People in this sub who met Americans who went to boarding schools, what was your experiences like with them?

19 comments

  1. It obviously depends on the person. But boarding schools in the US tend to attract the very academically engaged and/or affluent. That is consistent with my experience interacting with boarding school peeps in undergrad/professional school (which in my case admittedly also attracted very academically engaged/affluent people generally).

  2. One of my uncles went to boarding school in the 80s.

    It was a Quaker all-boys boarding school somewhere in the Northeast where you stayed in cabins and chopped your own wood for the wood-burning stove that was your only source of heat in there. Apparently some famous musician’s son was his roommate but I don’t remember the name.

    He’s pretty cool. Really nice, funny guy. But yeah, intellectual, artsy fartsy type from a well-off New England family. Likes wine and jazz music and gourmet cooking. He and my aunt cook elaborate meals and do yoga together and stuff.

  3. My mom went to a boarding school. She both loved and hated it. There was definitely some resentment towards her parents about it too. But her parents were sometimes shitty anyway

  4. I will only mention my very good friend’s experience.
    He lived in a little town in Mass. They gave a couple scholarships to local kids and he was chosen.
    His dad was a truck driver and they were a pretty regular family.

    He loved the school and said he met really nice kids that he never would have otherwise.
    He made a lot of good friends and ended up doing a pretty cool job.

  5. My husband and his sister went to boarding school, and most of their family friends did as well. In my husband’s experience, I think it was a terrible decision on his parents’ part. He hated every minute of it and became completely disengaged academically and as a result he didn’t finish college. One of the rules they had at dinner was that they had to eat fried chicken with a fork.

    It just sounded weird, and honestly everyone I’ve met who went to boarding school seems to not understand the basics of life, like how to create a resume or who to call if the HVAC goes out. My in laws have a tendency to buy new cars often because if one breaks down, they just don’t know what to do so they buy a new one.

  6. Idk if this counts as a prep school but when my mom did interior design work one of her clients kids went to Oak Hill Academy in VA. They were nice people

  7. Boarding schools are much less common these days than they were in the past. At various points in my life I lived in Bethel, Me and Bath, Me. Both towns have boarding schools. For the most part the kids who went to the schools seemed basically like the rest of us kids in town, most of the time the fact that they went to the boarding school didn’t come up.

    They only time I remember there being a big deal about one of the students at the school in Bath, is when there was a rumor that Cher’s son Elijah was attending. As far as I know he did not, but one of my neighborhood friends looked enough like him in the pre-internet days that we got some attention from some of the girls that normally wouldn’t give us the time of day as we roamed around town.

  9. If there was a specific boarding school you’d send your kids too if given the opportunity, which one would you send them to?

    Me personally I’d pick Shattuck St Mary’s in Minnesota so my kids can get high level hockey training

  10. I grew up on a boarding school campus where my dad was a teacher. It’s a bit “Dead Poets Society,” definitely.

  11. I actually don’t know that I know anyone personally who went to a boarding school. I remember playing against a boarding school in soccer in high school. All of the kids were giants and they were all really good. It seemed more like they were all there on a scholarship, which is likely why they were all there. My school was sort of similar, only with basketball.

  12. North Carolina has a school called The NC School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM, or “Smath” as the students call it) – it’s a free (but very selective) STEM-focused boarding school for the junior and senior year of high school, run by the state university system. As someone who went to a state engineering school, I knew a whole lot of Smath kids.

    In general, they weren’t *too* different from the average engineering student cross-section – a decent amount of STEMbros, a handful of ‘party bro’ frat guy type dudes, overwhelmingly white guys, etc. The main difference was because Smath gives you like 50-60 credit hours, they were all a year or two ahead of their age peers, and because Smath was the “highly selective whiz kids school” they all were unsurprisingly really fucking smart. The main thing was they probably had a slightly higher than average rate of burnout – from what I’ve heard, Smath was extremely stressful, and a lot of them couldn’t make it through 5-6 total years of high stress education.

  13. There’s quite a few boarding schools around here and I knew a few people that I know who went to them. I also know a few kids who go there now.

    This might shock you, but they’re normal kids. I don’t know what would be special about my “experience” with them. Yeah they usually come from wealthier families, but that’s it.

  14. I work in an independent school, which is a private day school. I have quite a bit of contact with boarding schools as well and I know many teachers/administrators and former students from them. Most of the boarding school teachers I know love working at them (but I wouldn’t work at one).

    There’s a range of boarding schools, from the affluent, academically rigorous ones to ones that are oriented around sports. I know a guy who works at one centered in skiing, and others who work in ones for experiential ed (aka camping and outdoors stuff). There are others with different missions, like giving underprivileged kids a boarding school opportunity.

    There’s a range in tuition costs – from close to $70k a year for some of the exclusive ones to $0 for the ones for underprivileged kids.

  15. The only people I know who went to a boarding school were Native Americans and they weren’t very fond of them.

  16. I went to a small private college and some of the men came from boarding school. They were all really pretentious. I had to teach them how to do laundry. Which surprised me because I didn’t realize laundry services were done for them. What do I know? I’m just a lowly public trade school girl, whatever. That’s fine. It’s just the way this dude was like “Well, I went to boarding school.” Like he was the most important person ever. He made his history of boarding school his whole personality. He actually never spoke to me again like I wasn’t high enough class for him and stuck to a small circle of rich kids.
    Edited to add- also remember another guy who went to boarding school as well. He was much more friendly, but still very sheltered and clueless. He used to talk about how his family would summer in all these different countries. He had the Trump haircut and wore button down shirts and ties. They were both from the New England area.

  19. I knew some kids who went to boarding school but not many. They were all decent enough guys but they were kinda detached from reality as they all came from extremely wealthy parents

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