a little more than half) seems to be more than what I would expect given the fact that most of these kids are not exposed to boarding school fairs and word of mouth that kids in private schools have. What percentage the lower income families apply to Exeter vs. others? I think less apply and you need to apply to get in. A similar argument can be made about under represented states or ethnicities - If no one from Oregon applies to Exeter, then they will not be able to match the geographic diversity of the country.
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No matter how need blind a school is, the sub 75K kids are at a distinct disadvantage for admissions to a school like Exeter. These kids do not have SSAT prep courses, are not going away to science camps over the summer, and don’t have connected parents.
I wondered a similar question regarding their commitment to provide education to “youth from all quarters” - They have a $1.2 Billion endowment. It should be no problem to provide free tuition to everyone. This bold strategy would cost the school about an additional $10 million per year which is roughly 1 month of earnings from the endowment. The hit would be in consequential to their budget and would greatly increase middle class representation at the school.
Nah, @heartburner, it starts with a coordinating conjunction and ends with a preposition.
But I agree with everything you said. It’s just that these schools market themselves as being open to everyone, but they’re not. Now we can start wondering how many of the full ride kids 1. are actually poor, and 2. got in without the help of an outreach program.
I really do not want to get involved in this discussion, but I have to ask: How many kids with low SES really would have thought that Andover (if they even knew about it) were an option if there were no outreach programs?
Me?
Not all poor kids live in poor areas.
@stargirl3 - Looking down the road to college applications, definitely check out the Questbridge program.
http://www.questbridge.org/about-questbridge/our-programs
@doschicos Thanks so much! My mom and I have talked about it, and my brother had applied for it. I actually got an email from them literally a minute ago. 