SUBMIT….Phew! The apps are in! In fact, we have just helped over 100 students from over 15 countries and 25 states submit applications to over 100 independent day and boarding schools this admission cycle. So it’s a good time to reflect on last year and look ahead to this year.
What makes this round of reflections particularly meaningful? Throughout the year, we will be celebrating our 70th anniversary.
We are humbled and inspired by this incredible milestone, which means simply that we have had the honor of matching (literally!) thousands of students to the right schools for them since our founding in Boston’s Back Bay in 1955. We are going to celebrate! So stay tuned for more news about our 70th anniversary events…
While none of us personally goes back as far as our founding, each year we learn a lot from our highly seasoned team of former independent school faculty. Our team spends countless hours learning about schools and students not only to match students with the right schools’ academic virtues, but also to find the school fit that promotes healthy child and adolescent development. We celebrate schools’ continuing, and increasing, focus on student health and wellness in 2024. Our visits to dozens of campuses last year, as well as the several receptions we hosted in Boston of admissions officers and school leaders, many of whom we also teamed with to present about these very topics at national conferences, yielded this common theme: Regardless of capabilities, kids need more support than ever, especially around healthy social and emotional growth. And parents need more support than ever, too.
Our continued commitment to being at the forefront of student and admission trends allowed us once again in 2024 to monitor and advise schools on their shifting admissions policies and platforms, and to optimize the search and application processes for our families, dozens of whom will still come to us throughout the spring and summer, our “second season,” in 2025 for placements this fall.
Times are Tough … And Families Need Good Schools, Good Mentors and Good Guidance More than Ever!
Our shared priority, whether we are in schools or guiding students toward the right schools for them, is the students and families themselves. Times have certainly been tough for parents and students. It’s hard being a kid these days, and harder still to be a parent. Our parents are more stressed and more dependent on us than ever. We know schools are seeing the same.
It’s our firm belief that schools are stepping up and into the breach to help families transform the current environmental challenges of learning, growing, and living into healthy developmental experiences and opportunities. While continuing to confront the challenges of the ongoing mental health crisis and its partner, screen time and social media, as well as the “college scarcity fear” that is driving parenting decisions, there will be a lot more work for good schools and good guides to do to help assuage parents’ emerging needs as new educational policies start to kick in at the US public schools, a subject we address below. But before we go there …
2024 saw a lot of challenges to the independent school world. Inflation fatigue, the uncertainty that leads up to elections, the true end to the COVID bump and the full effect of the COVID correction were felt across the independent school world. We saw more families choosing to stay in good public schools or to stay locally in their international communities. We also saw more schools experience the move from “COVID full” to the post-COVID reality that the demographic cliff is still real. While, as you’ll read below, selective schools remained as competitive as ever, if not more so, and schools that had been enrollment-comfortable and seen an increase in applications over the past several years were asking us (on the downlow, of course!) if we were seeing a similar decline in interest in independent day and boarding schools.
This disparity between the “haves” and “have-nots” is, unfortunately, likely to grow. As it does so, an even more robust return of standardized testing in the more competitive schools is likely to become a reality in short order, particularly with the merger this year of The Enrollment Management Association(EMA) and The Educational Records Bureau (ERB): the pair that controls the school testing market. Meanwhile, the more enrollment-challenged schools will be relegated again to “hunting and gathering” to find full pay students, pushing enrollment into a 12-month season. The hunt for students will likely mean that more “traditional schools” are competing for students with learning-specialized and therapeutic schools. This shift in student profile for more traditional schools will continue to have significant implications for programming and faculty training in these traditional schools.
While there has been a lot to worry about, we believe that the educational policies and ideological priorities of the new administration in D.C. will also provide ample opportunity for independent schools to serve as the remedy for families for whom public school will no longer be the best option. We will be writing more on this topic in the future. But for now, we are hearing from families who are sounding a lot like the distressed families who reached out to us during COVID: worried for their children’s safety and educational integrity. We were then and will be now, a supportive place for these families, championing the transformative power of independent day and boarding schools and reassuring families that these schools are up to the task, just as they were during COVID. We look forward to helping families and schools find each other in these challenging times.
Below, we crystallize industry trends that we garnered during our 2024 season of visits, conferences, and direct work with students and families during a high-paced, high-demand admission season. So let’s get into some greater detail on a number of these topics, summarizing our 2024 experiences and forecasting what we imagine 2025 will look like in these areas:
2024 Trends and 2025 Predictions
1.) The Haves and Have Nots: Highly Selective Schools are Here to Stay
As you’ll see in our accompanying piece encapsulating the state of College Admissions, we have a solution to the riddle: If there are indeed fewer applicants, partly due to the Demographic Cliff stemming from the dramatic drop in the birthrate during the 2008 recession, why is it harder than ever to get accepted at top schools? Indeed, the answer is that demand for the precious spots at selective schools remains extremely high, stemming from both domestic and international demand. Grade inflation born during COVID means there are more straight-A students than ever before. On the flip side, enrollment-challenged schools, especially some small boarding schools, some junior boarding schools, and a smattering of day schools, struggle to meet enrollment goals. It’s a similar phenomenon in Higher Education, where some small liberal arts colleges have closed or merged with larger universities — while the Ivy-level colleges continue to attract tens of thousands of applicants per year, and remain as, if not more, competitive than ever.
2025 Will See the Divide Between Selective Schools and… the Rest… Widen
In addition to the impact of grade inflation and the surge in applications to more selective schools that started during COVID’s test-optional period, the “scarcity fear” that is driving outrageously low acceptance rates at the top colleges will drive parents to the most selective schools in 2025. These parents are fueled by the “good parenting cultural imperative” to help their children by providing them with every opportunity to be successful in the future. For these families, the most selective schools are the greatest gift parents can give to their children. In our work, we continue to educate parents about the excellent benefits of these selective schools for the right young person. Our guidance reassures parents that the most sure way to help their children thrive in college and beyond is to provide them with the most robust educational experiences that fit their child’s unique developmental needs and strengths, which means that there are literally dozens of other schools out there where their children will create stronger foundations for better future success. We will continue to advocate for the right students matches at these outstanding schools, prioritizing fit over selectivity when it is in the best interest of the child.
2.) To Test or Not to Test? And the Marriage of EMA and ERB
Like colleges, schools swung dramatically towards test optional admissions policies at the advent of COVID. Slowly most Boston-area day schools, as well as a handful of the most selective boarding schools, have brought back the SSAT requirement -— though several dozen boarding schools, and a small batch of local day schools, remain test optional. (Apply the SSAT Required Filter on our McMillan Boarding School Guide to stay up to date on who is requiring the SSAT.) We did not see a negative impact overall in 2024 on parents’ or students’ appetite for pursuing applications at schools that are again requiring standardized testing. Meanwhile, we continue to see a large pool of highly qualified students more suited for the wide range of schools who have remained test-optional.
Testing is Making a Fuller Comeback in 2025! And the Merger of EMA and ERB Will Be Sure to Help
A fuller return of standardized testing in the moderately competitive schools is likely to become a reality in short order with the merger this year of the Enrollment Management Association (EMA), which administers the SSAT, and the Educational Records Bureau (ERB), which oversees the ISEE. Now these two competing tests will be put under the same administrative roof — a bit like combining the SAT and ACT for the college world. This marriage will simplify the choice and administration of standardized testing for private schools, making the testing process easier for families and more streamlined for school admissions offices. Despite the relative comeback of standardized testing in selective boarding schools and Boston day schools, we hope that 2025 will continue to see a wide range of schools that remain test-optional and provide more of a “holistic read” of candidates’ readiness for their communities.
3.) Opportunities for Independent Schools to Capitalize on the New Administration’s Promises for the Future of Public Education in the US
While no one yet knows for sure the changes the new administration’s Department of Education will seek to implement, there is a high likelihood that special education funding will be reduced (or gutted), at least at the state-by-state level. While it might be convenient to think that the likely impact will be isolated to certain school departments, it’s more realistic to understand that schools will feel these proposed changes more universally (e.g., larger classes, fewer extracurriculars, fewer teachers, fewer recommendation letter writers) and that they will affect students and families in ways that transcend the negative impact of programmatic decline. We understand that many families across the country are fearing for their children, who may be especially vulnerable due to their gender journey, their mental health struggles, or their learning challenges. When public schools went to minimal direct instruction online during COVID, we spent a lot of time just listening to fearful and anxious parents with a compassionate and reassuring ear. The fear for some of our families this time around is already more palpable. Independent schools stand ready to be the antidote and the safe harbor for these students and families. And we are already partnering with parents and schools in this venture.
Independent Schools Seizing An Opportunity to Do Good in 2025
We predict that 2025 will see independent schools reach out to these families that are new to independent schools and driven to them by unwanted changes to otherwise healthy public schools. We predict —as well as hope and encourage — that independent schools step up their messaging focused on their already mission-aligned programs and school community cultures that can offer these vulnerable but otherwise capable and promising young people a safe place to learn, grow, and thrive. We will be at these schools’ side, providing these families and students with our deep knowledge of what makes independent schools uniquely positioned and qualified to holistically educate these students. While we know that many families in strong public school districts have the funds to support an independent school education for their children, we predict that schools will need to be working to restructure aid and tuition discounting to attract the right candidates who are feeling forced to leave public school. We also anticipate that boarding schools will see more students from states that are more dramatically affected by educational cuts and predict that these students will need a level of financial support to make this needed change to boarding schools.
4.) International Students: 2024 Saw the Post-Graduate Boarding School Year as a Bridge to US Colleges
We have seen more international students, in particular from Europe, with whom we are already engaged in the college planning process hit pause and seek an extra year at a boarding school to serve as a bridge to university. Rather than athletic post-graduate applicants, we are calling these students “Academic and Gap PGs.” Additionally, a significant number of international students are at least a year younger than American students at graduation. The age split has widened as US independent school students, particularly boys, over the past twenty years have increasingly chosen to profit from an extra year in high school, while a number of international schools are pushing students to complete their final high school exams earlier than ever. Boarding schools may benefit from a focus on the younger international student who has already graduated from high school but may benefit from an additional year to enhance college readiness both academically and experientially.
2025, The Year of Geopolitical Instability and International Market Shifts
Just as our international markets for US education had stabilized coming off of COVID and the immigrant hostility of the pre-Biden years, geopolitical forces once again threaten to upend the boarding school international landscape at the drop of a pin — or the drop of an X posting. As we saw during COVID, if Chinese students are not allowed to travel to the US due to the suspension of visas, many enrollment challenged schools could suffer, and even close. This year, rather than a pandemic, we warn about a potential diplomatic disruption between the US and China. And, while the non-Asian international market is currently maintaining an interest in the US, we had a front row seat last year during our extensive international travel, family visits, and international school liaisons to the two sides of the geopolitical thinking about the US as an educational destination for international students: On one side, there is a deepening concern among parents about the stability of US leadership, gun violence, the disruption caused by college campus protests, and the ideological shift away from inclusionary communities. On the other side of this discourse, a number of international families shared their support of the diminishing influence of “woke-ness” on education in the US. We are closely watching our international families’ commitment to US education and its standing as the preeminent educational system in the world in the context of unfolding geopolitical events. And we are preparing to see another downshift in international students’ interest in studying in the US.
5.) Application Platform Complexity and Confusion Discouraged Families to Apply in 2024
Through our combined experience of decades of working at — and now collaborating with — dozens of schools, we have come to appreciate the distinct qualities of each particular campus community, while at the same time understanding the importance of simplifying the admissions process for all prospective families. So we join our families’ plea to streamline the increasingly complex independent school admissions process. The current system, with its myriad of school-specific essays and questions, and multitude of platforms, has proven overwhelming for families from all over and discourages many from adding schools to their list that may turn out to be the best fit for their child. Some of our families are being asked to navigate four different application platforms while only applying to a relatively short list of schools. The same complexity that has resulted in inadvertently discouraging qualified applicants to apply to a range of schools has had the effect of denying schools a chance to see a broader, more vibrant, mission-appropriate pool of candidates.
While all applications have become more complex for families to navigate, day schools may be suffering the most from the urge to stand out through enhancing complexity. It is particularly difficult to apply to independent day schools in Boston, for example, where, thanks to an explosion of unique questions and application platforms, applying to a short list of day schools is more time intensive than it is to apply to a robust list of boarding schools across the country. We are puzzled by this continuing trend. Why are schools pursuing admissions policies that, in the end, serve neither them nor the students they are looking to recruit? In the final analysis, they are adding to the trend we have seen for the past couple of years of parents choosing fewer schools to research and applying to an even shorter list of schools, which often results in compromising range and choice at the end of the process for families. There is a simple solution we ask schools to consider: look to the example of the Common Application for college admissions! See below…
Our 2025 Prediction is Actually More of a 2025 Wish
Will Schools Simplify the Admissions Process for Families — the Way the College World Has?
We hope schools can find common ground and realize that the complicated process, rather than giving any one school a competitive edge over others, hurts the shared goal of attracting more candidates to the independent school admissions world. Acting in collaboration, can schools come together as peers and colleagues to agree on a set of common essay questions on existing platforms like Ravenna or Gateway? Or choose to take the most obvious path and join the accepted, easy platform already provided by The SSAT Standard Application Online (SAO)? As student advocates, we find it difficult to endorse a process that can make it more difficult for a 14-year-old to apply to 9th grade than it is for our 18-year-old college candidates in our practice to apply to college. The example of 1,100 selective colleges, many of whom directly compete for the same pool of qualified students, creating an application process that takes place on a single common sense platform called The Common Application seems like an obvious remedy for the distress the current school admissions process is causing families. By best serving students and families, this Common Application actually also serves the colleges’ best interests. We’re happy to do our part to continue to be a voice for families and advise, where appropriate, our school colleagues in this endeavor to streamline the process.
6.) 2024 Saw Schools Adding Programming and Training to Address Students’ Emotional and Behavioral Challenges
Professional Associations, like TABS, are leading the way on this critical issue by providing important mental-health awareness training to faculty members so that the work to support students doesn’t only fall to counselors and learning specialists. As a result, faculty are more able to identify anxiety and depression, and the steps necessary to refer these young people to qualified help as early as possible. Early detection and referral allows teachers and coaches (who spend the most contact hours with students) to play an important role in mitigating the potential impact of mental health issues on individual students and the community at large. In particular, faculty members have been made more aware than ever of the contributing factors of social media consumption and cell phone usage to negative mental health outcomes. Our School Planning Chair, Jill Hutchins presented alongside her colleague, Dr. Sarah McMillan, at a national educational conference to help schools understand the relationship between student retention and healthy development and the need to develop policies and programs that allow students to pursue the precise and quality treatment required to enable them to become contributing and successful members of their communities. When schools develop partnerships with the most effective types of therapeutic interventions for students struggling with emotional and behavioral challenges, including outdoor behavioral health programs and short-term residential programs, there is a higher likelihood of student retention and future success.
Continued Mental Health Awareness Will Continue to Be Enhanced Among Entire Faculties
We see schools wisely investing more time, resources, and training of their faculty member mentors to address student health and wellness issues on the ground level. We also see schools developing more flexible and realistic policies around mental health leaves and requirements for student re-entry following a leave aimed at enhancing student retention and successful student outcomes.
7.) Cell Phone Policies Adopted to Mitigate Distraction and Promote Social Engagement
In our work guiding students and families to the best school fit this year, we have noticed a pronounced trend of parents asking about schools’ cell phone policies. It has been encouraging to see independent schools increasingly adopt policies that limit cell phone use, especially during class time. At the same time, schools know parents need to be reassured that they can reach their children for urgent matters. So schools have shown a lot of creativity in protecting the well-being of students by limiting their access to phones while also making sure they have enough access to friends and family.
While schools were initially hesitant to impose such restrictions because of potential student and parent disapproval, the success of these cell phone policies has hinged on schools’ offering engaging activities that have filled the void left by technology — meaningful alternative programming during these phone-free periods — and taught them lessons about themselves and others that they would have otherwise missed had their cellphone time remained their primary leisure activity. This alternative programming ensures students remain actively engaged rather than feeling deprived or disconnected. Options such as outdoor team-building exercises, hands-on creative workshops, or mindfulness sessions not only enrich students’ experiences; they also encourage collaboration, critical thinking, and emotional resilience — qualities that excessive screen time has been shown to hinder.
During a reception with Connecticut private school admissions directors last fall, these structured alternatives were said to ease resistance to phone bans by demonstrating their value to students and parents alike. When young people are given opportunities to connect with peers, explore new interests, or simply unwind without digital distractions, both research and schools’ lived experience are showing that they are more likely to embrace a balanced relationship with technology. In related news, our own Dr. Sarah McMillan, along with her national speaking and training partner Dr. Sarah Beneson of The Mattering Movement, spread the word last year at national conferences and faculty trainings about this positive relationship between limited screen and social media time, coupled with an active routine of social and physical outlets, and healthy child and adolescent development across domains that serves to protect against the development of mental health issues.
2025 Prediction:
Schools and Parents will Hunger for Even More Programming Replace Cell Phone Usage
In a world dominated by screens, independent schools can take advantage of a unique opportunity to model healthier habits. By pairing phone-free policies with thoughtful programming, these schools can create environments where students thrive both academically and personally. In addition to serving students better, this is a critical differentiator that has the potential to attract more students to independent and boarding schools, which is critical to schools’ health as they face, among other enrollment challenges, the declining demographic cliff.
8.) Successful Admissions Offices Personalized the Campus Visit
More than ever, our families appreciated the extra care provided by certain schools who matched their child with a tour guide who shared a common interest and introduced them to a faculty member whose area intersected with the child’s. Families whose children face learning or emotional challenges also benefited from a chance to connect with learning support and counseling support professionals to exchange program highlights and explore the ways in which individual schools uniquely work to support their students’ needs. Real connection with members of the campus community was the major differentiator to our families in this admission season in their decision whether to go forward with an application. One rising 10th grade candidate, who loves guitar and plays soccer, met a charismatic music teacher and enthusiastic soccer coach at two of the three schools she visited — you can guess which of the two the student and family chose to apply to. “Now that I am on the other side working with families looking at schools rather than hosting applicants as an Admissions Director,” explained our Jill Hutchins, “ I fully appreciate the importance of training student tour guides and personalizing the family visit.”
Schools that Don’t Tailor Admissions Visits will Suffer Decline in Applications
As families become understandably more discriminating, and tuitions rise, it’s going to take more than Big Data to attract apps — the Human Touch and developing relationships remains paramount.
9.) 2025 Will See A New Name for the Same Great Comprehensive Boarding School Guide!
We’ll continue to update and curate the best, unbiased, comprehensive guide of its type – McMillan Boarding School Guide, formerly known as the Owl Boarding School Guide, We don’t accept a penny from schools, and refuse to artificially “rank” or offer elusive acceptance percentages of average SSAT scores – it’s a free guide for you, as families, to compare signature programs and key data and for you, as schools, to see what your peers are offering for things like signature programs, and SSAT testing (or not!). It is also full of our own blogs as our team shares its background working in, and nova visiting, a range of boarding schools. We’re excited to continue serving you under our new name, with the same dedication to quality and impartiality that has always been our hallmark.
10.) 2024 Saw an Explosion of New Educational Consultants for Schools
While we enter our 70th year and celebrate our founders’ starting the professional association that would come to train and guide the ethics and practices of educational consultants (The Independent Educational Consultants Association), the years coming out of COVID, and last year in particular, saw a large number of former school admission professionals, a significant number of parents whose children have undergone the school search process, others from related fields, and even those looking for a new career enter the field of school admissions consulting. We welcome these additions to this space, particularly at a time when both students and schools need more voices and more expertise championing the benefits of independent day and boarding school education. Like any field with a surge of new practitioners, we are seeing a wide range of expertise and experience among new consultants. We are particularly excited to see former friends from the school world who bring to the field many years of background in promoting healthy child development. We will continue to promote the spirit of collaboration, of universal standards of best practices, and of the opportunity for all of us to continue to improve as we take on the responsibility and privilege of serving students and families looking to grow, thrive, and address their needs through the transformative power of independent school education.
2025 Will See McMillan will Spearhead Collaboration between Consultants and Enrollment Professionals
The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) has asked School Chair Jill Hutchins, former TABS Board Member, and CEO Don McMillan to serve on a small leadership panel whose charge is to better serve prospective families by strengthening the connection between admissions professionals and educational consultants. In using the annual conference and other venues, we hope to create programs to bring these professionals together to further our shared mission: to attract and match students from across the country and around the world with their ideal boarding school fit. We will also continue in 2025 to bolster collegiality through our regular efforts to share conference presentations with professionals in the school admissions world. We look forward to seeing you at one of these venues!
Concluding thoughts: While these are tough (maybe even the worst) of times for education and for students and families, we will devote all that we have to help make them also be the best of times. While we weren’t around when Dickens penned that phrase — “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” —, our group has seen thousands of students through good decades and challenging ones. In this, our 70th year, we are deeply grateful for the opportunity to face the challenges with all of you. And to celebrate the full range of the wonderful passions, interests, needs and strengths of our preK-12 (and Post Graduate) students. We are strengthened by our partnerships with schools and families. We have an abiding faith in the transformative power of education and in the place of education in our world. We joyously celebrate the legacy of our firm as we lean on the innovative spirit that has continuously propelled us into a brighter future. And we embrace the challenges and possibilities of now our eighth decade working on behalf of children!
