You likely know them by name: Exeter, Andover, Choate, Deerfield, Loomis Chaffee, St. Paul’s, Putney, Taft, Miss Porter’s, Peddie. Of course, this list isn’t exhaustive, as there are other fancy schmancy boarding schools. 

Now, don’t get us wrong — these are some great schools, some of the finest boarding schools in the nation. They offer a first-class education. Many of them even enjoy terrific relationships with elite colleges. Elite colleges, after all, trust fancy schmancy boarding schools. They’ve been admitting students from these schools for generations, dating back to when most students admitted to elite schools hailed from fancy schmancy boarding schools. But those times are no more.

Our nation’s elite colleges still love our nation’s elite boarding schools. When these colleges continue to admit students in such high numbers from these secondary schools, it speaks to their mutually beneficial relationship. Elite colleges trust these schools and their curriculums. They know from experience that high-achieving students from these boarding schools will do well at the next level.

Does Attending a Selective Boarding School Help With Elite College Admissions?

However, just because your child attends a fancy boarding school doesn’t mean they’ve got a leg up in admissions, and if you think as much, well, you’re in for a surprise. If that were the case, we wouldn’t work — every year — with many boarding school applicants from these very fancy schmancy schools.

Some Boarding School College Counselors Aren’t Very Good

If the college counseling at these schools was so good, if it was so effective, if it could be relied on implicitly, then why oh why would so many families of students at these elite boarding schools seek out Ivy Coach’s assistance? In the end, there are lots of reasons. Among them, the college counselors at these schools aren’t always all that good. They’re often quite crummy if you ask us. Indeed, there are — without question — some better college counselors within America’s public school system than at these fancy schmancy boarding schools.

Boarding School College Counselors Play Favorites

But if you had to ask us to boil down why so many students shouldn’t rely on their school counselors at fancy schmancy boarding schools as they navigate the elite college admissions process, that’s an easy one. We’ve seen it repeatedly over the last 30+ years: these college counselors play favorites. That’s right. They go to bat for the students they most want to get in. Maybe it’s the child of a family who has been a major donor to the boarding school. Or perhaps it’s the oldest child of a family with three to four more kids coming to the boarding school in the pipeline (think of those tuition dollars!). You get the idea.

Consider it like this: there are only so many highly selective colleges. There are eight Ivy League schools, Stanford, Duke, MIT, Northwestern, etc. Competitive applicants from these schools are all vying for admission to the same set of schools. Did you not stop to consider that when a boarding school has eight applicants up for admission to Yale, they’ll pick and choose which ones they lobby for the hardest? Of course they will.

And college counselors at top boarding schools often have relationships with admissions officers. These lobbying calls can undoubtedly sway the decision-making. Heck, many of our students at Ivy Coach over the years have benefited from this very lobbying (behind the scenes, we help our students approach their counselors so their counselors want to root for them!).

A Shining Example of a Boarding School College Counselor Playing Favorites

Want an example of a boarding school playing favorites? Allow us to share a story. We love our stories, as Ivy Coach’s loyal readers know so well. A few years ago, we had a student who first came to us after having already completed the admissions process. She didn’t get into any of the schools she hoped to attend. It was one major strikeout.

Yet after we examined the student’s profile, we knew what had happened. First, the student could have presented much-improved applications that showcased a singular hook and powerful storytelling to improve her case for admission. Second, the student’s family didn’t have deep ties to the school, and the school’s college counselor likely didn’t go to bat for her.

So we recommended that the student complete a PG year at another boarding school to have a chance to re-do their admissions process and get into a much better school. We then helped the student craft outstanding applications. And while we would never tell the student this as we like to undersell and overdeliver, we knew the student had the chance to earn admission to multiple Ivies (not Harvard, Yale, or Princeton but any other Ivy or Ivy-equivalent she chose in the Early round).

We worked with this student on all of her applications. But unbeknownst to us, a few days before the Early deadline, we learned that the student intended to apply Early Decision to Rice. A student who had a chance to get into Columbia, Dartmouth, Penn, Duke, Brown, Cornell, etc., chose Rice. We couldn’t believe it, and we tried desperately to talk her out of it.

But for this student, there was no turning back. As it turns out, this student had mentioned her interest in Rice to her college counselor at the fancy schmancy boarding school. The college counselor likely thought, “Rice isn’t one of our usual suspects. This way, the kid won’t be competing against our other kids who didn’t just come to us for a single year as a PG student. I’ll encourage Rice. I’ll push it hard for ED.”

And so the student applied ED to Rice and, low and behold, she got in. We were so disappointed because, while Rice is a fantastic, elite university, we knew this student could earn admission to an Ivy League school or a school like Duke and we knew that’s what the family would have preferred. However, the family listened to the college counselor instead of us. A few days after the student learned of her admission to Rice, her mother asked us if we thought she could get out of her binding Early Decision commitment to Rice so she could submit the other applications we worked on through Regular Decision. Of course, we told this mother, “Absolutely not! It’s a binding commitment. Your child is going to Rice!”

Ivy Coach’s Boarding School Students Often Have Weak Ties to the Boarding School

Yet, at Ivy Coach, we don’t rely on such lobbying from the school counselor. Because our students at Ivy Coach — more often than not — are not the ones who benefit from this lobby. More often than not, our students are not the boarding school legacies or the children of major donors.

Instead, our parents often don’t have deep, longstanding relationships with the boarding schools their child attends, so we’ve got to help them punch back against the students whose families enjoy longstanding, deep ties. Those students, after all, are our student’s competition.

The student may be an international student. Perhaps the student is a PG student, completing an extra year of high school). Or maybe the student is the youngest sibling (no more are coming up in the pipeline, so the school doesn’t care as much!). Or it could be that the student is the only sibling who will ever attend the boarding school, and the boarding school knows it. These students can significantly benefit from Ivy Coach’s help — to compensate for their boarding school’s college counselor who has a habit of playing favorites that serves not their child but instead the school’s bottom line.

Ivy Coach’s Assistance for Boarding School Students

May this story serve as a loud warning to all parents of boarding school students who don’t have deep, longstanding ties to these schools. And if you need Ivy Coach’s help to launch a counterattack, to help your child gain a significant advantage in the highly selective college admissions process (much like the advantage enjoyed by families with deep, longstanding ties to boarding schools), fill out our complimentary consultation form. We’ll then be in touch to outline our go-forward college counseling services.