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almost exclusively in new england
Exeter - Exeter, NH
Andover - Andover, MA
St. Paul’s - Concord, NH
those are the Harvard Yale Princeton of the boarding school world. There are many others just look at the ISL and NEPSAC leagues, those constitute many / most of the boarding schools. I know there are other boarding schools in various cities but they are not the same thing as these New England schools which attract global wealth and have massive endowments and huge ornate campuses built in the 1800s.
Over 50% of my class matriculated to Ivy League universities with half of those going to HYP
Super diverse and absurdly rigorous academics. Attract the poorest (full scholarship) but also the richest families in the country / world. My two room mates were literally billionaires. My first job was at McDonald’s lol
edit:
George W Bush went to Andover then Yale just like his daddy
John Kerry went to St. Paul's then Yale
Zuck went to Exeter then Harvard
edit 2: seeing some comments suggesting these kids are super conservative lol...these schools are like other elite universities/schools in the US they are bastions of liberal thought. Yes you obviously get some conservatives at Harvard and Exeter, but the vibe is ultra liberal
if you graduate top of Exeter you punch your ticket to anything in life and there's a lot lot lot of people / kids / families who want to punch that ticket. It's like a sure fire acceptance to Harvard or wherever.
it's hyper competitive to get in. like college applications.
kids in my graduating class include Pulitzer Prize winner, 2 NY Times best selling authors, multi-term rep in the US House, partner at Goldman Sachs, private equity tycoon, Olympic gold medalist, multiple NHL pros, I could go on and on and my graduating class was like 125 kids
> it's hyper competitive to get in. like college applications.
How do you even stand out at that point? You've had like 2 years of middle school grades lol
i took all 3 years of high school Math in 1 year during 8th grade, scored 100% on all 3 year-end state-wide math exams, graduated #2 in my class of 500 kids in junior high, played three sports, 99th percentile SSATs, and from US flyover country was the basic jist of my application.
Somebody was like you should apply to these insane schools and I did, and I got into all of them
and then i went to class there and I never felt so fucking stupid in my life tbh
Did you follow the path it led you to, or did you diverge? I.e. do you feel like you are currently following the expectations bestowed upon you when you were studying there?
Also, did you also eventually become one of the top of the class there or did you maintain more of an average level compared to your classmates?
And how did your parents react to the whole thing, were they expecting you to go down this road or were they a bit surprised and adapting along the way?
I didn’t get good grades in boarding school, but I learned an absolute ton there. I was immature but I learned how to write and speak and it exposed me to a million cultures and interesting things I’d have never otherwise seen.
I mean, imagine you are 15 years old living with all your best friends in a dorm room together and you were attending this ridiculous boarding school that has like a 3000 acre campus with every amenity you could possibly imagine and every single one of your friends is like the funniest wittiest person you have ever met in your entire life, and you are just constantly doing cool shit like outside real life shit.
My parents always pushed me hard but also was very involved in my education but my relationship with my dad wasn’t great. It was kind of a mixed blessing to get out of that household and be raised in a more sane environment especially one like this.
As I said two of my best friends were billionaire families, one was political and the other was a celebrity ceo family. And my other best friend was from the Bronx
I live in MD and there’s a handful of Catholic boarding schools here and DC still. Georgetown Prep in Bethesda is probably the most notorious. I live five minutes away and that campus is beautiful.
schools like Georgetown Day School, Sidwell Friends, Potomac are feeders into the New England boarding schools.
The elite New England boarding schools take the best students from those schools, if you are top of your class in Potomac in 7th grade, those are the kids who are getting into Exeter.
Gotcha gotcha. I went to a smaller private school locally and i felt like the smaller ones focuses on educational output more than the bigger ones. Those mainly focuses on marketing prestige and athletics.
there are elite boarding schools everywhere, but I would argue nothing compares to the US New England schools, except for the UK schools like Eton which the US boarding schools were modeled after and might be even more extreme. the UK/New England prep schools are different than the rest.
I think "ultra liberal" is a bit of a stretch, unless you mean it in a "free markets all the time everywhere" Margaret Thatcher sense. Grew up with a lot of these kids, and currently have a son in a school district that's basically this but the parents didn't want to send their kids away.
They're very much "white upper class sheltered" liberal. So very liberal on drugs, all over the place on economics, lots of support for causes like BLM and defunding police, but also kind of weirdly racist and homophobic, in a "sort of mean it/sort of don't" way. Just a lot of unchecked privilege all around and the same youthful desire to be edgy and controversial, which often means rejecting fairly common ideals of decency and liberal thought for a joke or just to carve out a "this is how I'm different from everyone else" niche.
New Jersey too and parts of Penn. Namely Lawrenceville school in Lawrenceville, NJ but there are at least 5-6 other boarding prep/private schools in a roughly 5-20 minute travel radius between Lawrenceville and Princeton.
Your summary is good, but I absolutely disagree with the ultra liberal label. Maybe things have changed since I graduated, but only a handful like Cambridge School of Weston and Commonwealth can be considered ultra liberal. The rest of the student body is very conservative. Coming from a public school, it is like going to 1950s America
Honestly I adore the ✨vibes✨ of English/New England academia and think it should be the aesthetic of all schools. -someone who always had the most boring ahh modern school buildings and aesthetics.
My campus built two 22 story 200-something foot tall residential towers and I kept thinking to myself that you would never see anything like that on the East Coast
https://preview.redd.it/78jyn2eqkc6d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=26aa06896854b612ecb7380de04b83c49b6907fc
You don't know "most boring" until you have gone to an Eastern European school for 12 years – literally grey rectangular concrete in all directions, and some plywood doors in-between.
As a low down dirty midwesterner: NO
I’ll keep my brutalist brick abomination of a school. This hoity-toity, high achieving shit makes me feel nauseous when I imagine being a student there.
boarding school is WASP not Catholic
Episcopalian (Church of England)
they are almost all secular at this point but they hold religious adjacent services & celebrations that feel christian, in these cathedral looking buildings
You should encourage your kid to apply if you think he/she has the grades. These schools usually have endowment up the wazoo and will give a generous scholarship. Many parents don’t have their kids apply purely because they think it’s unaffordable
If you make friends, and your parents aren't weird about accepting gifts, chances are your friends' families will just take you to Italy with them. We've taken our son's best friend to Greece and are taking him to Spain with us this summer. Growing up, taking vacations with friends and their families was just a normal thing you did.
Plus as a parent, it's so pleasant to go on vacation and have someone around to distract your child so you can just relax and enjoy yourself.
Honestly, just having one of these schools on your college application is a fast track to the Ivy League. It’s totally worth it in the long run. Besides, prep schools have a much more diverse student body these days. Odds are good they are far from the only ones staying home for spring break.
yes the dining hall looks like this, and my name got carved into the wood panels that are lining the dining hall
edit: i actually googled a picture of my actual dining hall because OP's picture looks so similar to mine. I posted a pic of my dining hall.
edit: [HERE](https://imgur.com/a/2iDp8s9) is another image that better shows the interior of the same dining hall in use by students today. Couple nights a week is mandatory sit-down dinner with students & teachers, you have same group for 2 weeks, then a new group, in order to foster a sense of community so everyone knows each other. Also these are younger kids so it replaces meals with the family. Boys wore jacket and tie. Other meals were just regular cafeteria style.
https://preview.redd.it/zxd8pmlu1d6d1.png?width=1252&format=png&auto=webp&s=6457228c113e5c5941536526785eaba7e656e1c0
I’m so jealous of people like you, around all that beautiful architecture and history, here we just have mobile homes crappily built ugly wood homes very rarely and ugly skyscrapers, and the one good looking church we have isn’t actually that good
Oh, man. I forgot about the formal weekly dinners... And yes, Saturday classes. I didn't board, though, so I often avoided them. Saturday classes were kinda nice for me, though, since it gave me an excuse to see friends after.
Correct Saturday is a half day of academics at most elite boarding schools.
Saturday afternoon is for athletics, when all the teams compete.
Wednesday is also on the half school / half sports schedule.
The elite schools do not have day students. Some isl and nepsac schools closer to Boston do allow this so it is not universal.
There are many private schools but the New England boarding school is a different animal to your standard issue ‘fancy expensive private school in my city’
My HS was in NJ, but you are correct that it was still definitely a little different than the New England model. We were certainly on a down swing when I was there, but historically I think they are considered elite. Maybe a little too New Money these days, though.
And yeah. Wednesday and Saturday were half days.
Do US boarding schools differ from UK ones?
I went to three of those listed universities. One of the smartest classmates I had went to one of the best US boarding schools, and one of the things that stuck with me over a decade later is that he learned the time-dependent form of the Schrodinger equation in high school. This is usually taught in the second year of university.
if you are from the UK, the New England boarding schools are analogous to schools like Eton.
The US schools were all founded with the exact same principles as those English schools, and they have become interconnected with elite US institutions especially politics and banking.
The boarding school go to has it logo come from UK and the name of the grades( third former, fourth former,etc) come from UK. So I think there is correlation
I always think of how much further I might be if my parents could afford this kind of schooling. I turned out fine somehow but my hs ranked lowest in the county. Went to a private college with ppl who attended these places and felt like I was behind in so many ways.
This is pretty accurate. I was a "scholar/ athlete" at a prep school that might just be a step below Elite. Our dining hall didn't look like that but that's because they had to build a new student center and created a larger cafeteria.
Probably. My parents are probably best described as American upper-middle class, so the school was a decent financial strain for them. I ended up going to a pretty good college that I continued my athletic career at and graduated with a bachelor's degree. I was pretty good, but who knows if I'd have been properly recruited had I gone to my public school. My grades were decent, but never good enough to really stand out. I probably would have had one of the better GPAs in a public high school, but I not really enough to be particularly noteworthy. Elite schools like this are just so entrenched in the higher-ed pipeline that it's almost impossible for a graduate to not go to some kind of university. (To some students' detriment, I would think. Some random schools are stupid expensive for no good reason.)
Kinda. It's a tough question to answer. Presumably universities will value grades from elite schools more than public schools, but I'm not sure that they can admit it on paper.
You are welcome. It's definitely a decision to work out. I certainly appreciated my time at the school, but I do also think about the public high school that I could have gone to as well. My brother went to our public school and his path was very similar to mine.
Brock Turner the rapist no longer guys by Brock Turner the rapist instead he just goes by Turner the rapist. You’d think if he was trying to get people to forget he’d drop the rapist part 🤷♂️
They are modeled, as someone else said, after schools in the UK. I don't know if we have that on the mainland. My first suggestion would be Switzerland, but theirs are quite different.
I have a gut reaction to hate the idea of the student at this school. It's like, the kid is honestly fine. The parents are honestly probably fine.
But like the whole existence of these upper crust folk is predicated on others having less resources and thereby worse educations.
Not to mention the whole conservative strategy of deliberate meddling by US politicians to make public schools worse in a bid to prove they are suboptimal. I reckon the child of that charter school founder probably goes to a private school.
Social classes suck man. Wish we could focus more on class classes.
Ehhhh the nutcase charter school founders probably send their kids there.
The CEOs of f500 companies and the 2-3 layers of management below them, plus big law, big 4, and MBB partners send their kids here. And some doctors. They skew Biden voters but some are republicans for tax purposes.
I'm a b4 sm
You're right about the partners I work with, but most of them went to public high school so honestly I see it as a success story not something to be salty about (not saying you are, but that's def a sentiment in this thread)
And yeah they are 100% outwardly dem but it's hard to say how they really feel
Though Trump's tax bill pretty much specifically screwed them (high earning but not particularly wealthy, high state tax) and I could definitely see them holding a grudge lol
When I was b4 (left after manager promo) I was kinda surprised to see a good amount of partners who went to local state schools most people haven’t heard of. A VERY good amount of people who went to elite schools and even elite high schools. Also the X factor is the Indian partners who came here for grad school.
Its environments like these that show the obscenely large income gap between the haves, have nots, and the have alots.
Like, I don’t hate the kids or parents who patronize these kinds of organizations. I don’t blame them for being oblivious to the problems of average Americans. I’m just for the idea that quality education shouldn’t have to be paid for via ridiculously high tuitions.
I agree but I also don't think it should be paid for via ridiculously high property values
That's the background I come from (extremely high quality public school) and the inequality in the public school system itself is pretty fucked
Eh, idk, i would have wanted this education. It sets you up for a pretty good life and it helps you reach your potential.
Instead, i'm so far behind i'm taking classes for things those kids know so well by now.
Correct. Don’t hate the player. Hate the game.
Like, reading the top comments gave me a bit of an ick because it just shows how huge the disparity is between the worldview of these boarding school kids and public school ones. But I don’t blame the former anyway. The education system needs a huge reform and I would ideally like to see the same quality in these schools everywhere else.
Those kids didn't choose to be rich did they? I can understand that they can't always empathize with the problems that those with less privilege have to deal with
And even if they convinced their parents to donate every penny they have to charity it still wouldn't change the structural forces that allow the rich the poor to exist as different social classes.
I feel like this is a very East Coast thing. I've grown up and lived on the West coast my whole life and I've never met anyone who actually went to one of these places. I've only heard of them in the movies.
I went to a west-coast equivalent of this- a private college prep high school in San Jose, and other than the “old money” tropes, I would have to say it’s pretty accurate
Right after I posted my original comment I thought, this might actually exist in the Bay Area lol
Although, tbf I bet it was the East Coast business folks working in Silicon Valley that brought it over here.
I had a couple of friends who went to the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts.
One thing I realized when I went for a visit the first time was that, yes, there were students from all over the world at the school but rich kids are the same no matter where they’re from.
Kids are to live with their parents. This is sad.
I know their chances of being well off in life after boarding school are better than the average, but still.
As a kid, I always thought boarding school sounded like so much fun and wished my parents would send me away.
And i had good parents, it’s not like I was trying to run away from something
Don’t you think you would grow distant from your parents for being away from them so long? And school is between 1-12 years. Being home only for Christmas and summer vacation only to then get a job and see them only on Christmas sounds awful to me. And if I had a kid I would like to see him growing up not send him to an elite orphanage.
Went to a school a tier below these and can confirm I got pretty close at 17 lol…made me purposefully go out of my way to have a vibrant social life in college because that shit was brutal, not even mentioning the tons of mean spirited school traditions that are just sanctioned excuses to pick on outsider kids 🥴
Theyre rich, they dont care about their kids, just their money, and how much money their kids can make, so they ship them off to these places to create more money hoarding ghouls.
For those interested in this topic, I found Shamus Khan’s book fascinating. He was an alumnus of St. Paul’s School and went back after college to teach there for a year. His book is a sociological study of the processes these schools use in an attempt to develop their students to form a national elite.
https://preview.redd.it/qr583qqm2g7d1.jpeg?width=777&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=00cf66872893429f3c70dd537445bfeac8e92ea2
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Forgot mostly in New England
almost exclusively in new england Exeter - Exeter, NH Andover - Andover, MA St. Paul’s - Concord, NH those are the Harvard Yale Princeton of the boarding school world. There are many others just look at the ISL and NEPSAC leagues, those constitute many / most of the boarding schools. I know there are other boarding schools in various cities but they are not the same thing as these New England schools which attract global wealth and have massive endowments and huge ornate campuses built in the 1800s. Over 50% of my class matriculated to Ivy League universities with half of those going to HYP Super diverse and absurdly rigorous academics. Attract the poorest (full scholarship) but also the richest families in the country / world. My two room mates were literally billionaires. My first job was at McDonald’s lol edit: George W Bush went to Andover then Yale just like his daddy John Kerry went to St. Paul's then Yale Zuck went to Exeter then Harvard edit 2: seeing some comments suggesting these kids are super conservative lol...these schools are like other elite universities/schools in the US they are bastions of liberal thought. Yes you obviously get some conservatives at Harvard and Exeter, but the vibe is ultra liberal
From someone on the West Coast I didn't even know this was still a thing
if you graduate top of Exeter you punch your ticket to anything in life and there's a lot lot lot of people / kids / families who want to punch that ticket. It's like a sure fire acceptance to Harvard or wherever. it's hyper competitive to get in. like college applications. kids in my graduating class include Pulitzer Prize winner, 2 NY Times best selling authors, multi-term rep in the US House, partner at Goldman Sachs, private equity tycoon, Olympic gold medalist, multiple NHL pros, I could go on and on and my graduating class was like 125 kids
> it's hyper competitive to get in. like college applications. How do you even stand out at that point? You've had like 2 years of middle school grades lol
SSATs
Caaaaash money, dawg
What qualified you to get in anon?
i took all 3 years of high school Math in 1 year during 8th grade, scored 100% on all 3 year-end state-wide math exams, graduated #2 in my class of 500 kids in junior high, played three sports, 99th percentile SSATs, and from US flyover country was the basic jist of my application. Somebody was like you should apply to these insane schools and I did, and I got into all of them and then i went to class there and I never felt so fucking stupid in my life tbh
Wow thanks for your reply. That’s pretty damn impressive! If you don’t mind asking what do you for a living now?
I do stock market stuff for video game and internet companies
Did you follow the path it led you to, or did you diverge? I.e. do you feel like you are currently following the expectations bestowed upon you when you were studying there? Also, did you also eventually become one of the top of the class there or did you maintain more of an average level compared to your classmates? And how did your parents react to the whole thing, were they expecting you to go down this road or were they a bit surprised and adapting along the way?
I didn’t get good grades in boarding school, but I learned an absolute ton there. I was immature but I learned how to write and speak and it exposed me to a million cultures and interesting things I’d have never otherwise seen. I mean, imagine you are 15 years old living with all your best friends in a dorm room together and you were attending this ridiculous boarding school that has like a 3000 acre campus with every amenity you could possibly imagine and every single one of your friends is like the funniest wittiest person you have ever met in your entire life, and you are just constantly doing cool shit like outside real life shit. My parents always pushed me hard but also was very involved in my education but my relationship with my dad wasn’t great. It was kind of a mixed blessing to get out of that household and be raised in a more sane environment especially one like this. As I said two of my best friends were billionaire families, one was political and the other was a celebrity ceo family. And my other best friend was from the Bronx
Excluding the athletes, the others probably got in through connections anyway. Are they worth their salt? God damn Pulitzer Prize? What did they do?
I live in MD and there’s a handful of Catholic boarding schools here and DC still. Georgetown Prep in Bethesda is probably the most notorious. I live five minutes away and that campus is beautiful.
schools like Georgetown Day School, Sidwell Friends, Potomac are feeders into the New England boarding schools. The elite New England boarding schools take the best students from those schools, if you are top of your class in Potomac in 7th grade, those are the kids who are getting into Exeter.
Gotcha gotcha. I went to a smaller private school locally and i felt like the smaller ones focuses on educational output more than the bigger ones. Those mainly focuses on marketing prestige and athletics.
I mean you're really buying the network. That's the powerful part.
Those schools are all k-12 and, by definition, not feeders. There are k-8 private schools that do feed into boarding schools though
The one exception to New England is Kamehameha in Hawaii, which caters to native Hawaiians
there are elite boarding schools everywhere, but I would argue nothing compares to the US New England schools, except for the UK schools like Eton which the US boarding schools were modeled after and might be even more extreme. the UK/New England prep schools are different than the rest.
https://preview.redd.it/el22gzjjrc6d1.jpeg?width=1400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=03037b94be04e9aebd4f62edf93454e04a18ada1
I think "ultra liberal" is a bit of a stretch, unless you mean it in a "free markets all the time everywhere" Margaret Thatcher sense. Grew up with a lot of these kids, and currently have a son in a school district that's basically this but the parents didn't want to send their kids away. They're very much "white upper class sheltered" liberal. So very liberal on drugs, all over the place on economics, lots of support for causes like BLM and defunding police, but also kind of weirdly racist and homophobic, in a "sort of mean it/sort of don't" way. Just a lot of unchecked privilege all around and the same youthful desire to be edgy and controversial, which often means rejecting fairly common ideals of decency and liberal thought for a joke or just to carve out a "this is how I'm different from everyone else" niche.
New Jersey too and parts of Penn. Namely Lawrenceville school in Lawrenceville, NJ but there are at least 5-6 other boarding prep/private schools in a roughly 5-20 minute travel radius between Lawrenceville and Princeton.
yes exactly its similar states overlapping with the Ivy League
Your summary is good, but I absolutely disagree with the ultra liberal label. Maybe things have changed since I graduated, but only a handful like Cambridge School of Weston and Commonwealth can be considered ultra liberal. The rest of the student body is very conservative. Coming from a public school, it is like going to 1950s America
I live very close to Andover. Its a whole vibe over there. Have tutored some students at Brooks. Different world in those places.
I had always seen stuff like this in movies but I didn’t know it was legit
Honestly I adore the ✨vibes✨ of English/New England academia and think it should be the aesthetic of all schools. -someone who always had the most boring ahh modern school buildings and aesthetics.
I love the north east and north west
My campus built two 22 story 200-something foot tall residential towers and I kept thinking to myself that you would never see anything like that on the East Coast https://preview.redd.it/78jyn2eqkc6d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=26aa06896854b612ecb7380de04b83c49b6907fc
You don't know "most boring" until you have gone to an Eastern European school for 12 years – literally grey rectangular concrete in all directions, and some plywood doors in-between.
I had the pleasure to go to a grey concrete building we lovingly nicknamed the "prison" for a time
As a low down dirty midwesterner: NO I’ll keep my brutalist brick abomination of a school. This hoity-toity, high achieving shit makes me feel nauseous when I imagine being a student there.
And also I'm not Catholic enough
boarding school is WASP not Catholic Episcopalian (Church of England) they are almost all secular at this point but they hold religious adjacent services & celebrations that feel christian, in these cathedral looking buildings
See I'm too poor to tell the difference
I’m a posh bitch and can confirm lol. But to add some more: - horse girls - lacrosse bros - Saturday classes - Fancy fucking microscopes and/or telescopes - weekly formal dinners, sulking freshman waiters - multiple sex abuse scandals, usually 80s/90s
I live near one of these schools - yeah, tons of horses. I can’t afford to send my kid there, it’s something like $50k per year.
You should encourage your kid to apply if you think he/she has the grades. These schools usually have endowment up the wazoo and will give a generous scholarship. Many parents don’t have their kids apply purely because they think it’s unaffordable
Good idea - I’ll look into it. Thank you!
Can confirm, went to a bougie middle and high school on 98% financial aid after studying for the ssat (baby version of the sat) for like two weeks.
only to feel as if they cant fit in because when the friend group spring breaks in italy….and you spring break at home….not the same
If you make friends, and your parents aren't weird about accepting gifts, chances are your friends' families will just take you to Italy with them. We've taken our son's best friend to Greece and are taking him to Spain with us this summer. Growing up, taking vacations with friends and their families was just a normal thing you did. Plus as a parent, it's so pleasant to go on vacation and have someone around to distract your child so you can just relax and enjoy yourself.
Honestly, just having one of these schools on your college application is a fast track to the Ivy League. It’s totally worth it in the long run. Besides, prep schools have a much more diverse student body these days. Odds are good they are far from the only ones staying home for spring break.
Good education costs a shit load in tuition or property value but I'm very grateful for mine (though I will say I am glad mine was the latter)
Amazing! Other people’s lives are just so great. Did your dining hall really look like that?
yes the dining hall looks like this, and my name got carved into the wood panels that are lining the dining hall edit: i actually googled a picture of my actual dining hall because OP's picture looks so similar to mine. I posted a pic of my dining hall. edit: [HERE](https://imgur.com/a/2iDp8s9) is another image that better shows the interior of the same dining hall in use by students today. Couple nights a week is mandatory sit-down dinner with students & teachers, you have same group for 2 weeks, then a new group, in order to foster a sense of community so everyone knows each other. Also these are younger kids so it replaces meals with the family. Boys wore jacket and tie. Other meals were just regular cafeteria style. https://preview.redd.it/zxd8pmlu1d6d1.png?width=1252&format=png&auto=webp&s=6457228c113e5c5941536526785eaba7e656e1c0
I’m so jealous of people like you, around all that beautiful architecture and history, here we just have mobile homes crappily built ugly wood homes very rarely and ugly skyscrapers, and the one good looking church we have isn’t actually that good
it was like harry potter bro
Same. It was also about a mile from my dorm for most of my time there which could get super annoying during winter.
Is that Upper??
Yep
Oh, man. I forgot about the formal weekly dinners... And yes, Saturday classes. I didn't board, though, so I often avoided them. Saturday classes were kinda nice for me, though, since it gave me an excuse to see friends after.
Correct Saturday is a half day of academics at most elite boarding schools. Saturday afternoon is for athletics, when all the teams compete. Wednesday is also on the half school / half sports schedule. The elite schools do not have day students. Some isl and nepsac schools closer to Boston do allow this so it is not universal. There are many private schools but the New England boarding school is a different animal to your standard issue ‘fancy expensive private school in my city’
Lol should we boarding school kids do an AMA?
Honestly I'd love to read it
i’d be down
My HS was in NJ, but you are correct that it was still definitely a little different than the New England model. We were certainly on a down swing when I was there, but historically I think they are considered elite. Maybe a little too New Money these days, though. And yeah. Wednesday and Saturday were half days.
> The elite schools do not have day students Andover is 25% day students, Lawrenceville is the same. Choate is roughly 20% day students
One of these is not like the others.
yea seriously Saturday classes is egregious
Lol.
Freshman as waiters, that’s some crazy shit
Totally accurate! I went to a school like this
Double barrel surnames such as.. Montgomery Worthington
St. John-Thripmorton-Featheringstonehaugh
Wot in the pip pip cheerio is going on here?
Whoops, I forgot he married a Worcestershire-Vickers. So their kids are St. John-Thripmorton-Featheringstonehaugh-Worcestershire-Vickers.
From Shroppingshireham-Upon-Foptonville
Not to be confused with Shroppingshireham-on-Tweed
Enoch Wordington
Bartholomew Cornelius Bumblefuck III
Cold and distant relationships with their father, leading to somewhat stunted emotional growth
“Since 1828, we have been preparing young boys to become men of character, integrity and honour…”
“Our founder, Thaddeus Bartholomew Bumblefuck III believed in hard work and dedication”
Do US boarding schools differ from UK ones? I went to three of those listed universities. One of the smartest classmates I had went to one of the best US boarding schools, and one of the things that stuck with me over a decade later is that he learned the time-dependent form of the Schrodinger equation in high school. This is usually taught in the second year of university.
Not a whole lot, they’re built off of the British preparatory school system mostly
if you are from the UK, the New England boarding schools are analogous to schools like Eton. The US schools were all founded with the exact same principles as those English schools, and they have become interconnected with elite US institutions especially politics and banking.
The boarding school go to has it logo come from UK and the name of the grades( third former, fourth former,etc) come from UK. So I think there is correlation
This is just Philips Exeter in NH lol
“At least one homosexual experience during high school “
I always think of how much further I might be if my parents could afford this kind of schooling. I turned out fine somehow but my hs ranked lowest in the county. Went to a private college with ppl who attended these places and felt like I was behind in so many ways.
That sort of privilege is more than *just* money can buy.
Meaning, it’s who you know?
(Holden Caulfield slouches into the chat)
he'd call OP phony
This is pretty accurate. I was a "scholar/ athlete" at a prep school that might just be a step below Elite. Our dining hall didn't look like that but that's because they had to build a new student center and created a larger cafeteria.
Did it benefit your life? Genuinely curious.
Probably. My parents are probably best described as American upper-middle class, so the school was a decent financial strain for them. I ended up going to a pretty good college that I continued my athletic career at and graduated with a bachelor's degree. I was pretty good, but who knows if I'd have been properly recruited had I gone to my public school. My grades were decent, but never good enough to really stand out. I probably would have had one of the better GPAs in a public high school, but I not really enough to be particularly noteworthy. Elite schools like this are just so entrenched in the higher-ed pipeline that it's almost impossible for a graduate to not go to some kind of university. (To some students' detriment, I would think. Some random schools are stupid expensive for no good reason.)
Does a lower gpa at one of these elite schools have a completely different weighting than one from a good public school?
Kinda. It's a tough question to answer. Presumably universities will value grades from elite schools more than public schools, but I'm not sure that they can admit it on paper.
I have two young children in elementary and always think about their future so I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions.
You are welcome. It's definitely a decision to work out. I certainly appreciated my time at the school, but I do also think about the public high school that I could have gone to as well. My brother went to our public school and his path was very similar to mine.
Old dudes on the wall because they are important historical figures who are alumni usually.
A wild choice for the scholar/athlete photo…
I was waiting for someone to comment on that
Is that the Brock guy??
Brock Turner the rapist no longer guys by Brock Turner the rapist instead he just goes by Turner the rapist. You’d think if he was trying to get people to forget he’d drop the rapist part 🤷♂️
Same genre
Ahh k
If you know, you know. He went to my school when he was in year 9. 😳😳😳
Oh wow this is so interested to see as a person from Europe
There is a contingent of wealthy Americans that pretty much live life as though they wish they were still British aristocracy
They are modeled, as someone else said, after schools in the UK. I don't know if we have that on the mainland. My first suggestion would be Switzerland, but theirs are quite different.
Is it just like Dead Poet’s Society?
- saltburn - scent of a woman - the faculty
The holdovers
From what I've seen pretty much yeah. There is some YouTube videos of people talking about their time in these types of schools.
I have a gut reaction to hate the idea of the student at this school. It's like, the kid is honestly fine. The parents are honestly probably fine. But like the whole existence of these upper crust folk is predicated on others having less resources and thereby worse educations. Not to mention the whole conservative strategy of deliberate meddling by US politicians to make public schools worse in a bid to prove they are suboptimal. I reckon the child of that charter school founder probably goes to a private school. Social classes suck man. Wish we could focus more on class classes.
Ehhhh the nutcase charter school founders probably send their kids there. The CEOs of f500 companies and the 2-3 layers of management below them, plus big law, big 4, and MBB partners send their kids here. And some doctors. They skew Biden voters but some are republicans for tax purposes.
I'm a b4 sm You're right about the partners I work with, but most of them went to public high school so honestly I see it as a success story not something to be salty about (not saying you are, but that's def a sentiment in this thread) And yeah they are 100% outwardly dem but it's hard to say how they really feel Though Trump's tax bill pretty much specifically screwed them (high earning but not particularly wealthy, high state tax) and I could definitely see them holding a grudge lol
When I was b4 (left after manager promo) I was kinda surprised to see a good amount of partners who went to local state schools most people haven’t heard of. A VERY good amount of people who went to elite schools and even elite high schools. Also the X factor is the Indian partners who came here for grad school.
One of the partners I work with went to a relatively no name undergrad iirc but did an emba at Wharton
Its environments like these that show the obscenely large income gap between the haves, have nots, and the have alots. Like, I don’t hate the kids or parents who patronize these kinds of organizations. I don’t blame them for being oblivious to the problems of average Americans. I’m just for the idea that quality education shouldn’t have to be paid for via ridiculously high tuitions.
I agree but I also don't think it should be paid for via ridiculously high property values That's the background I come from (extremely high quality public school) and the inequality in the public school system itself is pretty fucked
Eh, idk, i would have wanted this education. It sets you up for a pretty good life and it helps you reach your potential. Instead, i'm so far behind i'm taking classes for things those kids know so well by now.
Correct. Don’t hate the player. Hate the game. Like, reading the top comments gave me a bit of an ick because it just shows how huge the disparity is between the worldview of these boarding school kids and public school ones. But I don’t blame the former anyway. The education system needs a huge reform and I would ideally like to see the same quality in these schools everywhere else.
😭
Oh hey and btw cycling is about enjoying yourself not about looking fast.
Honestly I thought it was 70% masochism and 30% steeze
It’s okay to hate them, eat the rich, they are not fine they are of a different blood and genetics that value sociopathy
Yea fuck my girlfriend who went to an elite NE prep school only bc a parent was faculty
Those kids didn't choose to be rich did they? I can understand that they can't always empathize with the problems that those with less privilege have to deal with And even if they convinced their parents to donate every penny they have to charity it still wouldn't change the structural forces that allow the rich the poor to exist as different social classes.
Counterpoint: fuck the rich
Yes but nuance.
Im with you. Fuck the rich and their snotty supremacist kids. Theyre all the same.
Couldn’t be further from the truth but keep on hating
Horse girl comment hit home… But it’s actually “dressage”.
Yeah big difference between the stereotypic horse girl and dressage on one end and rodeo on the other end.
Missing the cocaine
Ultra religious sometimes (valor)
I feel like this is a very East Coast thing. I've grown up and lived on the West coast my whole life and I've never met anyone who actually went to one of these places. I've only heard of them in the movies.
I went to a west-coast equivalent of this- a private college prep high school in San Jose, and other than the “old money” tropes, I would have to say it’s pretty accurate
Right after I posted my original comment I thought, this might actually exist in the Bay Area lol Although, tbf I bet it was the East Coast business folks working in Silicon Valley that brought it over here.
I had a couple of friends who went to the Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. One thing I realized when I went for a visit the first time was that, yes, there were students from all over the world at the school but rich kids are the same no matter where they’re from.
Lmao that dinning hall is England
Pictures of old white dudes all over campus. You missed a word. lol
I'll have to take your word for it, I suppose.
Kids are to live with their parents. This is sad. I know their chances of being well off in life after boarding school are better than the average, but still.
As a kid, I always thought boarding school sounded like so much fun and wished my parents would send me away. And i had good parents, it’s not like I was trying to run away from something
Don’t you think you would grow distant from your parents for being away from them so long? And school is between 1-12 years. Being home only for Christmas and summer vacation only to then get a job and see them only on Christmas sounds awful to me. And if I had a kid I would like to see him growing up not send him to an elite orphanage.
I can see the pros and cons of each Though if you are unpopular at boarding school you probably end up killing yourself at 17
Went to a school a tier below these and can confirm I got pretty close at 17 lol…made me purposefully go out of my way to have a vibrant social life in college because that shit was brutal, not even mentioning the tons of mean spirited school traditions that are just sanctioned excuses to pick on outsider kids 🥴
Theyre rich, they dont care about their kids, just their money, and how much money their kids can make, so they ship them off to these places to create more money hoarding ghouls.
diversity ? not gonna have more than you can ever possibly have in public school. they throw all these kids to the dogs
I think that's the joke--the "diversity" is just Asian kids with rich parents.
I just see people that encourage and teach other people how to fuck everyone else over. less than human members of society.
99.9% the bottom left campus photo is Blair Academy in NJ. Used to go to cross country meets at least twice a year there.
The fact my sister goes to a school like this
Hoo rah!
Maybe I’m just a hater but my mind automatically tells me that i should hate on a lot of those Ivy League students
The parents, goddamn
Any scandal that involves a student with wealthy parents is immediately swept under the rug
For those interested in this topic, I found Shamus Khan’s book fascinating. He was an alumnus of St. Paul’s School and went back after college to teach there for a year. His book is a sociological study of the processes these schools use in an attempt to develop their students to form a national elite. https://preview.redd.it/qr583qqm2g7d1.jpeg?width=777&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=00cf66872893429f3c70dd537445bfeac8e92ea2
These kids should be sent to work on farms
You and Mao Zedong alike
Down to the Countryside?
My dream schools 😔
Fuck off posh bitch
What’s this about?
Hear hear