I caught up with an old acquaintance and found out her high-school-aged sons, one a year older than Rob and one a year older, are both going to boarding school. This makes two boarding-school families in my circle.
It’s a nearly completely unfamiliar thing to me. That is, it isn’t that we sent Rob to public high school because we weighed the options and decided against boarding school; we never even CONSIDERED boarding school. If we HAD considered it, I would have assumed it wasn’t an option, either for the difficulty of getting accepted, or for the expense.
I was a little appalled when the first person in my circle mentioned her 8th grader (same grade as Rob at the time) was going to boarding school the next year. I am aware of the concept of Rob leaving home after high school, and that feels normal to me (albeit weird/upsetting in its own way) because it’s what everyone in my family did. Boarding school bumps that familiar plan four years earlier. Two conflicting reactions in me: “But he’s/I’m not READY for that!” and, glancing at argumentative teenager, “…Wait. We can…DO that?”
Also a third reaction, which showed me that I must think boarding school is superior in some way: a feeling of jealousy, like this meant their child was doing better than mine. Followed closely by that instant human self-protection mechanism of thinking critical thoughts about the path not taken. THOSE GRAPES ARE PROBABLY SOUR ANYWAY. WHO EVEN WANTS TO GO THERE.
The acquaintance I was recently talking to said the whole thing has been a huge shock to her system. Her husband and his family ALL went to boarding high schools: the only question is which one, with lots of opinions about which ones are Better than others. While her family is like mine, with no one even really noticing it as an option. So to her husband, it is totally normal to have their kids mostly out of the house as of age 13-14, and for her it is a shock that has her going to the couch right after work and staring into space until she thinks, “This isn’t good. I need to stop doing this.” And then stares into space some more.
I’ve wondered if we should try to get Rob into one. A lot of them have very good scholarships; my other acquaintance who has a daughter in boarding school says that school has free tuition for any student whose family makes less than $80,000/year. But it’s more that I’ve wondered if we SHOULD HAVE tried: it feels too late at this point, with Rob finishing his sophomore year. I wouldn’t want to switch him at this point unless things were bad for him at the public school, which they’re not.
Also, I read Malcolm Gladwell’s book David and Goliath, and there are some very interesting and reassuring sections about the non-superiority of things we consider tend to consider superior, such as small class sizes and hard-to-get-into colleges. It switched me completely around on the subject. It changed the way I think of my educational goals/hopes for my kids.
I had a similarly mindset-changing reaction to Jean Hanff Korelitz’s book Admission: it’s the novel that made me stop worrying that Rob is insufficiently Well-Rounded. I thought it was interesting to think of colleges having trends just like anyone else: for awhile the students they’re searching for are the well-rounded ones; then that trend passes off and they want the specialized/obsessive ones. First they want the highest possible test scores; then they’re saying test scores matter less than community involvement; then they’re seem to have forgotten about community involvement and they’re looking for leadership. Who knows what they’ll be looking for next? It was a little upsetting to think of all the parents forcing their children into unwanted extracurriculars because that was the right thing when THEY went to college, only to find out they’d inadvertently made their child a LESS desirable candidate for the current trends.
I panicked a bit about “Then how DO we know what to prepare them for??” until I finally came back to that many-times-reached conclusion that THIS is EXACTLY why we DON’T try to do that. We let them do their thing, and either it’s in fashion at the college or it isn’t, but at least they won’t have wasted time doing things they don’t want to do in order to make themselves WORSE candidates. If the college they wanted to go to doesn’t want them with their own abilities and interests and inclinations, it wouldn’t be a good fit anyway. It’s the same as finding friends, or romance: we don’t think “How do I make myself into the right sort of person for that other person?” Instead, we’re supposed to focus on finding the person who’s a good fit for us as we are, so we’ll work together naturally instead of by force.
Isn’t Admission a good book? And the scenes from the movie that have to do with young uber-candidates is SO FUNNY! And the scene where the young man does ventriloquism, unabashedly, and Portia is embarrassed for him (but why?) LOVE.
I have an 8th grader this year, going to a well-regarded public high school next year. Boarding school has never crossed my mind. I can’t even conceive of her being on her own yet and she has no desire for that either, which helps. I think about college a lot though, and worry mostly about paying for it without putting myself and my husband or my daughter into a lifetime of penury as a result.
One of my best friends in junior high went to boarding school in high school and I was so jealous – I would have loved to have had the opportunity! Mind you, I was stuck out in the country, no car, hour-long bus ride each way to school and back in a big yellow bus, and was at a school with very limited options for the very few “gifted” students like me. If I was living in the city going to the same school as many of my friends (amazing, huge gifted program! language courses like Latin available! rowing team! etc.), I probably wouldn’t have felt that same LET ME OUT feeling.
I went to a five-week in-residence science nerd summer school one summer and it was the best summer of my teen years, hands-down.
As a former college admissions officer, I always feel like it is helpful for families to remember/realize that the VAST majority of schools accept all or nearly all of their applicants. So much of what we talk about in the media/pop culture are the admissions stuff related to the most highly selective schools, which is about, I don’t know, maybe 200 schools out of 3500.
If your child has a 2.5 high school GPA or higher and nothing else (no extra curriculars, sports, volunteering, etc) there are literally thousands of schools that would accept him. Bump that up to a 3.00 or higher and almost every where will accept him.
I think many families don’t realize that, for a lot of schools, the admissions officer will only see the applications from the VERY top and VERY bottom of the pool. For example, when I worked at the University of Arizona (a solid school with some good programs), I would get about 10,000 applications from my territory. Probably 90% of them would be automatically admitted by the computer, which assessed if they had completed the required classes from high school with a C or better. I never ever saw those. I saw the ones who didn’t meet the autoadmit criteria and the ones that were so high that they were scholarship eligible for our biggest money awards (about 75% of scholarship awarding was done by the computer as well).
I could go on and on about the admissions stuff but, bottom line, don’t stress about the activities stuff. Encourage kids to do the things they are interested in and keep their grades solid. The end.
Swistle’s post and this comment were really nice to read. My son’s a junior and I have to admit I am really starting to freak out about college applications, scholarships, test scores, etc. I keep thinking that he hasn’t done enough, join a club or something, run for an office! But at the same time, I don’t see how he’d have any time. He runs in some capacity on a team year-round, takes high-level classes with lots of homework and is using up most all of his spare time as it is. It’s nice to hear that that will be enough.
And the test scores! Back when I took the SAT, 1200 out of the 1600 ( a mere 75%!) was considered great and qualified me for all the scholarships at the schools I applied to. Now all the kids want 2200 of 2400 or they’re disappointed. I don’t know if the grading has changed that much, if it’s just internal pressure to score that high or if that’s what schools want now.
Thank you, Wendy!!
This is VERY reassuring! Thanks so much for this comment as it has eased my mind quite a bit.
As another mom of a junior, this comment gives me a huge amount of relief. Thank you!!
I went to boarding school, one of those world class ones that always shows up in the top twenty lists. It’s probably advantageous to some kids, and may have tossed me up into a higher SES circle than I would have been in before.
But mostly, 14 was really young to be on my own, away from my support network. The teacher student ratio was 12:1, which is bomb ass for learning school stuff, but not a parenting ratio… unless of course, you have twelve teenage kids.
My mom regrets sending me because we lost those years together. And the thing is, we couldn’t ever make it up, because after high school was college, and then I was an adult. I guess what I’m muddling around to say is that going to boarding school is really leaving home at 14.
I went to boarding school for high school but only because we were living in another (developing) country at the time and out-of-country boarding school was really the only solid option for our education. I loved it! It was a fantastic school, great staff, tons of activities, amazing friends… But would I – living in N. America – consider it for my kids? No. Like you, it isn’t even on my radar as a possibility for them.
I liked Wendy’s advice: “Encourage kids to do the things they are interested in and keep their grades solid. The end.”
I used to joke that I was looking into boarding school for kindergarten but man, it was just that. I knew some kids who went to boarding school when they graduated from the private k-8 day school where I worked, but that’s it. I just would never do it unless there was another reason, like rehab or something.
Growing up, I knew a few kids who went to boarding school. I hope they enjoyed it, but . . .
Most of them went off to boarding school after 10th grade. Even though they were coming from an excellent public school, their boarding schools required them to repeat 10th grade. One kid returned home after two years because his family lost its money. Our high school did not consider him a year ahead, so all his grademates were now a year younger than he was; his friends had graduated.
Some kids went because of their parents social aspirations. I can’t figure out if it’s better to get away from parents who view you as a vessel of all their hopes and dreams or if it just creates an irreparable rift.
Some kids went because they had alienated so many of the kids at school and needed new friends. But I assume three years is plenty of time to alienate everyone at your new school, and what then?
And honestly, in the long term, I doubt it made any difference –good or bad — for most if not any of the kids who went.
Interesting that it’s so common in your friend circle! (Well, two instances seems unusually high to me, anyway.) I never encountered anyone who had attended boarding school until I got to college. It was an Ivy League college, but even among those students, it wasn’t all that common — I knew maybe 3-4 people who had attended one of the very fancy prep boarding schools. My sister went to a different Ivy League college, and she knew a lot of people who went to boarding school, so they are definitely feeders into the top colleges.
But I can’t imagine leaving home at 14. It was hard enough for me to leave at 17 for college! I definitely wouldn’t have wanted to leave my family for high school.
I honestly and in all seriousness did not even know boarding school was still an option in these modern times. I always figured it was something that was done years ago but no longer exists. I can’t imagine not being at home with my parents as a child; I would not have succeeded at boarding school. Nor can I imagine being away from my kids (before the time when I will want them to leave the house for college). It suddenly feels like the world has morphed into this strange alternate reality where boarding schools are still a thing.
I’ve never heard of Admissions but I’m adding it to my to-read pile. I went to a top 10 (by US News and World Reports standards…although now it seems to have fallen to more like top 20, interesting) college and my husband is in the military. Our kids are still really young but we always say that military school and community college followed by university would be a great option for our kids (assuming they are the kind of kids that aren’t top of their class and/or don’t really know what kind of degree they want going in). Although in my head I agree with my husband and then think “but of course our little geniuses will go to my alma mater.” HA.
Even at my college I knew very few kids who went to boarding schools; I think the only kids I did seemed to be of the ‘problems at home’ variety and not of the ‘we throw money to the wind’ variety.
I went to boarding school. So did my parents and both of my brothers. It is completely NORMAL in my family – like the husband of the first friend you mentioned.
I recognize that it is NOT normal. But when it’s normal, it really is just that. Normal.
My favorite question people ask is always, “What was it like not living with your parents when you were in high school?” And I always answer…”Well, what was it like living with yours?” I didn’t live at home. I don’t have a frame of reference for comparison. But I KNOW I have fantastic parents and a great relationship with them to this day.
I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED board school. It was the best and most formative experience of my life. My children (4th and 2nd grades now), will have the choice of going to the same school, or going to a school locally, and both of them actively talk about going to boarding school. They have visited my alma mater with me. They have older cousins (my brother’s kids) who have/do go, too.
Not all boarding schools are ELITE. I was in school with a fair number of international students (AWESOME multicultural experience!), and with students whose parents were employed overseas but wanted a United States school for their kids. It was not necessarily a school for the upperclass.
I left home at 13 (I was young for my grade), and the first couple weeks were definitely weird. But then it was normal. And then it was the best and most formative experience in my life.
It’s not for everyone, but it certainly was awesome for me. And for my two brothers. And for our parents before us. It made us closer, not more distant. It gave us all a tremendous confidence building experience under the guidance of fantastic teachers and dorm counselors and friends who were all in the same boarding-school boat.
I can’t wait for my kids to have those same experiences if they choose. They’re going to love it!
I feel the need to take a Xanax after reading this! My daughter is 14 and while we JOKE about sending her to boarding school I guess, like you, I never realized it was a possibility. But just knowing that I COULD send her away (and sometimes it’s SO tempting), even knowing that I WOULDN’T fills me with a bit of dread!
Wow. Around here the only kids who go to boarding school are the delinquent boys whose parents can’t handle them. They end up in the military school in the north end of the state, and it is one tiny, tiny step from there to reform school. I cannot imagine missing those years with my Boys, but I’m fascinated by Bethtastic’s perspective.
Have you read Prep? I know it’s fiction but it’s what I think of when people talk about boarding school. I don’t think I’ll mention this to my husband because my oldest (7 yo) would likely end up on a few dozen waiting lists. I am like you: I never would have thought of sending them.
Yes, I’ve read it! It was the kind of book where I completely love it AND found it too upsetting to contemplate re-reading!
My son is a Jr in high school and its a boarding school. I never in a million years thought I’d be sending him to a boarding school. It was hands down, the very best thing we ever did. He LOVES it so much. His is a christian boarding school.
How did we decided to send him there? When he was in 8th grade all of his friends were deciding which high school to go to, we have three in our area. Turns out they were all going to different schools. We had heard about this school through our church. We took him up there for a weekend and he loved it, so we decided to give it a try, telling him if he hated it he could come home. We didn’t want him to feel abandoned.
Honestly the first 6 weeks were terrible. I kept thinking of all the things I was missing. It was bad. I found out later it was really hard for him too! But after that, he just loved it. He is thriving. He is getting opportunities he never would have had at public school. My son is an average student so it’s not elite or anything.
Turns out, I am not missing much. We see him every three to four weeks. We talk to him every day. We don’t miss nagging him to get his homework done. We don’t miss nagging him to do his chores. I feel our relationship is closer because we enjoy our time together and don’t have to worry about all that other stuff. He has such great role models there. He’s only a Jr. but he’s in charge of the freshman dorm hall, he’s becoming a leader himself. HE takes care of himself, laundry, making sure he eats, cleaning his room, getting his homework done and so on. He has to get himself to class on time and to his sport activities and other things on time. I’m not there to nag him. He learned pretty quickly that Mom wasn’t always going to be there to save him. BUT we are pretty connected with the deans, so we know what’s going on with him.
I would like to add, I didn’t realize what people actually thought of boarding school until I sent my boy there. People assume he was a bad kid and that is why we sent him there. Instead of telling people he’s in boarding school, we tell them he’s at an academy.
Sorry this is so long….I guess I am pretty passionate about this! Just so you know, I have an older daughter that already graduated. She did not attend a boarding school. So I have experience with both. Honestly the boarding school was the best decision we ever made!
Oh and the empty nest was hard at first but now….we love it! Food doesn’t get eaten. Stuff doesn’t get left out unless hubby or I leave it. Things are exactly the way I left them.
When the boy comes home on breaks, it’s lovely! But when he leaves, it’s really nice too!
This is fascinating! I have never considered it, never, and I can’t imagine a scenario where I would be anywhere near ready to send my 14 YO away. I do have a peripheral friend who is from Sweden, and she has six kids or so, and they all go (far) away to a Lutheran boarding school. She goes to pick them up at Christmas. She is very nonchalant about it, and apparently she left Sweden to attend this school at a young age, so to her it’s no biggie. I can imagine there are some very real benefits to sending a child to a school like this, but selfishly I would want to have that extra time with them. My kids would probably think it would be just like Hogwart’s and would beg me to go. But look at all the trouble that Harry got in! No way. :)
My husband had a very dysfunctional family (actually I should say has, but he is no longer in contact with his parents) and used to fantasize about going to boarding school, but no such luck. I will say that I read dozens of British boarding-school books when I was a kid, and it was just the way Tayna and Bethtastic describe it: leadership experiences, friendships, getting yourself to class, no parents around to nag you. Kind of like college, but early. It always sounded idyllic.
It is absolutely 100% not on my radar. I would never, ever have thought of it if you hadn’t posted this. Never.
Fascinating. I too had always assumed that to the extent this still existed it was a very 1%er thing.
On another note, Swistle, I would love to read more posts and get more peeks into your general philosophies of childrearing. I think of all the personal bloggers I read, you are the one with the oldest kids, and although (and rightly so of course) that makes a lot of the fun detailed personal stories go away, it also gives you a certain authority to say “we have done it this way … here’s how it has played out over time.” I am fascinated by how families put together their parenting philosophies right now.
I never thought about boarding school …. until we started sending our older daughter to a local private school last fall. She is thriving there, and it is light years better for her than her (well-regarded) public school. Her private school goes from k-8 so the obvious question is: where will she go for high school? It turns out that about a half of this school’s graduates go to boarding high schools. I was stunned by that number. I can’t imagine I will ever make that choice, but since just a year ago I had never considered sending a kid to private school at all, I’ve learned to never say never.
I grew up in New England and boarding school was not that uncommon. My mom went when she was 11! I find that shockingly young, but she and her sister and lots of people in her social group did the same. To be honest, I would have LOVED to go to boarding school for HS. Looking back, I think it would have resulted in my relationship with my mother being much better for a large chunk of my life. My mom was ok with the idea, but my dad flatly refused probably because where he came from no one went to boarding school. Instead I went to day private school. Where I live now it’s virtually unheard of and I would really miss my son, so it’s not even on the radar.
On the college part — I live in the sort of place where I see kids (and their parents) agonizing over which school they should go to (including, can get in to, and so forth), and it has always been thus (I grew up where I live now). And I remember my high-school classmates who were “stars” who went on to live less than star-struck lives (and some non-stars who are now doing delightfully well. And so on.). And. I tell everyone (and I believe) — where you (get in to and) go to school is much less important than what you do while you are there.
Full stop.
This, absolutely so much this. And the same thing whether you even go to college at all or not.
My dad’s family is a boarding school family–he and all his siblings went, and one sister then sent her kids. For my cousins, one key thing was that it wasn’t a surprise. At all. They had grown up hearing about how great boarding school is, so by eighth grade, they were totally prepared. I mean, American kids leave home at eighteen just because that’s the standard, so having the norm be different in your family isn’t that difficult.
Oh also, boarding school was the trade off in my dad’s family for living in a semi-rural area with awful schools, but low taxes. My parents then paid absurd northern NJ property taxes (like, 12k per year crazy) in order for my sister and I to be able to go to great public schools–me to a science magnet, and her to the local school. At those tax rates, for eighteen years, boarding school for four years each might have actually saved money!
I too went to boarding school, and in my case, I loved it. I went first as a day student, begged my parents to let me board and started boarding junior year. I had a great experience there and really grew into my own person. I was and am close to my parents.
I will likely send my kids to the same school when they get older, but as day students, because I would miss them too much. I might change my mind if they put me in the same position I put my parents in.
Boarding school and private schools are the norm in my family but not my husband’s. For our kids, it is considered, but not an automatic. Like public schools, some of them are good and some of them aren’t. I think the underlying difference between the two is not the curriculum, or the class size, or the quality of the instruction, or even their admissions process. It is that in private schools, the parents are essentially customers, and therefore the responsibility to the individual child is greater.
I have a professional background in college admission and will second Wendy’s comments – most colleges in America admit most students who apply. It’s true that the most famous colleges anduniversities are more selective than they have ever been, but that’s a tiny sample. I so appreciate Swistle’s description of working with a child to find what they love, then finding a college that fits them best. There are so many great schools out there, there will be multiple places where they can be happy and learn a huge amount.
For those who are interested in the link between college and different definitions of success, there is a new book you might enjoy – “Where You Go is Not Who You’ll Be” by NYT columnist Frank Bruni.
I always joked that I would send my teenagers to boarding school because I remember what I was like at that age and I don’t want to live that again.
Reality is though that because of the city we have chosen to live in we might very well be sending our children to boarding school. The only catholic high school is co-ed and those I have seen who went there all seem to have issues. Most likely the boy will board at the boys school an hour and a half away and the girl will board at the co-ed school in the same city my parents live in.
I went to a public gifted and talented boarding school, IASMH, in Muncie, Indiana my junior and senior year. It was free except for a book fee when I went, but I was in the 4th class to go there so state funding was robust at the time. I don’t know whether it costs now but considering how the last couple Indiana governors have gutted education I suspect there are a lot more fees and/or tuition now. Kids came from all over the state of Indiana and the focus was rural or inner city kids whose high schools did not offer AP classes. My experience was both very very good and very very bad. Many of my classmates now at age 38 are titans of tech & academia. They have verified twitter accounts, run huge law firms, run for congress, etc. Also a lot of the women are very thoughtful homeschooling parents. It makes my life immeasurably better to know my classmates and share those two amazing & horrible years. My time there was both amazing because the diversity of classwork was better than most colleges. I thrived in the classroom. But many of us were so depressed. So so depressed and there was so little help. 4 out of 119 in my class killed themselves during those 2 years. One of the boys who killed himself tried to kill others at the same time. Drugs and alcohol were so easy to get because we were on Ball State’s campus and the RAs weren’t very nosy so long as you followed the most basic rules. I know things have changed significantly there in the last twenty years, and I know some of the classes ahead of me are now sending their children. If my sons were interested in going to boarding school I would look long and hard at the social and support aspects of the school. Long and hard.
The idea of boarding school is so foreign to me that I basically think of it as something that English novelists made up.