Why Boarding School

The boarding school experience is an ideal way for students to optimize both academic learning and social development. Under the close supervision and guidance of our faculty and staff, students are encouraged to challenge themselves intellectually while developing their social skills, athletic and extra-curricular interests, personal maturity and ethics. Sharing common areas in the dorms and around campus, students learn the arts of patience and compromise with their neighbors and peers. They also quickly learn the importance of trust and respect. As a result of living, eating and studying together, boarding students graduate with maturity and confidence, an understanding of others who may be different from themselves and a close bond with classmates that will endure for the rest of their lives.

According to a recent study by the Art & Science Group, the leading market research firm for educational and non-profit institutions, and which was published on the website of the Association of Boarding Schools,* there are five central advantages to boarding school life:

The Academic Promise

24-Hour Learning

Thanks to the unique and encouraging campus environment boarding schools provide, students are tremendously active outside the classroom. Across the globe, boarding school students participate in more extracurricular activities than other students, whether it is exercising and playing sports (12 hours vs. 9 hours), engaging in creative endeavors like music and painting (6 hours vs. 4-5 hours), or participating in student government and club activities (35 percent vs. 27 percent).

Learning to Lead

One distinctive characteristic of boarding schools is that character development counts as much as academics. The environment--in which teachers live among their students and students live away from home--lends itself to the cultivation of self-discipline and independent thought. Leadership opportunities also emerge. More than three quarters of boarding school students say they have been given leadership opportunities, a far higher percentage than public and private school students. At the same ti

College Ready

It is almost universally acknowledged that boarding school environments--through the balance of greater mentor guidance and greater personal responsibility--deliver graduates to university with an unequaled level of preparation. 87 percent of graduates concur, while nearly 80 percent added that they were equally prepared for the non-academic aspects of college life, including independence, social life and time management.

Getting Ahead

Beyond college, boarding school graduates are most often professionally accomplished and philanthropically active adults. By mid-career, more boarding school graduates achieve top management positions with more frequency than students from other schools. More impressively, 60 percent of alumni give to social service organizations, compared with 46 percent of all others.

*Source: The Association of Boarding Schools

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