Thank you for the insights @PhotographerMom. I don’t run with people in the big donor crowd, so I had no idea the impact an election year has on charitable giving. Of course giving is the lifeblood of boarding schools.
I was thinking about the survival much more simplistically - that if this goes on for a while, and boarding schools can provide a more robust, safer education than public or private day schools, they will have domestic students beating down their doors. I live in a wealthy school district where people with options choose to send their kids to public schools. There is no boarding school culture here. Parents here believe the public education is superior. Take away the superior education- and I can see them looking for any other education option out there. They will pay a lot to position their children with every advantage possible.
It comes to this: If people with money can’t locally get the experiences that give their kids a competitive advantage In life, they will pay a lot to get it elsewhere. We just don’t know yet in this changing world what will give people a competitive advantage. Heck, it may not even be traditional college anymore. But in a pandemic dystopia like what we appear to be facing, a safe, self-contained educational bubble community like a boarding school sounds like a pretty darned good place for a teen to hole up while the world sorts itself out.
People here are pulling kids from public school, and are willing to pay a lot for tutors to home school. but that doesn’t address the super important social component of school. Boarding schools can provide that, too. If Boarding schools nail the safety issues (big if), my bet is that they will weather this fine. Even the ones with smaller endowments. They just have to afford the necessary infrastructure changes somehow.
Heck, aren’t the NBA players basically doing boarding school in Orlando so they can play safely? If that works, people will apply that model to education for their kids.
My deep thought for the night ?