American Prep. Ronald Mangravite
students from differing backgrounds. Minorities still face challenges navigating issues of race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual identity within boarding communities and also with their surrounding localities, which are often not nearly so progressive in their viewpoints as are the schools themselves.
LGBT students will find a range of situations depending on the school. Many schools have strong support groups and a culture of support; others offer official tolerance but with some hostility within the student population. As these circumstances are fluid and can change quickly, it makes sense to fully investigate schools as they are at the time of application, and not to rely on information that could be several years out of date.
INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS
Internationals have a long tradition in American boarding schools. In the past, internationals were a small population, with only a few students from the same country. Now international populations are growing quickly, in enough numbers at some schools that students can speak their native languages for much of each day, speaking English primarily in class. This can be counterproductive for many international families who may be sending their children to American schools to perfect their fluency in English and for cultural immersion. Internationals also find a wide range of support at the schools, with some schools providing “host” families to serve in loco parentis for students from far away. These families maintain contact with the student’s families and keep them up to date with their students’ activities via Skype and social media. Other schools’ cultures do not offer such levels of support for internationals.
WHO GOES TO BOARDING SCHOOLS?
Boarding school students now come from a wide array of classes, races, ethnicities, cultures and lifestyles. Despite this diversity, all students and their families have one or more basic motives for choosing a boarding school education. These include:
LEGACY TRADITION
Students whose parents and forebears attended the same school are known as legacies. Legacy families usually have a firm commitment of support for that school and regularly contribute money and volunteer hours. Because of this tradition, legacy students typically receive preferential treatment in admission, as is customary with most colleges.
In the past, legacy students were the norm at boarding schools. Nowadays, legacies are less prevalent, often a minority population. Legacies often follow in the family footsteps – the same dorms/houses, sports, courses, and even at times teachers. Their lifelong affiliation with the school often gives legacies a relaxed confidence that can have a calming effect on campus, helping to moderate the anxieties of newcomers.
ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE & POSITIVE LEARNING ENVIORNMENTS
Many students apply to boarding schools seeking superior academic opportunities and programs. Such students often are refugees from schools where academic effort is derided. The intellectually curious generally meet with social approval on boarding campuses. Advanced students are often thrilled to enter a school where the student body values and appreciates learning and hard work.
Many incoming students are gifted intellectually but, discouraged by their past school experience, have mediocre records of achievement. Such students often blossom under the tutelage of boarding school academics, with enchanced individual attention and academic support.
ESCAPING PROBLEMS AT HOME
Some students come from family situations that negatively influence study and academic progress due to parental strife, terminal or debilitating illness or other crises. A boarding school can be a haven in such instances but many a student in such situations has suffered residual after effects; a young person’s transition away from familial adversity can be difficult. Fortunately, contemporary boarding schools have counseling staffs at the ready to assist in such cases.
(Note: this strategy may work if the student’s problems are external; students who carry unresolved emotional or psychological issues often do not find relief at boarding school.)
CHARACTER/SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Families sometimes seek out boarding schools to help their students gain self-reliance, responsibility, and personal identity apart from the family. Students who come from very wealthy or celebrity backgrounds often thrive in the relative social equity of a boarding school campus. Such students may have the freedom to find their own core identity, apart from their family backgrounds.
Boarding schools, with their objective authority and systems of acceptable behavior, can allow rebellious students a neutral environment to sort through their conflicted feelings about their families and channel their emotions in constructive paths. Students from very protective households can find self reliance; those from tightly directed households can find independence; both can find self assurance. Boarding school life fosters emotional intelligence – negotiation, reconciliation, cooperation and resilience. Equally, these schools understand negative education – learning to cope with failure, defeat and disappointment.
FAMILIES IN TRANSIT
Families that move frequently because of corporate reassignment, government postings, or similar circumstances will often send their students to boarding school to give them the comfort and continuity of a home base. Students from such families often become the most connected of all students. Lacking a home circle of friends, their school friendships become particularly important as do their bonds with the schools themselves.
COLLEGE ADMISSION ADVANTAGE
The outstanding college admission record of many boarding schools prompts some families to enroll their students in order to gain an admission advantage. This strategy can have decidedly mixed results. Such a strategy is “other directed”, not focused on the benefits of the boarding education per se, but on a potential outcome of such an education. As will be discussed in detail later in this book, the mere admission of a student to a high performing boarding school does not guarantee college admission success. The focus, some might call it the obsession, on college admission turns the student away from, the opportunity to develop personally, intellectually and socially and towards an outcome that is, at its basis, in the hands of others.
So too, the notion that only certain boarding schools are pathways to elite colleges is a misapprehension of college admission realities. U.S. colleges seek diversity in all its forms. The days when large cohorts of boarding school graduates were assured admission at elite universities have long passed. That said, the superior academic environment at high performing boarding schools serves as an inspiration and a springboard for students to strive and succeed.
PRESTIGE
Concurrent with college admission success, the prestige of elite boarding schools is a draw for certain students and families seeking social cachet. Such a quest is completely misguided; prestige does not derive from one’s school ties. In today’s world, one wonders from where it derives at all. Social benefits derived from a boarding school education include personal connections with classmates and schoolmates one would never have met otherwise and an ability to navigate amongst people from a wide variety of backgrounds who one might otherwise have never encountered. Such aspects may be advantageous but those seeking entrée to the Social Register through their school enrollment are doomed to disappointment.
ATHLETES
Athletes seeking college scholarships often enroll at boarding schools to enhance their visibility to college coaches or to further develop their skills and physical conditioning. A boarding school offers a number of advantages for the dedicated athlete. The campus itself allows for extended training and conditioning opportunities, seven days a week. Teammates and coaches are ever present.
BOARDING SCHOOL CULTURE
Some students opt for the classic boarding school experience for its own sake. Some hope to meet and befriend students from different backgrounds and countries, opportunities that may be missing from their day school and public school experiences. Many international students attend U.S. boarding schools in order to be immersed in American culture, as they study, work, play and reside with American students.