Why do you send your kids to boarding school?

panpacific
Fri, 20 Nov 2015 18:57:05 +0000

To be fair, I think @TurnerT was talking about a particular scenario where families have the choice of attending an excellent public/magnet school or paying $200K for a prep school. If you think about it, that would be a decision I bet most BS parents active on this site wouldn’t make lightly either (unless $200K is not a lot of money to high income families living in NJ burbs.) This is evidenced by how some big fans of BS posting often here have expressed in various ways how they wish they had a viable local option they could choose so they didn’t “have to” send their kids to BS. While based on my own experience, I tend to agree what @GnarWhail said, which is that an elite BS is substantially better than a top ranked public school, when cost is taken into consideration, at a certain point the decision is becoming an investment decision, i.e. a cost and benefit analysis is called for. My bottom line back in the days was that I wouldn’t go for a “second tier” BS and I would need a substantially discount (more than what our income would typically justify), given that we did have a pretty good local option. YMMV.

On the other hand, we have never had an “excellent” public school so I don’t have first-hand knowledge about them. Now that my kids are in the “most famous” colleges, some of their peers from PS of certain Boston burbs and Northern NJ etc do feel like adequately prepared. Many students from public schools are not as well though.