Prep Chic

So boarding schools are now using a powerful recruitment tool to entice middle class and poor kids to their campuses--money. Many have massive endowments and are using their financial heft to entice high performing kids. Thirty years ago, 16 percent of Taft students received financial aid. These days, slightly more than one- third of Taft students get it.

Though boarding schools have long been feeders to elite colleges, those links have weakened. In 1939, 23 students from Taft's 82-member graduating class were admitted to Yale. By 1984, the numbers had shrunk to six out of 148. In the past five years, 23 percent of Taft graduates attended one of the Ivies or little Ivies (Wesleyan, Williams and Amherst). Those students were just as smart as their '39 counterparts--or maybe smarter. But these days, high- powered colleges are looking for diversity, too. An excellent student from a public high school in, say, Montana may be a more attractive applicant to a highly competitive college than an average student from a prestigious boarding school in the Northeast. Senior Sam Daegremond says he'd probably be going to Harvard if he'd stayed at his public high school in Old Lyme, Conn. "My parents and I talked about how colleges look at boarding schools, and that coming from Taft would be kind of a disadvantage. I sort of sacrificed my standards for college by coming to a good [high] school." Instead, he's settling for his second choice, the University of Pennsylvania.

In fact, because the college admissions process has become so frenzied, it's almost random which highly-qualified students are admitted. Parents, says Deerfield Academy headmaster Eric Widmer, are beginning to look to boarding schools to supply the same leg-up in the world. "They reason that a good boarding school can provide the same kind of advantages as four years in an Ivy league college," says Widmer. They want to provide their children with that experience--even if it means their kids get a little homesick.

© 2005