Groton School

Prep School Admissions
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Any parents or students here who could comment on the following about the Groton School, please.

How much of a grind is it compared to other mid size schools like St Pauls or Choate. Is it more home work for the sake of it (some schools take pride in it)?

School’s culture - is it really as congenial as it appears? is there a stark devide between the rich and FA students where each stay in their lanes and fork social cohorts?

Are there too many legacies and athletes that form the impressive college matriculation or do regular kids also have the strong shot?

How good is the food?

Is the school’s center of gravity academics, or music or sports?

Anything unique you could talk about it.

Really appreciate any input!! Thanks so much!!

Thanks!!

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We could be friends! You ask all the right questions.

Groton is exceptional. My child elected not to apply because it was not a fit despite being exceptional, which was very appealing

but… For the right kid, I believe it would be fantastic! Dig a little deeper and you might find several possible fits for your child. Or maybe Groton is just right? In any event, apply widely, especially if international and/or in need of financial aid

What is your child hoping/looking for?

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Choate, with 865 students, is a large prep boarding school along with Andover (1165 students), Exeter (1106 students), Lawrenceville (815 students), & Deerfield Academy (about 650 students).

Groton, with just 380 students in grades 8 through 12, is considered a small school.

St. Paul’s School has 541 students and, similar to the Groton School, does not offer a PG year.

Groton may appear to some to be a more academically intense school than some other elites because of the presence of 8th graders. Entering boarding school in the 9th grade at Groton means entering a community with students already accustomed to the intense academics found at schools like St. Paul’s School, Andover, Exeter, and Choate.

Groton, like St. Paul’s and the other schools listed above, yields impressive results regarding college matriculations:

St. Paul’s School Class of 2025 had 147 seniors who matriculated at 4 year colleges (6 others took a gap year for sports). The most students from the St. Paul’s School Class of 2025 matriculated at Harvard (8); Yale was second with seven (7) SPS Class of 2025 students, followed by Cornell (6). Five (5) SPS Class of 2025 students matriculated at Columbia (5), Georgetown (5), & Colby (5). Four (4) matriculated at Amherst College as well as at Boston College and SMU. Three (3) at Dartmouth College and only 2 at Princeton and just 2 at Brown.

Choate Rosemary Hall college matriculations for 5 classes (2021-2025) show the top 10 destinations as:

U Chicago (63), NYU (54), Yale (42), Columbia (39), Cornell (35), Georgetown (27), Boston College (27), N’eastern (26), U Penn (25), and Brown (24). Additionally, 22 at USC and 20 at Harvard.

Based on college matriculations, all 3 schools (Groton, St. Paul’s, & Choate) are academically intense.

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I have two kids there.

I’ll offer up some quick answers to your questions for the forum. Feel free to message me if your family is thinking about Groton for the fall.

Grind - We only have experience with Groton so can’t compare to other schools. My kids wouldn’t call it a grind but they would say that the academics are extremely demanding. Homework is definitely not busywork; it’s necessary to get kids to the depth of understanding that’s expected of them there. The school doesn’t have an easy track for athletes or major donors. If you don’t keep up with the work, your grades will most definitely suffer. According to a recent school profile that was circulated to colleges, approximately 10 students per year graduate with a GPA of 93 or higher.

Culture - It really is a very warm and friendly place. It’s hard not to be at that size. There are cliques, as with any school, but they don’t appear to be based on wealth. We’re an ordinary family of middle-class professionals and both our kids have friends across the financial aid spectrum, from zero pay to major donor families.

College matriculation - The top third of the class of the class routine matriculates at the most selective unis/colleges. The top half go to extremely good schools (think Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Williams). These spots go to the top kids academically. Groton is a sporty school but produces very few recruited athletes each year, so those kids don’t make up a meaningful number of top matriculants. Kids of the uber-wealthy get into great schools, but based on personal knowledge, they also tend to be top-third academic performers in their own right at Groton. My observation is that those kids absolutely do better than average during ED admissions, but the regular smart kids do great in RD. As I’ve noted before, the school publishes in its magazine a list of exactly where each student attends each year for those who ar deeply curious.

Food - The food is fine. Kids complain about; parents think it’s quite good. We’ve stopped in for several visits and meals on random days when the dining staff were serving average meals (as opposed to the steak etc. that greets is during parents’ weekend), and I’ve always enjoyed the food.

Center of gravity - I’d say academics come first, followed by sports and music. Groton is a very sporty school but it doesn’t recruit heavily and is really only outstanding among its peers in hockey. It’s weird. It’s a very old-school, olde-timey ivy league-like ethos that every student should be both a scholar and an athlete. The stereotypical jock likely won’t be able to keep up with the workload there and should look at other schools. The stereotypical nerd who was pummeled in middle-school dodgeball will be miserable at Groton. The school hates giving exemptions from athletics for more than one term. Music is huge, and the kids who perform in orchestra (or jazz ensemble, or chapel choir) are constantly busy. But, as with athletics, I wouldn’t send my kid there if they were more of a musician than an academic.

Uniqueness - I thought the school’s marketing motto, “our size is our strength”, was hokey before our first kid enrolled there, but I couldn’t have been more wrong, and the motto couldn’t have been more corrupt. The school’s size allows all of the faculty and staff to know all of the kids and engage with them in a really deep and meaningful way. The headmaster even seems to know all (or most) of the parents, and I was surprised my second or third time on campus when he randomly walked up to me and started talking in detail about one of my kids. I wouldn’t have expected him to know me from Adam. That level of care and connectivity, in my view, is what explains the school’s outstanding reputation and its students’ remarkable college placements.

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The 8th grade has nothing to do with the school’s academic intensity.

For one, there are only ~26 kids in that grade, which means that ~60 students starting in 9th grade have no prior Groton experience. (The school adds about 10 more kids in 10th grade.)

More importantly, the 8th grade at Groton is nothing like the 9th; it’s extremely easy.

It’s a very special experience for any kid lucky enough to make it into the school in 8th grade, and there’s a lot of focus on Groton culture and traditions; but its existence is completely unrelated to the academic intensity of the school.

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The Head of School is 1 of 1. Superior human and maybe the school’s biggest selling point from my perspective. We didn’t apply, but almost did because of him and him only. And his wife, who’s the real star :grinning_face:

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Can you elaborate or share any evidence of your assertion ? ( A couple of sources refer to the 8th grade year at Groton as a “nurturing transition year” suggesting that it is less intense academically than the later years. Nevertheless, this core group of about 27 students should have adjusted to the Groton School and to life at an elite primarily boarding school.)

From an old CC thread: About 40% of 8th graders (Second Formers) at Groton are repeaters. About 50% have status of sibling, legacy, or relation to faculty or staff member.

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All of those statements are true, but none of them support the idea that Groton having an 8th grade contributes to the academic intensity of the school.

The 8th grade absolutely is a “nurturing transition year”, but that means transitioning the kids to the idea of living away from home at a boarding school.

The 8th graders all live together on one floor (boys upstairs and girls downstairs). They have singles but no doors on their rooms, only curtains. The dorm head reads out loud to them every single night to put them to bed. They have study hall together in the large wood paneled schoolhouse room and sit at assigned desks. The headmaster reads them A Christmas Carol and feeds them cookies before the holiday. They generally all sit together at one specific table in the dining hall. Their 8th grade year is carefully managed to make them feel especially safe and welcome. It’s not about ramping them up to academic speed for 9th grade, and 9th grade is therefore not especially intense because of hyper-optimized former 8th graders.

Not trying to be flip or rude, I just don’t want other folks reading this thread to get the wrong idea. 8th grade at Groton is probably the most pleasant and idealized year that any kid could spend at a US boarding school.

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Yes, I agree.

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Thanks!

While I am not married to matriculations and all of these schools have impressive results (driven in large part by their selectivity at admission), I think SPS results were quite exceptional in 2025, and not sure if it’s a pattern or an aberration.

And i wouldn’t necessarily equate intensity with college matriculations though to some degree it holds true. I just feel like sometimes the intensity in some schools (not all) is just higher workload and not necessarily a driver of deeper learning or critical thinking. That is what I am trying to assesss in particular on the intensity question on Groton

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Thanks - very helpful info as we are trying to assess if we should accept the Groton offer of admission.

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While the mix of matriculations to highly prestigious universities from SPS was unusual for its class of 2025, the total number and percentage was not unusual. In other words, about a quarter of the class matriculated at the Ivies plus Duke, MIT, U. Chicago, which is normal these days for SPS. (There were no Stanfords that I saw.) While maybe they got more Harvards and Yales than in previous years, they got fewer Browns and Columbias.

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@highschoolparent2

Yes, there’s a small cafe with bagels and beverages, and a school store where kids can by drinks and snacks. Kids are all on the same schedule (breakfast until 8, lunch about noon, dinner at 5) so I personally think there’s not much need to go beyond the dining hall. One of my kids occasionally buys iced tea in the afternoon and the other has never spent a dime on campus over several years there. Doordash is extremely popular, as at most schools.

I don’t think I can answer your question about wealth. It seems to be a sensitive subject for you and I don’t think I have the sensitivity to answer it. Boarding schools are elite institutions. They’re expensive. They’re filled with rich people and insanely rich people. Groton does a better job than most in my opinion at welcoming middle class and underprivileged families. There are a lot of them there. The school wants them and they’re welcomed in every possible way by the faculty, staff and student body. That said, kids everywhere are very good at sniffing out who has money and who doesn’t. You don’t have to advertise your financial needs but you probably also can’t hide it. It’s nothing indeed that needs be hidden, in my opinion.

My point about the closeness of the school community and positive college outcomes is this: the highly personalized recommendations that private school students receive from their schools gives them an enormous advantage over public school kids in college admissions. The effectiveness of those recommendations scales in direct proportion to their detail and intimacy. Groton presents an extremely accurate and detailed depiction of all of its students during the application process, regardless your family’s wealth. That approach works well and the numbers bear that out.

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