What is a boarding school like?

Boarding school is a chance to build strong relationships with classmates and faculty members as well as to grow in maturity and self-understanding. Boarding school is a place to gain independence, learn valuable life skills, and make priceless memories. Boarding school is the opportunity to build a solid academic foundation to prepare for college and the global job market. Boarding school is where you can broaden your horizons through travel, language immersion, and collaborating with students from around the globe. Boarding school caters to the needs of the whole student: academics, athletics, and personal growth.

The Best Boarding Schools in the US

Badge for BEST IN THE US BOARDING SCHOOLS

By Dr. James Barham

Published: Feb 22, 2021
Updated: Sep 8, 2023

The top boarding schools in the US comprise dedicated faculty (who often live right by campus), talented students, and a host of exciting educational and extracurricular opportunities. Contrary to stereotypes, these schools introduce students to a boarding school experience that is rich, challenging, and transformative.

Key Takeaways

The best boarding schools in the US give students a space where boundaries are relaxed and supported and provide a special partnership with faculty members, the parent, and the student. This is advantageous for a child’s growth.
Students and parents first choose a boarding school for its benefits, including challenging academics. Students will be intellectually challenged in ways they have never been.
International students who attend boarding schools have a great chance to develop their English language skills.

Table of Contents

Featured Programs

Two types of boarding schools exist in the minds of many Americans. The first is the elitist world we glimpse through the lens of television and film: bright and beautiful people for whom boarding schools are a springboard to wealth, influence, and high culture. The other image is the threat given to some children: shape up or get shipped off to a boarding school in Switzerland. Neither of these images is true to the boarding school experience available in the US today.

Discovering America’s Leading Boarding Schools

Parents and students may choose a prestigious, private boarding school for their rigorous academic program that challenges students in ways they have never been in a regular secondary school. A boarding school ensures that boarding students are fully immersed in a learning environment where education is the main focus of all activities.

Most boarding schools, including those belonging to the independent boarding school category, maintain a small student body with a 12-student class size on average. Boarding students take an active role in their education. After the school day is over, teachers who live on campus are available for further assistance.

Attending a boarding school, whether a coeducational school or an all-girls boarding school, has several advantages. Students participate in various activities that will help them gain new cultural experiences, make friends from around the world, gain greater independence and confidence, learn new languages, and expand their social networks.

Benefits of Attending Boarding School in the US

International Education

A boarding school offers a multicultural, inwardly-focused environment. Boarding students study their academic programs alongside peers and teachers from many religious traditions, ethnic origins, and cultural backgrounds.

High Academic Standards

Daytime education and residential schooling are highly dissimilar. Boarding schools excel in creating and implementing challenging and inspiring curricula for students.

Extra-curricular Activities

Leisure time activities have historically been a key component of student life in boarding schools and have strengthened the sense of community among students.

Personality Development

For many students, starting school in an unfamiliar place emphasizes a challenge. However, kids spend more time together than ever in day school, so they frequently adjust to living away from home and rapidly make new friends. They develop independence and autonomy from their parents.

Preparing for University

Because boarding schools maintain a low student-to-teacher ratio, students will have more personalized attention that will help them prepare for their four-year education major. Students also create resumes, which are crucial for college admissions and job decisions.

Many boarding schools provide advanced courses to aid students in selecting the ideal vocation after graduation and have strong connections to Ivy League schools like Harvard and Columbia.

Lifelong Friendship

Strong ties remain among the friends who first meet at the boarding school. Living together, caring for and supporting one another, participating in community service, and spending significant time together all contribute to the sense of family unity. A boarding school encourages students to develop the strongest connections.

The Most Selective Boarding Schools on the List

A top-notch boarding school prepares students for success throughout their lives, but some of the most prestigious boarding schools are quite picky about which students are suitable for the experience. The list’s most exclusive boarding schools are those that are hardest to gain admission to. Below are the most selective boarding schools along with their admission rates:

Georgetown Preparatory School, 23%
Choate Rosemary Hall, 23%
Peddie School, 22%
The Hotchkiss School, 21%
Taft School, 21%
Lawrenceville School, 20%
Milton Academy, 19%
Phillips Exeter Academy, 19%
Middlesex School, 18%
Deerfield Academy, 17%
Phillips Academy, 13%
The Thacher School, 12%
Groton School, 12%

Boarding school FAQs:

Although there are more than 300 boarding schools across the US, the majority of people have never experienced one in person. Many of the top boarding schools are located in the Northeast where the tradition of boarding school extends back over 200 years. Even so, boarding school campuses can be found in locations all over the US: from Florida, to Texas, to California.

For the purpose of this list: A boarding school can be defined as a place where students are housed, fed, and educated in one location by a committed and capable group of staff and faculty. Most boarding schools offer options either to board on campus or to attend as a day student and return home in the evenings. Though some boarding schools are exclusively for students living on campus, day students typically comprise a small minority of students at a boarding school. Many boarding schools were founded with a religious or military affiliation, but have been adapted to meet the needs of twenty-first century learners.

Students choose to attend boarding schools for a variety of reasons. Faculty at boarding schools typically have a higher percentage of advanced degrees than their public or private school counterparts, and the curricula tend to be more challenging and varied. Students seeking an Ivy League education, an opportunity to spend time in a foreign country, or the chance to work in world-class facilities often find that boarding schools provide the ideal launching pad for attaining such goals.

Although boarding schools may seem like a non-starter for many parents and students, in fact these schools should be on the radar of students seeking admission to top-tier colleges and universities. Many boarding schools offer postgraduate programs, in which students newly graduated from high school have a chance to spend an additional year at a boarding school, making their résumé that much more competitive before they apply to college or university. Boarding schools typically even award a high school diploma to students taking such a gap year (giving students two high school diplomas!).

The opportunities offered and the level of attention provided at a top boarding school do come with a price tag, but there are abundant scholarships and financial aid options available to parents. The average cost of boarding schools in the US is currently $56,875 per year (as of 2021, according to the Boarding School Review), but 46% of students at boarding schools receive financial aid of some type (according to the National Association of Independent Schools), and the average amount of aid is $24,747 (according to the National Association of Independent Schools).

Boarding school is a chance to build strong relationships with classmates and faculty members as well as to grow in maturity and self-understanding.
Boarding school is a place to gain independence, learn valuable life skills, and make priceless memories.
Boarding school is the opportunity to build a solid academic foundation to prepare for college and the global job market.
Boarding school is where you can broaden your horizons through travel, language immersion, and collaborating with students from around the globe.
Boarding school caters to the needs of the whole student: academics, athletics, and personal growth.

How do we determine the best boarding schools?

The people affiliated with a school are ultimately what make it great. This is why influence gets at the heart of what is truly best in education.

If you are serious about finding the best boarding schools, you should be asking where the most influential faculty are teaching, and whether their graduates themselves are advancing the school’s reputation for academic excellence. Most ranking sites rely on an opaque combination of reputation surveys and arbitrary performance metrics. Influence, as measured by our InfluenceRanking engine, provides a ranking that is free from bias, insulated from manipulation, and reflective of real-world educational outcomes.

Our influence ranking engine consults the largest repositories of open source data on the Web and entrusts their analysis to machine-learning technology. These databases contain billions of continuously updated data points, which by their nature resist biased manipulation and by their scope contain built-in protections against wholesale gaming.

Our technology thus uses artificial intelligence (AI) to

aggregate scholarly and academic citations from databases such as Wikipedia and Crossref,
evaluate links and other semantic information contained in these databases, and
weigh their merits against other information sources such as periodicals, journals, and global media outlets.

Importantly, our machine-learning technology doesn’t simply scrape the web for mentions. Influence at AcademicInfluence.com is therefore not a popularity measure. Rather, the AI underlying our InfluenceRanking engine drills down deeply to

identify people and institutions, locating mentions of them across the Web in 15 different languages,
associate those mentions with records of achievement in specific fields of study,
map the people that make up an institution, keeping track of independent work done by those people as well as their affiliations with other institutions, and
aggregate the influential output of people at an institution, thereby gauging the institution’s influence by disciplinary programs and overall.

Find out more about our methodology here.