For some parents, the decision to send a child to boarding school is a long-term investment in the child’s academic future — even if it comes with short-term financial hardship.
Private school students tend to outscore their public school peers across several metrics of success, including music, reading and math, according to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly referred to as “the nation’s report card.”
These statistics are complicated, however, by the reality that many private school students were advantaged long before they entered the classroom. Many experts argue that private school students outscore their public school peers because their parents are more likely to have completed college and have more financial resources.
“When you compare children who went to private school (for an average of six years) with those who only went to public school, any apparent benefits of private schooling — higher test scores, for example — are entirely attributable to parents’ education and income,” Robert Pianta, a professor of early childhood education at the University of Virginia, told U.S. News & World Report. “The fact that they went to private school does not account for any differences we might see.”
The average cost of private school attendance, from kindergarten through high school, is $312,026, according to the Education Data Initiative. That average tends to increase when looking at private schools located in the northeast — with Connecticut schools having the highest cost of private education in the country. Other high-cost hotspots include California, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
To determine the most expensive boarding schools in the U.S., Quartz reviewed the combined cost of tuition and fees, before financial aid, at more than 50 highly-ranked boarding schools. While schools in the northeast tended to be more expensive, in aggregate, it was California high schools that dominated the list of the nation’s most expensive boarding schools.
Continue reading to learn about the most expensive boarding schools in America.
