Illegal drug use is banned and alcohol use is forbidden to most students on most boarding campuses, though some schools allow alcohol to students who are legal adults under certain restricted circumstances. Schools work out their own policies for substance infractions. Some take a stern line with drugs but tend to treat alcohol much less harshly. Others are equally strict with both. Students caught selling drugs face immediate dismissal, and in the case of a serious criminal action, potential arrest. Some schools maintain sanctuary policies for students who take alcohol or drugs but then recognize their errors, self report their behavior and check into the student health center. Another common policy is nondisciplinary intervention (NDI), whereby a student or faculty member can alert a school official of a student’s alcohol or drug use, or a student can self report. The school then moves to help the offending student without disciplinary action.
Responses to criminal behavior may depend on the gravity of the offense. A petty theft might land a student on probation with warnings, but not expulsion or arrest. Repeated acts of theft that reveal a student unwilling or unable to reform, or a theft of real magnitude that sullies the school’s reputation may result in suspension, dismissal, or arrest.
Schools will go a long way to avoid such extreme measures. Once the school is aware of a problem, administrators will contact the parents to discuss the potential consequences. Such steps usually put a stop to the issue ahead of a major crisis. Detection of student problems is largely dependent on the web of communications systems that schools put into place. This includes faculty, advisors, student proctors, and the general population working together when someone becomes aware of serious malfeasance. Some school communities are decidedly better at this than others.
COLLEGE COUNSELING
As a rule, college advising at boarding schools is much more sophisticated than at public and day schools. Boarding school college counselors (CCs) often have long standing personal relationships with the admissions officers (AOs) of elite colleges. They often invite college AOs to campus, travel to colleges to lobby for their students, and closely advise the students about their applications.
College advising usually begins with general guidance for students in 9th and 10th grade, with admonitions to take rigorous courses in core subjects, participate in extracurricular activities (ECs) and service, and use summer vacations to good purpose. Many schools explicitly avoid college admission activities until the students reach 11th grade to keep their students focused on school, not college.
The college admission push typically kicks off in the middle of 11th grade (with some schools working with students in 10th grade). It often begins with a family weekend during the winter term. Parents and students meet in large groups with CCs, then with individual counselors assigned to small groups of students. These private sessions focus on what the students are seeking in a college (similar to the boarding school search process), and also on the extent of the family’s financial resources.
CCs will use this information together with student test scores and transcripts to propose a slate of prospective colleges. Many schools use software programs such as Naviance to assist in this task. By comparing a student’s test scores and transcripts against those of recent school alumni, the software programs can project likely college matches. Naviance is widely used by a wide range of high schools both public and private, but often to only limited effect if the school’s statistical base is small; a “B” rated public school which has only one grad matriculated to Dartmouth, and that ten years ago, cannot accurately predict the probabilities for a current applicant from that school to that college. whereas a boarding school with multiple recent admittees would have stronger data with which to work.
College admissions officers and boarding school CCs are closely connected, communicate frequently, and often socialize together. Many pros move from one camp to the other somewhat as realtors do, representing the “buyer” (the college), and then shifting over to work for the “seller” (the school). The familiarity between these two camps often means that school CCs frequently learn breaking news that could impact their students: perhaps what positions a college sports team is looking to fill, what the appointment of a new college admissions director may bode for the school’s rising applicants, or upcoming changes in financial aid calculations. CCs can also promote their star students to the colleges ahead to their applications.
The CCs have a vested interest in this process. They want to maximize their school’s “admit efficiency” and therefore promote students who are strong candidates likely to gain admission to a particular college and also likely to accept a place when offered. This increases the college’s admissions efficiency, ups their “yield” (admitting students who go on to enroll), and raises the college’s confidence in that school’s college counselors, thereby improving the chances for future applicants recommended by those CCs. This is why CCs often dissuade less than stellar students from taking “long shot” chances on colleges that will most likely reject them.
CCs also manage students’ application plans against the plans of other classmates. Though the notion that elite colleges take quotas of students from certain schools is decidedly false, large numbers of students applying to the same college increases the likelihood of more rejections, if for no other reason than that colleges prefer diversity of geography and school origin. CCs cannot and do not prevent students from applying to long shot schools, but do help their students understand their likely prospects and promote realistic strategies to achieve them.
Each student is given a list of likely prospective colleges by the CCs. This is partly to help the students understand where they will likely be accepted. It also helps the CCs, as each college relies on the school’s CCs to weed out the unlikely candidates from the applicants most likely to be accepted and to attend that college.
The advantages of boarding school college counseling are many. Fully staffed CC offices provide a depth and frequency of individual counseling that other schools lack. Students are given schedules to maintain – advance study for and scheduling of SAT/ACT exams and SAT subject tests. Parents are kept advised of progress. Many boarding schools host college AOs to interview students on campus. College coaches likewise are invited to observe prep athletes.
However, boarding school students face certain particular challenges in college admissions. Since prep schools by definition consist of students preparing for college, this usually results in many students applying to the same few colleges, usually those ranked in the top 20 or 30, a circumstance not so common in other types of schools, where a minority of students might be college bound (as in most public schools) or focused on local or in state colleges (as in many day schools). This results in much more potential intra-school competition at the boarding schools. Tensions and emotions can rise. Students often respond to this by avoiding discussion of their grades, tests scores, and college plans, thereby helping to maintain a friendly atmosphere before acceptances are mailed and hurt feelings and resentments are generated. Boarding schoolers may also find themselves at a disadvantage geographically. Whereas a student at a boarding school might gain some small advantage being from an underrepresented state, the school itself might be in Connecticut, an overrepresented state. In such cases, students must make sure that their applications emphasize their family’s location, not their school’s.
The schools typically allow 12th grade students to take a small number of “college days” in the fall and winter to visit prospective colleges. Students travelling to far off colleges often schedule college days on a Friday or Monday to combine with the weekend days in order to accommodate long distance travel. “Revisit days” handle similar travel needs after college admission offers have been received in the spring.
MINORITIES
The experience of minorities at boarding schools continues to evolve. In a repudiation of their past history, these schools now are committed to inclusive and diverse student populations and seek to