I’ve been perusing this site as well as some of the information available on the internet for Canadian Private School graduates on their university destination schools. So far, I’ve not gotten much answers save for a few conjectures to my question:
with secondary private school education costing C$40-50k per year in tuition for students that go to Canadian (day) private schools like UCC, St George, Havergal, Branksome, etc. Am wondering why the yield to go to US unis for these graduates are at a 20-25% clip? Is it a result of competition? (eg most are rejected in US Unis they applied to?)
or
is it because it’s just easier and cheaper to apply to Canadian universities after graduation (most of the private schools have 60-70% of their graduates end up in Canadian Unis)
I’m asking bec I’m trying to find out if it’s worth it to pursue private secondary school education for my child in Toronto.
While clearly there are advantages to private schooling (eg smaller class size, etc), it seems like investing $500k (assuming Gr 1-12) does not seem to be a “$ savvy idea”. I mean, sure, we can afford it, but not sure what is the pathway of these graduates after attending the private high school(s)?
Of course, there’s some who transfer come Secondary School only (eg $50k x 4 = C$200k - so a bit cheaper) but again, if the schools do not truly prepare you to succeed in US top unis (related to question #1) then the cost might not be commensurate to the benefits obtained?
Clearly, these schools would NOT state why their graduates mostly stick around in Canada (but if one looks at the tuition, profile etc - it would seem that US University costs would not be a concern, which leaves me with competitiveness/etc)
Curious to see if anyone in the forums have their thoughts on this…
I am sure they prepare you to succeed just fine. Do you think they prepare students to attend McGill or U Toronto? 25% sounds like a perfectly large number. I can’t imagine it’s everyone’s goal to go to a US college.
I guess I’m trying to see if parents enroll the kids to these private schools/boarding schools with such as primary goal(s) or what not (Eg US uni).
Essentially trying to see why kids/parents in the US try to enroll in top tier Boarding schools. Seems like that is one of the reasons that come up based on the US boarding school thread…
And the response is always “don’t enroll to a school with the goal of enrolling in a certain college.”
Because the education is fantastic, instils intellectual curiosity and challenge kids outside of their comfort zone. It fosters independence and collaboration at the same time.
The pendulum has swung from preferences for boarding and private school students because universities and U.S. News are giving more weight to equity and diversity.
If you search certain private and independent school forums, you will see many parents ruing the funds they spent on private, as they see kids from less rigorous publics being accepted in higher numbers due to their inflated GPAs.
I grew up in Toronto. My 3 kids variously went to public school in Toronto, private school in Toronto, public school in the US and private school in the US. I’ve taught at private and public schools in Toronto and in the US.
There’s many factors that go into the cost/benefit analysis of private vs public K-12 school. Some of the pros of private school are small class sizes, individual attention from teachers and admin, students are screened for ability and social characteristics, college counselors are available and attentive.
The young adults that I know who came out of K-12 private schools seem to be more self-assured to me. They are more socially competent. Public schools don’t have the ability to turf out trouble makers. Private schools do.
At the secondary level, the material would be more challenging and engaging in a private school than in a public school, especially the level of the schools you listed in your post. The teachers are more likely to have a PhD or masters in the subject matter. There will be 12-16 students in a class rather than 30-40. It is far easier to teach and learn with the smaller class size.
As to why families will choose University of Toronto, Queens, Waterloo, Western, McGill over similarly ranked US schools? #1 Cost. Tuition at the Canadian schools runs $7K-17K CAD vs about $75K CAD at the US schools. #2 Where a student wants to live. Most students do not go very far for university. It is not easy to get a visa to stay and work in the US after undergraduate studies. #3 If a student does want to study in the US, it makes a lot more sense to do so for graduate studies when the cost for US schools becomes similar to Canadian schools and visas become more attainable.
In my experience, Canadian parents will pay the money to send their kids to HYPMS over say University of Toronto, but not so much for schools outside of HYPMS. Students want to go where their friends are going
I am on guessing here, but guessing based on having graduated high school in Canada, attended university in the US, and having relatives attend university in both countries.
I would guess that the most important issues are the high quality of the universities in Canada, the relative better affordability of university in Canada, and the fact that admissions to top universities in Canada tends to be predictable and based largely on merit. In contrast admissions to highly ranked universities in the US is relatively much less predictable.
Another issue might be that at least in my experience companies in Canada seem to prefer to hire graduates from the very good universities in Canada. Having graduated from highly ranked universities in the US (MIT and Stanford) I at least found it difficult to find employment or even job interviews in Canada.
If you can get accepted to Toronto, McGill, or UBC, and if you have Canadian citizenship or permanent residence, I do not see much point in attending an average university in the US. There might be some point in attending somewhere like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, or Stanford, but admissions to these schools is very difficult for international students and is also very difficult to predict.
And students choose which university to attend for a very, very wide range of reasons.
I went to boarding school in Toronto, not one of the ones you listed but same idea.
You are right that about 25-30% of students go to US (or UK) schools. But it isn’t because of rejection from top US schools, it’s because Canadians aren’t conditioned to pay a fortune for university. So most Canadian boarding school parents are only paying for the very tippy top US colleges. And some won’t do that.
I went to an elite LAC and everyone thought I was nuts. My parents grew up in the States so they encouraged it, but the only kids in my class who went to the US went to ivies or one went to play hockey at Notre Dame.
As for preparation for US schools. I graduated from high school in 1995 so things have likely changed. But I was a better writer, a poorer math student, and way more mature than my American counterparts.
So it seems like cost is the key determinant for why most Canadian graduates of BS/“Day” schools decide to stay put in Canada for university. Which kinda makes me a tad confused (or maybe going around in circles, if that may be the case). Why?
First of all, if cost is a “factor” in staying “put” for university, then isn’t the “cost” to send them to private BS/“Day” schools even more prohibitive through the years?
Maybe the only plausible answer to that ^ question is that the education is second to none vs public system. Then again, I don’t think it’s much different in US BS vs US public schools (?).
Thing is - I am indeed going around in circles – bec if parents are willing to shelve the costs for Secondary School, why not University in the US? Maybe as someone of you have alluded do, the benefits of going US Uni route is just not as “easy” (eg it’s more a lottery, US Visa after graduation is not easy to get) or it’s just not “worth it” anymore to go to the US for Uni unless it’s one of those HYPMS type schools.
Either way, thanks for providing the insights. I was not sure where to start thinking about this in terms of “benefits” vs “costs - clearly the costs are financial, mostly” hence the question I typed in to begin with. I will continue thinking about this “cost/benefit” equation in the next few months. Thanks again
When you say LAC, are you referring to schools like Smith, Williams kinda schools? Now why would “they” consider you “nuts”? (I happen to have a really good friend who went to Smith and she was so nice she helped me out with my essays in my application to UPenn for my MBA a few decades ago – and I got in ︎ - granted she went to HBS for her MBA after Smith haha)
See, I have a liberal arts background too (for my undergrad but in Asia) so again, given that I didn’t go to school in Canada, I am a tad confused, esp since the private schools seem to “tout” liberal arts education, or at least they “talk the talk” in their brochures/websites/etc.
Probably because they never heard of it. And plenty of uninformed people (specially a couple of decades ago) think a "pre-professional’ education is the only acceptable path.
Plenty of US kids, including from private schools, head to Canada. Plenty head choose in state publics.
Kids who have intellectual curiosity and good work ethics can make the most of whatever college they end up at. If you don’t have that, Harvard is not going to save you. Some people believe a private school is more likely to foster that type of growth.
No one has mentioned that in some Canadian provinces, e.g. Quebec, many private K-12 schools are government subsidized, making the cost less than comparable US private schools.
High school and college are two different experiences. Some families will pay for private high school because the experience they want their child to have is available at that school. It could be anything from a residential option for a family needing to relocate, a certain set of academic offerings - advanced, remedial, FL, individualized, sports or scheduling flexibility for an EC, etc. They may not need to pay for that in college for any number of reasons.
Likewise, students from affluent areas may have access to excellent public schools in high school but opt for a private college, even as FP.
So things may have changed in the last 25 years but when I was a high school student in Toronto, where you went to high school was more important for connections than where you went to university. The boarding school community in Ontario, even in all of Canada, is small. I live in the PNW in the US now and will occasionally meet someone who went to boarding school in BC or Winnipeg and we always know someone in common, have had the same teachers, etc.
There are investment banks and law firms in Toronto that are filled with graduates of my high school who went to different Canadian universities. I imagine it is very much like the public school crowd in the UK or how Exeter (and friends) once was in the US. Maybe that is changing, my high school has many more international students now and seems to be less concentrated among the Canadian elite. But there is one reason, in addition to cost, that Canadian boarding school parents may not find an elite US school necessary.
It doesn’t really impact English schools in Quebec. We used to play sports against Bishops College so I looked them up and it’s around 84K Canadian a year for boarding which is the same as my high school in Ontario where there aren’t subsidies.
Yes it might be changing more so now, especially since I did notice that most of the schools actually do offer more “day” option vs boarding. In fact, some schools have already done away with requiring a boarding year, save for Appleby College, I think… I could be wrong, need to do more research, but for Havergal, UCC, Crescent, Branksome and the like, more than majority are day students and in fact, maybe <10-15% are true boarders now.
Either way, good ideas from this thread / forum – things I didn’t/couldn’t figure out earlier starting to make better sense eg puzzle pieces coming together to be solved. Thanks!
We’re Canadian and high SE (though not 0.1% wealthy) and while our kids did not attend private school for K-12, we were fortunate to live in a catchment area with excellent top ranked public schools. They also attended Gifted & Talented programs from middle school on. In addition I was a stay at home mom and was able to provide supplementary enrichment at home and through after school activities.
Would I have preferred a private school experience for them? Maybe from an academic standpoint but I chafe at the elitism of them and appreciate the diversity they experienced in their public schools. As I said we are high SE but we live a very comfortable suburban life and their peers came from similar SE backgrounds. Dh and I grew up in solid lower-middle class income families. We don’t mix in the kind of wealthy stratosphere that many attending the elite private boarding and day schools do, and I’m not sure I would have been comfortable with that kind of environment for my kids.
As to university in the US I looked into it for our older ds at the time, primarily MIT and some of the more selective LACs. Apart from the fact that he didn’t want to go that far away from home for school and that he also wasn’t willing to jump through the hoops necessary for holistic admissions including writing the SAT or the ACT, I just couldn’t justify the price. Yes he no doubt would have gotten a superior education at a top private university, but with holistic admissions there’s no guarantee he would have gotten in and it would have been difficult to pay for as we would not have qualified for aid. When it comes to public universities in the US I don’t perceive any of them being superior to what he has access to here at home. With top marks and his choice of major he could have gotten into any university here that he wanted including UofT/UBC/McGill and I can’t think of any American public university that would be better. There would be no reason to pay US prices for a comparable or less rigorous education.
It made far more sense for him to apply to universities in Canada for undergrad and then to the US or UK for grad school (which he’s so far resisted doing only having applied in Canada for master’s programs. We’ll see what he ends up doing if he decides to continue on to a PhD).
Also anecdotally I participated on a K-12 forum for gifted kids when the boys were younger and there was 1 mother there who had been grooming her daughter, a dual US/Canadian citizen, for admission to Harvard since almost the moment of her birth. The father was American and an Harvard alumnus and they had lived in NYC for a while until his passing at which time she and her daughter returned to Canada. She was the most elitist snob I have ever come across. She micromanaged everything in that girl’s life with the end goal of getting into Harvard. For middle and high school she ended up going to UTS but in the end despite all her mother’s planning and machinations she didn’t get into Harvard, not even waitlisted.
I agree that one of the nicer things about growing up in Canada was the lack of intensive parenting, especially about college, that is so common in parts of the US. Even at my boarding school there was never any pressure around college selection.
Yes that is definitely something we are not sure of in terms of fit: the “seemingly snooty” attitude that we hear about … not sure if the majority of the people / families whose kids go to those schools are like that but I’ve read enough to “give pause”.
For now, I’m truly doing the “legwork”: pros, cons, “fit” (I honestly can’t distinguish one private school from the other save for, maybe, how “conservative” one school is relative to another, maybe the crowd of families attending etc… some say they’re trying to be more “inclusive”, pluralism is the word they use - but I still see/feel not a lot has truly changed. In a way, “reputation/legacy” does not change overnight nor in a half decade - so I do recognize what you did see/feel in your experiences. Thank you for sharing (I recognize that you typed a lot - which takes some time too)
︎ - granted she went to HBS for her MBA after Smith haha)