How do you find those schools?
There are boarding schools in the US known for their culture of kindness. There is some self-selection in who chooses them, and if it’s what you want for your kid, they end up on your list!
I note when my D30, then in her final year at a K-8 school, suddenly decided to focus on boarding schools for HS, I found this community invaluable for generating leads for her to investigate. I explained what she was looking for in general, and people here quickly came up with many great, thoughtful suggestions.
In the end we were pleased with all the schools she visited, and she applied to each, and in fact was accepted to each, which I think in part was because she went into interviews with a really good idea of not only why she was applying to boarding schools in general, but also why she was thinking about applying to THIS boarding school.
And again, I can’t thank this community enough for helping her get to that point so fast. We basically started investigating schools on October 8, and we were visiting our first school by November 7.
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Are you a parent or student who is abroad seeking a boarding school? Most people in America go to a public school they are assigned to, based on where they live. There’s not much choice in their decision (short of being able to pay).
I still don’t understand the context of your question.
Usually which high schools in a state (or In your metropolitan area) are “high performing” will be well known. And then for the qualitative aspects about the student population, you need to talk to people that go to those high schools. If they are public schools, you will need to buy a house in their catchment area etc.
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Buying a house is not the only option. Usually as long as you can verify the residency in the district. Renting would also be acceptable.
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But make no mistake - even the right high schools have kids that struggle - both public and private and many deemed lesser have kids who excel.
There is no assured path.
High school is often the first time kids will face exclusion - for example getting cut from a sports team, although it could happen in middle school or earlier club sports.
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I have taught at one college prep private school A, one STEM focused public charter school B, and one normal high school C with a magnet program CM. My own children went to public school D with higher (not the highest) test scores within the district. A, B, CM, and D are all considered “competitive” by some population. As a teacher myself, I truly believe the students are shaped by their families and their friends. When looking at the 10th graders, by the third week of school I can have a clear idea of how each of them might behave and grow for the rest of the school year. My data includes mainly how their parents respond to my emails, whom they hang out with in the hallway, cafeteria, and after school, and how they do their work in class. Even in the least “competitive” program CM, there are kids with parents who care about their growth, hang out with kids who believe in learning, and are willing to give up immediate pleasure. Even in the most competitive school A, there are kids who treat school as an obligation and can’t wait to get out. Their parents have likely already laid out funds to support their lives so why bother.
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I mean that’s preparation for the real world. In college, there’s a lot of exclusion with greek life and clubs
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Depends on the school. That’s not necessarily true.
Again, you haven’t stated who you are and what you are trying to accomplish. Without that, no one can truly assist you.
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I urged my kids to get the most out of their high school educations because I knew that once they got to college, they’d be taking classes that were mostly in their majors. They double majored, and also took pre-professional required classes, so there wasn’t much room for exploration. Anticipating this, I urged them to take any AP classes that were well-taught, well-reviewed. Usually, students can get access to these sorts of classes in high school, no matter the rank of the school.
At our high school, the teachers were phenomenal and made my “shy” kids want to be prepared and they evolved into really respectful adults.
They remember that the teachers told them:
“If you think this is hard, wait until you have to apply for a job with hundreds of other applicants.”
No. I am asking because so many Americans push to get their kids in competitive high schools through means like buying a house in an expensive district
To be very blunt, the evidence available in the Chetty studies and such suggests if they are doing that for highly selective college admissions purposes, they are likely making a mistake.
Of course if they think their kid will actually get a better education, have a better experience, or so on, that’s fine.
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Some do. Some make errors.
We did. When we moved to TN, we moved to the top school district in the state. Still you’d be amazed at how many go to private schools.
Our kids did fine and went off to college and are doing well.
But know where we messed up ? Our county has little diversity. It’s extremely white and wealthy. Given the chance to do over, we’d change because the world is diverse.
But yes they got great opportunities. But I do like to think mom and dad, in addition to great teachers, played a role.
And honestly, it costs hundreds of thousands more to live in my county vs the next. Is it worth spending that for a ‘better” school ? Unlikely - you could just go private. But there are top kids all over. That’s not exclusive to good or competitive schools.
But it all starts at home.
100%. I guess we live in one of these districts. Of course, good schools was one of the criteria we used for choosing where to live, but certainly not the only one.
There is actually a difference between wanting your kid to go to a good school and “pushing” to get them into a “competitive” school (the implication of this sentence being that it’s all about college). Particularly when it’s a public school you’re talking about - yes ours gets a good number into T10/20/whatever T-arbitrary number works for you, but there are also some slackers and stoners and CC dropouts because that’s how public schools roll, even in “good” areas. But the experience my kids got out of high school was so much more than the name of the college they ended up at the end of it. I am thankful, also, that they got to be teenagers and enjoy their school years rather than spending 4 years focused on college applications. All that said… yes, I believe there are colleges where the name/reputation of our high school is an advantage, deduced by the admit rates to those colleges from our high school being noticeably higher than their average. (Some colleges, not all of them.)
PS I suspect this “so many Americans” is distorted by where you live. I know in the Bay Area, where we live, it might feel like that, but I guarantee you that “most” Americans are not doing this.
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Yes, in a lot of states, the flagship-level colleges are a reasonable goal for all the very good students in college-prep high schools, and that is the actual goal for many of the families even in very good public college-prep high schools. Other good but not quite top students are also content to just go to whatever is the best in-state option they might have.
Of course a few kids would go to an Ivy or MIT or whatever, but it is expected those would be rare. Others might opt into other privates, including LACs, but that was more about choosing a “different” experience as opposed to getting into a “better” or “more prestigious” college.
In these states, for sure there are still plenty of parents thinking in terms of buying their family homes in good school districts. But that is then less about maximizing college admissions chances, it really is mostly about where they think their kids can get the best educations while also having fun, active high school experiences.
I then understand in California specifically, the state is just so big, such that even between Cal and UCLA, that isn’t nearly the same number of slots proportionately as, say, Minnesota Twin Cities or Wisconsin Madison or Pitt and Penn State or Indiana and Purdue or so on provide in those states.
From an outsider perspective, I then think it is obvious enough there are more like six or so UC campuses that should count as “flagship-level” by normal standards, and many more UCs and CSUs that are not far off.
But I understand some California families don’t quite see it that way, and those families may sometimes be thinking about high schools and college admissions in a much more tense way.
Although I think this is changing for the better, the other main US metros in which I think this sometimes happens are in the BoWash corridor, where for historic reasons even the flagship-level publics were sometimes seen as much less desirable than not just one, but multiple tiers of privates. So rather than attending privates versus publics being exceptional, in certain circles it was expected the very good students WOULD go to privates, or even those good but not quite top students who in other states would happily be considering not-flagship publics.
Again, though, I think this is changing. Full pay costs increased a lot, even adjusting for general inflation. Meanwhile there has been a “nationalization” and in fact “globalization” effect where the popular Northeast privates are getting a lot more high quality applications from outside the region, making admissions harder, and more uncertain, for regional students.
And so I think many of these families have started reconsidering their flagships, or perhaps nearby ones. And this has a feedback effect–the more such families make that choice, the more socially-acceptable it becomes, and really also the better the “stats” of those colleges, and that attracts more such families, and so on.
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To OP’s question: “Does attending a competitive high school really help a kid down the road?”, I’d say “absolutely yes” for a very strong student, but “probably no” for an average good student. Parents can tell the difference in their own kids.
Why “yes” for a very strong HS student? Such a kid is probably aiming high for colleges and so attending a competitive high school (I’m thinking of several in the SF Bay Area) will provide them with 3 benefits:
(1) the classes will likely be more rigorous at such a HS, which prepares them better for college rigor;
(2) they will be battle-tested in a “steel-sharpens-steel” way when you interact with other top students… just as elite athletes need to compete against other top athletes to take their own game to the next level, and
(3) the college AO’s will likely be more confident admitting kids from a HS they have a track record at versus an unknown HS and never admitted anyone from… AO’s will not only be more confident of advocating for such a kid, but also will give them some buffer even if their stats aren’t perfect. Just as medical school AO’s know that a 3.7 GPA from MIT is at least as worthy as a 4.0 from ASU or Pepperdine.
Why “no” for the average strong kid? Such a kid will have a harder time standing out compared to all the elite HS students around them. If you believe that top colleges will take a maximum of 1-2-3 unhooked kids from each public HS, then it is unlikely an ‘average strong HS kid’ will be one of those.
For elite colleges, I might agree with you. For the disproportionate number of kids from our school going to colleges in the roughly 20-40 ranked schools (my own included), I’d disagree. But again, this is something you can tell from Naviance, Maia etc. Example my kid’s college has I believe around a 25% admit rate for OOS kids. The admit rate from our school is close to 60%, and there are a number of colleges where this disproportionality was evident. If you’re looking at a balanced college list this kind of thing matters too.
Do we only consider the value of high school in terms of college admissions? Why?
A friend, someone who has had a successful career as a journalist, attributes much of his success to his high school teachers who required a lot of writing and demanded that it be well done. He was a “scholarship kid” at that school.
Education makes your brain a more interesting place to be. A good high school can set a student up to get the most out of anything that comes afterwards.
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