The reasons are only opinions. There is no evidence I can see that boarding schools provide a better education than a peer public school or much lower cost parachocial school, not one bit. What I do see are kids at other schools being more broadly and better socialized.
Again, I think many of the myths about boarding school are just that, myths. When you spend upwards of $200,000 on high school you will believe almost anything.
@TurnerT, is there some particular point for you to come on here and criticize the choices made by the parents who frequent this board? Pretty sure no one has ever expressed anything other than that these are their own personal opinions, and that what works for them as a family may not work for other families.
Sometimes I wish I had explored the opportunities more. My spouse was dead set against it. We lived in a crap state with generally poor quality education and low diversity, high homophobia sprinkled with a lot of hate. Acceleration was the answer at the time. Best wishes everyone.
What kind of evidence are you looking for? Unless you have had substantial personal experience with all these school options you have mentioned, how can you say there’s “not one bit” of quality difference among them? And even when you do have experienced all options, it only says the schools you happen to be familiar with didn’t indicate the difference. Many boarding school families do have substantial experience with their public schools (a sibling of their boarding school student may still be there), so I think it’s fair to say relative speaking they know better than those who never attended a boarding school. Why do you think they have to be defensive just because they are paying the tuition? It’s a choice. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be defensive for something one has no control but has to accept? Wouldn’t that be a more typical situation where one needs that kind of “self re-assurance”?
I will give you that not ALL boarding schools are better than ALL private day/public/charter schools. There are excellent and mediocre ones in every category. Whether you feel your kid can benefit more from one type or another is a personal decision, but to say there’s “not one bit” of difference is irresponsible and flatly wrong.
BTW, what NJ boarding school are you talking about? Lawrenceville? And you are saying attending Lawrenceville doesn’t help with college admission. I’d suggest you take another look. It’s not helping everyone getting into tippy top schools of course since every one has a different baseline, but no help at all? Hmm.
@panpacific I live in NJ. I am talking about all of them, Lawrenceville, Peddie, Blair, etc and even many of the private day schools.
There is no difference in terms of college acceptance and actually they are weaker than the county magnet schools, particularly the ones in Monmouth County.
They appear better because they are selective and have a greater concentration of high stat students. However, stat for stat there is no difference. Many parents learn this the hard way.
Keep in mind, NJ has some of the best public high schools, so it doesn’t surprise me.
Boarding schools are about relationships. The relationships between everybody on campus are more intense and rich than those that I have seen at day schools. These relationships leverage the “education” that happens outside of the classroom. There no doubt are huge differences between all these different cats (schools), and readers of these threads can judge for themselves if the differences are meaningful to them. Certainly, the point has been beaten to death that a BS education should not be viewed merely as the ticket to a particular university.
Plenty of New Jerseyans live in Salem, Cumberland, Cape May, and other counties where the public schools are not remotely like Ridgewood, etc. Nor will they see many options for parochial or charter schools nearby. ~O)
@TurnerT Both you and I know this “debate” is going nowhere just like a lot of college talks. But I think to the minimum, your statement earlier could be modified to something like “if you are lucky enough to have an excellent public/magnate school within reach, you may not gain a lot by attending a prep school both academically and in terms of college admissions”. And it’s “your opinoon” because other families may very well see other values in attending a prep school just as you may have reasons other than academics and college to send your kids to a public school.
For 999 out of every 1000 students, graduating from an elite boarding school does not change the likelihood of attending the most famous of the famous colleges–that’s the fact most difficult for people beyond the prep school world to understand. But so what? The top boarding schools don’t get every student into Williams or Amherst, but the breadth of amazing colleges to which those boarding schools send students every year is unmatched when compared to ‘good’ or ‘top’ public schools or day schools or…
You go to an elite boarding school because the education and experience are lightyears beyond those day schools and magnet schools and charter schools and local public schools. If you are wicked smart, you get access to classes and teachers you wouldn’t get at those other schools. If you are an exceptional athlete, you get coaching and competition and facilities those other schools could never offer. Even better, the well-rounded, high-achieving generalist can exercise all the facets of their abilities and interests without worrying that their school is using up resources because they are more concerned with keeping most disruptive 1/3 of the class under control than they are broadening the scope of the opportunities for the whole student body.
Boarding school is not for everyone. Some kids–many kids–are just not up to it, but for those who can thrive, they are in the best possible environment. For those students, even the best public and charter and magnet and day schools fall short.
What we paid for LPS: $0
What we pay for BS: $0
I’m challenged here in a way I wasn’t before, but most importantly, I’m engaged in classes and **I’m happy.
To be fair, I think @TurnerT was talking about a particular scenario where families have the choice of attending an excellent public/magnet school or paying $200K for a prep school. If you think about it, that would be a decision I bet most BS parents active on this site wouldn’t make lightly either (unless $200K is not a lot of money to high income families living in NJ burbs.) This is evidenced by how some big fans of BS posting often here have expressed in various ways how they wish they had a viable local option they could choose so they didn’t “have to” send their kids to BS. While based on my own experience, I tend to agree what @GnarWhail said, which is that an elite BS is substantially better than a top ranked public school, when cost is taken into consideration, at a certain point the decision is becoming an investment decision, i.e. a cost and benefit analysis is called for. My bottom line back in the days was that I wouldn’t go for a “second tier” BS and I would need a substantially discount (more than what our income would typically justify), given that we did have a pretty good local option. YMMV.
On the other hand, we have never had an “excellent” public school so I don’t have first-hand knowledge about them. Now that my kids are in the “most famous” colleges, some of their peers from PS of certain Boston burbs and Northern NJ etc do feel like adequately prepared. Many students from public schools are not as well though.
We’re very lucky to live in an area with both excellent day and boarding options as well as top-notch public schools… Although I wouldn’t hesitate to send our kids to the LPS if that’s what they wanted, they’ve all ended up in prep schools, some as boarders. The reasons we sent them to these schools are many and varied.
Two of my kids are bright kids with LDs. Because they perform at or above grade level they wouldn’t have received much in the way of services at their LPS. One is particularly uneven and because of the way the LPS is structured her weaknesses mean she would miss out on honors classes in her areas of strength. At her current school they can give her the support she needs while still allowing her to be in honors sections. While some disciplines are leveled there is great fluidity, meaning she could move up or down a level depending on her ability and needs, unlike the LPS where kids have a very hard time switching tracks.
One kids, who thought she didn’t have an artistic bone in her body, won a major state-level art award after being encouraged by her teacher. The only kids whose work is submitted from our LPS are the kids who self-identify as artists and who have taken many art classes.
Two of my kids are athletes. They were good at their sports, but not excellent. Neither would probably have played at the LPS, the state champs in their sport, beyond freshman year. Both played/will play at their prep schools for 4 years. The third child was pushed outside his comfort zone by the school’s athletic requirement, something I wholeheartedly endorsed.
One tried a new sport (not available at the LPS) freshman year. By senior year she was being recruited by colleges. She chose not to go that route but she could certainly have used her sport to either gain admission to a more competitive school without athletic scholarships, or to get very substantial money from one with them. Daily, rigorous, enjoyable exercise helped one slim down from a chunky adolescent to a strong but slim teen.
The upshot is that my non-athlete came out of HS feeling competent in his body and my athlete came out knowing she can produce art. Who knows where the third will find her strengths to be?
I always laugh at the old canard about LPSs providing diversity lacking at prep schools. One of the reasons we sent our kids to prep schools was to experience more diversity that they would in our economically, culturally and racially homogeneous community. 90% of the kids of color they would have encountered in the LPS would have been bused to town from the city anyway, and those kids largely stick to themselves. All three schools my kids attended were substantially more diverse that our LPSs. My D’s best friend from BS is AA. Not one of her friends from home is a person of color.
I also hear people claim that BS kids are somehow sheltered and don’t know how to advocate for themselves in the real world. Nothing could be further from the truth. My kids’ schools strongly encouraged them to advocate for their needs, and since they got to know their teachers well they never saw them as unapproachable. This has served my older kids well in college, where they are more proactive about seeking out help than many of their peers. They also learned early to budget, clean, do their own laundry, and get themselves up on time, skills some of their classmate seem to lack.
@TurnerT, I’m curious about something. You say your kids attended parochial schools. If your LPS was so great why did you take them out of the system? How is sending them to parochial school substantially different from sending kids to BS?
There is the “myth” in outside boarding school communities that
“People choose BS for better college admission outcomes.”
Everyone on this board knows that attening BS does not necessarily improve college outcomes and often negatively affects them as the student pool is more competitive.
Posters on this board are immediately warned that if their motivation for applying to boarding schools is ivy admissions, they will be disappointed.
So there is no “myth” among the prep school parents/students at least on that topic.
College preparedness is why I am looking at boarding school for my child. Although we are in a very good public school district the public school teachers in our state just teach to a test because that is all the state administrators are concerned about, test scores. Public school teachers have had their pay, benefits, pension and anything else cut that can be cut. Pretty depressing when you have a PHD or masters degree plus 60 credit hours. I just went to parent teacher conferences and teacher morale is incredibly low. I feel that the overwhelming majority of prep school teachers are very passionate about teaching and care deeply about student progress. Not to say some public school teachers are not passionate but some are just hanging on until retirement.
College preparedness, yes. College admissions, no.
I guess I should have added, not only College preparedness, but also LIFE preparedness…
What an interesting thread–and even more interesting is that its lifespan is six months long. . .
As someone who now has a daughter going through the Boarding School admission process, just two short months after DS started his freshman year at BS, I can attest to the questions and judgements tossed at us by both friends and family. What is really interesting is the gender bias toward our decision to allow our daughter to apply to schools across the country–as if to say, “Well, we know MILITARY SCHOOL is fine for boys, but WHAT?!? Why your GIRL?”
The irony is our daughter has been on many schools’ interest lists longer than her older brother–by her own choice!
As seen in this thread, families have a multitude of reasons why they choose boarding school. We have many reasons to send our children here in the state of CA, with one of the lowest per-student LPS spending rates in the nation. Statistics like these make a very good case for us alone. To “Opposite Judge”, I believe that families that choose to put their kids into classrooms of 40-50 students with overwhelmed, unionized teachers who do not even have the time (or inclination?) to read English essays is akin to child abuse (I’ve only had to take that very low road once in a particularly heated and disrespectful discussion re: BS). But even with that said, that is not why we chose BS path.
We chose BS because we want our children to really LEARN, to continue to LOVE learning (and not become cynical/disrespectful because of “the system”), and to NOT become all about the grade, the score, the number of APs taken and passed and the EC resume.
As someone who teaches at the college level, I have seen far too much of this LPS/parochial/private day school outcome.
After all, isn’t life too short to enter the rat race at 14?
I am fundamentally puzzled by the folks who talk about how much boarding school “has to offer”. My feelings are that the alternatives have a lot to offer, too, but maybe in different ways; you just have to be able to identify what they are, what the value is and how to mine it.
I’ll also note that the advent and growth of the Internet has made it possible for students in nearly any location to have some access to challenging educational opportunities without having to leave home.
@JustOneDad I am fundamentally puzzled by your continued interest in the educational choice made by BS families. Yes, there are alternatives to boarding school that also have a lot to offer, so what? Is it your opinion that any alternative that doesn’t involve “having to leave home” would be a better choice than BS?
@itcannotbetrue said:
Hmmm, I kind of think that the boarding school application and selection process is akin to entering the rat race at 14!
The kids enter a competitive pool of applicants and are measured against other kids based on grades, test scores & their EC resume, exactly what you don’t want for your kids! 
@JustOneDad As someone who sent two kids to boarding schools, I pointed out in another thread a while ago that for parents who are resourceful and willing to be more hands-on with their kids education, to well prepare them academically, attending BS is just one way out of a few. Making use of online resources, hiring good tutors and taking advantage of the enrichment programs in above average public schools are all potentially effective ways to supplement an otherwise mediocre local high school. That said, IMO, there are certain benefits prep schools provide and most public schools don’t. First, these schools don’t have to follow the beaten paths in getting students prepared for college. Students don’t need to pack up an all AP course schedule to be competitive for selective college admission. The classes they take are challenging and some of them are “post AP” but teachers are not teaching for tests. Students are not penalized for that. That’s not the case in public schools in my neck of the wood at least. Smart kids get good grades but are not learning to be prepared for college. Then if you try to supplement their school education, with the EC involvement, things could quickly get overwhelming (not to mention, it’s difficult to motivate the kids to do the “extra work” when their peers don’t have to.) Secondly, in selective prep schools the peers of high caliber coming from different background can be great resource for learning. Class discussions and EC’s are very enriching experience. Thirdly, for the right kids, it means a more active social life with the like minded and a great four year experience living in a community 24/7 (for “merely” 7 months a years taking out all the breaks). Students are treated more like adults as they are an integrated part of a boarding community. The extent and depth of iterations with adults can be beneficial to students’ development for the long run.
Just some of the benefits of attending a boarding school I can think of. Obviously, not every BS kid can get all out of a boarding school education. And I am sure some students are developing into very well adjusted young adults and adequately prepared for college from public schools (I know some actually). There are more than one way to skin a cat.
@JustOneDad - twelve pages of instructions, comments, connect the dots, personal anecdotes, heartfelt feelings and you’re still “puzzled?” Maybe you should just throw in the towel. No matter how much someone may want to sing, not everybody can carry a tune.