Thread by @nephew_jonathan

Okay, a long thread on East-Coast Boarding School World. I may drop off and finish this tomorrow.

I am the child of a boarding-school history teacher and lived on various campuses from the age of two onwards. I also taught Latin at a day school for a year and a half. 1/n

https://twitter.com/nephew_jonathan/status/1808312946084196384

First, to dispel some misconceptions:

What I mean by boarding-school world (BSW) is historically an old-money, WASP phenomenon. It is therefore mostly found in the Northeast and South, with a few outposts in California.

Elsewhere in the country, "boarding school" usually seems to mean reform schools or military academies; we're ignoring those.

The exact boundaries of BSW are...fuzzy. We'll define it as 'an expensive private school with at least some on-campus housing for teachers.'

This is because not every school my father taught at actually had student boarding, or was primarily boarding. Some used to have boarding but then downsized it.

The common denominator here, really, is that my family always lived on campus.

RIGHT, so. The prototypical BSch is a nominally or formerly Episcopalian institution in a rural or exurban area somewhere not far from I-95. It was founded as a boy's school probably around 1890 and went co-ed sometime in the 1970s.

Or it was founded as a girl's school, in which case it is somewhat less likely to have gone co-ed.

BSch originally catered to old money and then to a combination of old money, not-too-old money, very sharp kids on scholarship and international students paying full freight.

Important thing to keep in mind: BSch *caters* to the rich but *is not usually that rich itself*. Andover's endowment is only $1.13B, and it's the richest. As of 2019, form 990 indicated an endowment of $67M for my alma mater...

...compared with revenue of $37M and expenses of--oops--nearly $40M.

Total assets were about $100M, but that includes the campus. And the problem with a boarding school campus is that it basically can't be anything *other* than a boarding school campus.

It bears repeating:

BSch **is not Harvard**.

It may be a traditional feeder school for Harvard, it may educate a lot of kids whose parents went to Harvard. But it **is not Harvard**. Harvard gets to run its own show and BSch **does not get to do this**.

BSW is The Help, institutionalized, like a well-educated butler. There are some corollaries.

1. Private-school teachers are assumed to be paid better than public-school teachers. Except at Andover/Exeter/St. Paul's/Deerfield, this is rarely the case.

There are exceptions: if you're a good physics teacher you can command a pretty good salary and have a decent pick of options. There's no union (the idea strikes me as utterly absurd), so there is no strict pay scale. However, you have no tenure and no pension beyond your 401(k).

We will, however, assume you get free housing on campus. In exurban schools in places like Long Island or greater Boston, this matters a great deal; in the middle of nowhere not so much. But again, you can't keep the house when you retire.

A non-STEM teacher will top out in the mid-60s + housing at the peak of their career. A STEM teacher may hit 80K but probably not much beyond that. You'll probably get a fair number of free meals, as well (there's a dining hall).

(Those numbers might be out of date by now; maybe 75K vs. 90K).

If you have kids, you'll get heavily discounted tuition, at least half off. If tuition is $35K a year for day students this is considerable.

But the point is: the comp package is decent but not something to envy.

2. BSW's job is not *fundamentally* to give kids the most rigorous academic education it is possible to give them. It's to *create members of the upper class*.

NB: in my experience the cultural difference between the UMC and the UC is not terribly wide.

Note: not all rich people are the same and so not all Bsch's will be the same. If your child is going to be the next Terry Tao, Andover is not a bad place to send them. If they want to become a trust-fund social worker, you can send them to Northfield Mount Hermon.

They'll get a lot of the UC socialization from their classmates, of course. But teenagers tend to be poor role models, so they need to be getting course-correction from their teachers.

This raises a conundrum: how do you hire culturally U(M)C people who will work for MC wages?

Solid MC, for sure--UMC by the time they're in their 50s as part of a two-income household--but it ain't lawyer money.

Option A: hire them young. A teacher who's 27 years old and unmarried is cheaper to house (you can make them a dorm parent).

They also don't have kids of their own yet and won't be drawing the cheap-tuition benny.

Many of them find they hate it or can't hack it and go somewhere else. At one school my dad taught at...

...there was a 9th-grade geography teacher who was found by a student in her bathtub, high on LSD, pretending (believing?) that she was a turtle.

Both had dirt on each other (student had been sneaking booze); neither got caught by admin. Teacher moved to Vegas to bartend.

(IOW she didn't get fired, but decided against teaching).

Option B: hire a teaching couple.

This is extremely common and usually mutually beneficial. Teaching couples very often stick around for well over a decade and tend to have well-loved families.

Also, you are hiring well-educated sophisticates. They'll marry other well-educated sophisticates, and if you're in the middle of nowhere, there aren't that many jobs for people with grad degrees.

My parents were *not* a teaching couple; this was not great for my mom's career.

They'll also only need one housing unit instead of two.

Downside: family dysfunction can get EXTREMELY nasty. There was a scandal at one school where a (married) admin left her husband and "ran off" with another (female) admin.

This school was quite progressive, so the 'the dean is living with Sandra from Development now' twist wasn't an issue. However, there were three children involved, and all parties lived within a quarter-mile of each other on campus. AFAIK nobody decided to move elsewhere.

This is the fundamental downside: the line between your public and private life is *extremely* fuzzy. And if it's a full boarding school, your social life can end up curtailed.

Someone's gotta watch the kids on a Friday night and if you are a dorm parent, that person is you.

Option C: hire an academic who couldn't find a tenure-track job. Boarding schools like having PhDs on the faculty; that's one of the things that sets them apart from publics (and no, an EdD is not a real doctorate--not in BSW, at least not ten or fifteen years ago).

In the 70s and 80s you could pretty much waltz right into a good boarding school with a PhD in history or classics to teach history or Latin. There are now so many humanities PhDs that it's no longer a sure thing, but they get hired.

They get hired ESPECIALLY if they *themselves* went to a nice private school. This is how I ended up teaching Latin at a nice day school despite having flunked out of grad school: I had my high school at the top of my résumé.

This is the dirty little secret of private-schools, just like every other elite institution: it might be diverse but it's still going to be quite classist.

This is less hypocritical than it looks. You're educating and socializing elites; you need to know how to do that.

And one of the best ways to know if someone's likely to know how to do that is to check if they're also a product of the elite factory.

Fac brats end up boarding-school teachers at wildly disproportionate rates. They know the culture but won't consider the pay beneath them.

Some other observations and maybe a few anecdotes or two.

BSW, as you can probably guess, sets a lot of money on fire, and yet boarding schools don't close anywhere near as often as you'd guess from their Form 990s.

Example 1:

$School has a requirement that all teachers must live on campus. However, $School doesn't actually have enough housing for all of them, so in practice, all teachers must live on campus except for the ones who don't.

Admin looks at the problem: there isn't enough housing for single teachers or young couples who haven't yet had a kid or who only have a toddler.

Admin responds by spending $4.2 million to build 6 massive four-bedrooms *on land it already owns*.

Admin then proceeds to go on a massive capital campaign calling up the alums for cash.

Example 2:

$School was founded in the Gilded Age as two campuses on two sides of a river: one for boys, one for girls. They go co-ed and merge in the 1970s.

$School has always had a very progressive reputation. This is great until it's churning out social workers and nonprofit directors who are writing $10K checks to the Annual Fund while the bankers and white-shoe partners who went to Exeter are coughing up ten times as much.

So sometime in the mid-2000s someone looks at the numbers and realizes that they're dropping $600K a year--and this was 20 years ago!--just *running the buses* between campuses because kids in a dorm on campus A are taking environmental science on campus B.

Verdict: we have to close one of the campuses. They survey the alums and keep campus A by a thin margin (it has a working toy farm with cows and the alums want to be able to visit the cows at Homecoming).

So they start sunsetting campus B.

This means cutting the student intake. It also means cutting the number of faculty.

Admin does this the worst possible way: they tell everyone to be in the living room, next to their landlines (2006), on a Saturday night, and wait for a call.

And they call the ones they'll have to let go.

Admin is very rarely *evil*. Faculty sometimes get it into their heads that they are (and once they do, they'll start seeing it everywhere). Admin is, admittedly, often incompetent or clueless.

The real issue with admin is that their job is to force compromises. You have to triage legal requirements, budgetary constraints, parent demands, faculty, alums, and students, in about that order. And the budgetary constraints are, as we've seen, not inconsiderable.

A much bigger problem *these days* is that admin are trying to move up the chain. Everyone--I mean *everyone*--wants to be head at Andover. It is *very rare* these days to get a head who started out as a math teacher and was with the school for 45 years.

This used to be fairly common but no longer is. Columbia's ed school now has a program in boarding-school 'educational leadership' and schools usually hire at least one or two admins from there. Compensation packages have also ballooned

For example, $School had a head who was pulling a salary of $350K (this was nearly 15 years ago) along with a company car and free membership at at least one of the adjoining country clubs. I get it, you're schmoozing with multi-millionaire alums, you gotta look the part.

Head stuck around for several years. Had a terror of a child he would have placed in classes of faculty he didn't like.

One day he starts nattering on at a faculty meeting. Member of the Board of Trustees in attendance stands up and says 'I think that's enough, $Head_name'.

He left for some other posting shortly afterwards. It's difficult to truly flunk out as a head unless you do something truly beyond the pale; you just sort of bounce within the system. Remember, BSW is small: nobody is more than two degrees of separation away from everyone else.

"Oh, you taught at $School_A before moving here. Who was head?"
"Bill Q. Admin."
"Oh yeah, Bill! I had him 30 years ago when I was teaching at $School_B. ...yeah, I remember Bill!"

(Delivered with a knowing nod, unsurprised that Bill is now a rather mediocre head.)

As far as I recall, Bill was...fine, really?

Bill ran senior seminars on Malcolm Gladwell books. This isn't exactly a tour de force through Gibbon or Braudel, but who cares? Bill's job is to talk to alums, who are the sort of people who love Malcolm Gladwell.

It's ideal to have Bill also teaching a class of some sort so he knows at least some of the kids and looks like he's still, at core, a teacher. It can't be a huge class or a really rigorous one, he doesn't have time for that.

It's not a PhD comp exam but why does it need to be?

But I digress.
---
Many schools, like many universities, have admitted
a lot of international students. This is one thing when you're a university with a large endowment. Remember: that ain't what's going on here.

These tend to come in waves. In the late '70s, it was Japanese kids; in the '80s and '90s, Koreans and Taiwanese. Around the turn of the century of course you get a huge number of mainland Chinese kids.

The spigots haven't turned off yet, but this gets riskier and riskier.

First, international students pay full freight. This is fine in and of itself. Schools want to be able to admit poor, sharp Americans, especially black and Hispanic ones. Except for about ten schools, the endowment can't pay for them so their classmates have to.

Cheating isn't, as far as I know, actually all that rampant among that crowd, and my father is not the sort of person to ignore cheating.

The trouble is what this means for the longer-term finances. There's, of course, the geopolitical risk.

If Chinese students stop coming one day, there is ~nobody to replace them. Maybe kids from India, but this seems unlikely for some reason (maybe things have changed in the last decade). There aren't enough rich Latin Americans, Indonesians or Middle Easterners.

Moreover, schools are reliant on alumni donations as well as tuition. The culture of 'oh of course I'll cut you a check' that you get with American alumni doesn't exist with most international students.

Remember that BSW is small, but it's large enough to have niches and tiers.

Andover and Exeter are never, ever going to go under. The worst-case scenario is that they'll have to cut a bit of fat and maybe cut the Arabic program. The trouble is further down.

One way of economizing is cutting expenses, another is in increasing revenue.

Scenario: it's 2009; $French_teacher at $School has trouble getting a student to learn the days of the week in order. They do flashcards. He asks her to recite them in English.

She can't.

Student had rich parents who were paying full freight for her, and it was 2009 so the endowment had just taken a once-in-a-lifetime beating.

In 2005 or 2018 this student gets rejected, in 2009 she gets admitted.

This doesn't *necessarily* put a huge dent in the school's reputation unless it becomes a pattern. Unfortunately at this school it did; it now costs over $60K a year and doesn't offer AP classes.

A nicer way of putting it is that $School ended up in a different market niche.

(That one WAS a case of admin malfeasance, actually. A few years later they got an eight-figure gift from an alum that they put into a separate fund to fund full-ride scholarships. It later came out that they were *spending the principal* and not just the interest. Whoops!)

But more broadly: is it BAD for a school that used to be decent at academics to end up education >50% mainland Chinese students with subpar English or kids with serious learning disabilities?

It's disappointing if you're an academically-minded faculty member, no question.

But remember, these schools are The Help. And those are niches in the market. Someone's going to fill them.

You can't count on those customers lasting forever, but the same is also true of students who can hack multivariable calc. All businesses are exposed to risk.

One final note before I sign off on this blog-post-of-a-tweet-thread.

Many schools used to have honor codes along the lines of something like this: "I will not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do." Break it and risk expulsion.

But--in practice--we are educating teenagers. Who *hasn't* lied about the reason they needed an essay extension?

So you have a conundrum. This is how you want the kids to behave, in large part because that is how you need them to behave when they're adults.

Buuuuuut they're teenagers so you *can* hold them to this standard, *but not in the same way you can when they're 40*. You can't even *really* hold freshmen to quite the same standards as seniors.

Add in the fact that many of these kids are quite rich and their families may in some cases be quite powerful. I've run into last names you might recognize, and a few other kids whose parents ran institutions you probably would. This means their lives are...precociously complex.

What this looks like in practice is *strategic obliviousness*: I'm going to pretend that you have a very good reason why you didn't finish your essay or were so busy you forgot to give Katie her iPod back. In exchange you're going to go fix it so I don't have to pretend again.

And, let's face it: it's a school that borders on a kibbutz. Your neighbors are also your coworkers and bosses. Why do I see John at Megan's place so often when her husband Frank is on study hall duty? Why does Tom always have so many beer cans whenever I see him at the dumpster?

People are complex; at a normal 9-5 you simply wouldn't see this stuff. And boarding schools *at their best* have a high tolerance for eccentricity, because the good ones attract sharp, eccentric students who thrive there; I was one.

But...well, you can imagine where this goes.

One final anecdote and then I'll sign off.

$School has always been known for a friendly relationship between teachers and students; teachers are often called by their first names and have been since the '70s.

In the '80s it was well-known that students and teachers would sometimes smoke weed in the woods.

One May evening in the mid-2010s it comes out that a teacher about to retire had kissed a senior. News breaks out on a Thursday. By Monday, he is gone, with two weeks left.

There is a catch:

The kiss happened in 1978.

Was it appropriate? No.

Should he have been fired? I dunno, man, it was 1978 and on some level this looks like a case of 'there was a whole lot of stuff going on in 1978, this probably wasn't anywhere near the worst thing but you, my friend, had the bad luck of getting caught.'

Boarding schools are strange institutions where strange people--teachers *and* students--often really, really thrive. I was one of them. Strategic obliviousness has costs but it didn't come out of nowhere. These institutions are loved for a reason.

That's all. n/n.

@threadreaderapp unroll

May be of interest to @ScarletAstrorum @orthonormalist several others I'll think of in the morning

perhaps @eigenrobot and maybe @zeta_globin (you probably know a lot of people who went to these)

@grethaie @kerry62189