@bobtaft just got accepted to Exeter as a PG with financial aid. Perhaps he could enlighten us a bit though I hope he won’t be offended by some of the preconceived notions expressed here.
I think it is ok to explore “preconceived notions” in the spirit of airing them out and testing them. If one person is thinking about it, lots of people are. Asking the question isn’t bad. I would think/hope a PG has been asked the question of “why” before, not be offended, and could speak well to the upsides. It would be great to have that perspective voiced – with the well-worn advisory here that “an anecdote is not data.”
Nothing is black and white. I don’t think schools are choosing PGs just for sports, and I can’t imagine that a school would accept someone who they didn’t think would improve their school – PG or no.
I don’t think it is right or wrong in broad-sweeping statements for someone to repeat any grade. Any more than I think there is a single motivation for a person or family to make that choice. My simple observation is that there appears to be a general trend that kids, particularly boys, are held back/repeat grades. Could be wrong – maybe it has always been that way. But if there is that trend, why? And overall is it a good thing?
Feeling like I should go hunt down some data…
As with most things, this conversation has been had before:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/prep-school-admissions/1946340-repeating-a-grade-at-a-prep-school-p2.html
My quick search didn’t find studies on this specific question, and it is a mixed bag of research on the grammar school level.
Here’s a cite to a list of schools that offer a PG year – but I doubt it is complete. Unless I missed it, Andover isn’t on the list, neither is St. Andrews nor Lawrenceville:
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-postgraduate-year-2774650
Interesting, though – it does seem to be a predominantly (not exclusive) NE phenomenon.
I would be curious to see stats on how many repeats there are at each BS. Seems to me, for the outliers it would say something about their school philosophies that could matter to people. You might have to drill down a bit to know what, exactly, but same goes for a lot of differences between schools.
As a parent, I would have been interested to know the number of repeats at the front end of our school search. It would have gone on my ridiculous spreadsheet with other questionable stats like endowment size, founding date and acreage. :-B It honestly didn’t cross my mind at the time, any more than whether PG’s have an impact on school culture. It could be a proxy for how important sports are to a school, though – which is a hard thing to quantify objectively.
Many students repeat for any number of reasons, one of which is that many come from a JBS which goes through 9th and they opt to repeat 9th so they can get the full four years at BS.
Here’s a classic thread on that phenomenon:
That thread was pretty interesting. I’m a repeater myself, which I guess puts me in the whole "will be older than most at graduation (19, February birthday so I’m 16 as a sophomore right now). I didn’t repeat for any athletics reason (I’m awful at sports) but rather the academics, as I’m entering from a large low-income public school. I think that’s how it is for a very good chunk of repeaters/PGs.
Personally, I have no qualms with going to school with PGs, but that’s mostly because A. as a senior I’ll be their age and B. I am not being recruited for any sport.
As others have said, the reasons for doing a PG year differ–and I wouldn’t equate the PG year to the Gap Year. Overseas, our Gap Year is a year for working, maturing, and finding one’s self that often includes travel and community service. There is rarely an academic focus.
The PG year, on the other hand, is an opportunity for a talented student to increase the breadth or depth of their academic studies because they sacrificed rigor or notable electives (like AP classes) to accommodate said talent.
For example, my son’s close friend wound up as a PG student at Phillips Exeter as few years back. She went through the same admissions process as any other student, attended her essays, took her tests, sat for interviews: In other words, she did everything she could to earn her spot as a PG in the same way many students earn their spots as 9th-12th graders. She wasn’t a lazy student in the least; in fact, she had a 4.0 to graduate high school in their Honors/College Prep program, and was a national merit semifinalist, but was unable to take several AP courses or other academic electives due to her commitment to professional theater. She worked as a professional actress through high school, on Broadway and in national tours (and, eventually, on television), and these time constraints forced her to choose between AP courses and developing her talent/resume. When it came time to apply to college, she probably could have earned acceptance to many great schools, but she thought she needed to take a year to challenge herself academically and find her “back up” plan in case acting didn’t turn into a viable career. It was a very mature and practical decision, and she took her PG seriously. Indeed, I’d daresay she was more focused and driven and posed a better role-model than some of the seniors. Oddly enough, she also re-discovered her love for softball and tennis during her PG year–two sports she had to give up to pursue acting. In the end, she was accepted to Wellesley, graduated, and is now pursuing her MBA at Wharton and hoping to open her own theatre company. And yes, she still gets paid to act.
I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want you child exposed to someone like this young lady, to be honest, and I’m not sure her story is so unique. PG students are motivated and dedicated to self-improvement. Corrupting the incoming 9th grader with their extra 10 months of worldly experience is probably far from their minds.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned it upthread, but PG used to be even more common back in the dinosaur days of my youth. Many students tended to be male ( but schools were also more male then) and it was often a kid who was solid but needed that extra year to mature and blossom as a student and athlete ( I remember most being athletes). Also, this was a thing done in pretty wealthy families.
I have noticed that only some schools have PG’s today. I wonder why the schools decided to drop their PG programs?
I think it’s deeply unfair to assume that PGs are dumb jocks. The PGs I know personally (either through my son or my own time in boarding school), are, to a person, bright and capable students. One was an athlete who had missed an entire year due to a serious illness and surgery; one was an international student who wanted more practice in an American academic setting; one was a dedicated musician and athlete whose mother passed away the summer before her senior year, and she knew she wasn’t ready to go through college admissions at that difficult point; one was an incredibly smart kid coming from a very rural, under-resourced school who recognized she needed another year of high school to make up for the significant gaps in her high school education (as she put it, “Boarding school was the first place I learned about evolution without it being accompanied by a laugh and eye roll.”). I could go on, but the point is that students choose to do a PG year at boarding school for as many reasons as 9-12 students choose to attend boarding school. Gap years can be great, but for students who are looking to address specific academic deficits, or who benefit from structure, a PG year may be an even better choice. And as for the “delay” in continuing on the path to real life…it can be a dangerous thing to expect life to go a certain way, and learning that there are a multitude of ways to be in life, including multiple ways to be successful, is one of the reasons we’ve sent our son to boarding school.
(And just an aside - don’t assume all of the older looking students are nearing 20! My 14 year old, true 9th grader, is over 6’ with a full beard)
No doubt on the 14 year old full beard thing. It always amazes me how diverse the spread is for 13-14 year old boys in particular. We know several great boys that fall into that bearded 14 year old category.
No assumptions about age here. Didn’t mean to go there. But a PG is more like to look 20 than a 14 year old is.
An observation: this seems to be a very sensitive topic for people. I am a little surprised by that. People make the decisions they think best, as do schools. I appreciate understanding the background, but it really isn’t my or anyone else’s business to judge a particular person’s life choices. Especially when it seems to be about getting the best education possible, however defined. More power to ‘em. If I am coming off as judge-y I apologize. Just curious is all.
Why is there less stigma for the 19-20 year old seniors who repeated freshman or sophomore year? What’s the difference?
And as I mentioned earlier, a PG will have plenty of company with students of the same age who entered the school as a repeat 9th or 10th grader,
@skieurope - The younger “not being good enough” is a function of (using your estimate) 30% of the team being the physical equivalent of a freshman in college. “Good enough” is relative. In a league where varsity teams are populated by older students, I totally agree.
It seems like a “keeping up with the Jones’s” thing to me. Schools do what they gotta do to compete.
There may even be double repeats - students who first repeated at JBS and then again at BS.
As @busymommyof4 mentioned, the couple pg’s that I know had some sort of agreement with the naval academy.
I currently attend a prep school that offers a PG year, and frankly, most of your concerns are unfounded. PG students are coming to school with a clear intention: to do well and get into a great college. They certainly aren’t expecting, “a free-wheeling with drugs and such,” not that the school would allow it if they were. In my experience, they operate as seniors, but take a greater variety of courses.
As to your question about what courses they’d be taking, it changes based on the school, their career/college goals, and why they’re there. But keep in mind, prep schools often over many more rigorous electives than public schools. My school has probably 5-6 science electives one could take after finishing their graduation requirements.
The bottom line is that PG students behave like any other student. As an underclassman, I could hardly distinguish them from the rest of the senior class.
I just noticed this thread as someone revived it but there are several incorrect statements with regards to PGs. By and large, they are not oldest kids on campus, in fact most of them come from LPS or catholic school with much later cutoffs so there are plenty of seniors older than them. Even the ones who come from other BSs (apparently you can’t do a PG year at the BS where you went for 4 years but you can switch to another BS for PG year and kids do. And unlike with public/private day/catholic school leagues you do retain athletic eligibility for the fifth year even if you stay in the same league. The main issue people seem to have with PGs is that most (at least at our BS) are recruited athletes who get coveted spots on varsity teams, which may be a problem for the kids already there hoping to rise through the ranks of JV to varsity. At some boarding schools there are sports where only recruited athletes (not always PGs but typically sophomores+) make the varsity, boys ice hockey being one of them. It is definitely something to research when looking at schools if playing at high level is important to you.
I have never heard of PGs causing social issues, all the ones we know are athletes and very busy so definitely not starting trouble on campus.
It may be obvious, however it is worth noting that some athletic leagues do not allow PGs so those schools typically do not have them. Think ISL. Schools that belong to leagues that do allow them, have them. Think Founders League. I’m with everyone else who argues that their impact on the culture of a school is small and skews positive unless you are an athlete who is bumped from a varsity slot in favor of an entering PG. My brother feels strongly that it is unfair to an athlete who has devoted three years to a sport to be denied a chance to compete at the varsity level because the school admitted a ringer. I sympathize with that but, at schools that admit PGs, that is a known possibility.
No more unfair than a younger but better kid coming in and taking a starting spot from an older player on varsity. That happens all the time. Especially with the repeats in ISL. my son was a starter this year. He almost certainly took the spot of a senior who would have started.
^ I wasn’t referring to starters but to making the team at all. Sure, schools build teams over time and that means that sometimes younger kids displace older ones but it is generally an even playing field. The introduction of PGs upsets that dynamic.