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Financing a boarding school education can be very confusing for many parents. You wonder whether you make too much to be eligible. Is there a specific time when you apply? Here are some facts most of us didn't know about private school financial aid.

1. You have to apply for it.

Applying for financial aid at most private schools is a separate process from applying for admission. You also need to make sure that you apply early. This is particularly important if the school has no specific admissions deadline or rolling admissions. Each school has allocated a specific pool of funds for financial aid. Once it is spoken for, there generally are no more funds in that academic year.

This video explains how to apply for financial aid.

2. You may be eligible for free tuition if your family income is below a certain amount.

Exeter, Andover, Groton, St. Paul's, and Deerfield, to name just a few schools, all have financial aid programs that offer tuition-free education to admitted students whose income is below a certain threshold. The threshold varies but is in the $60-75k range. Why are these highly competitive schools offering free education to children from families with incomes below $75,000? They want to make their excellent educations available to a broader constituency. When tuition and expenses creep into the $50,000 range, only

As you work through choosing the right boarding school for your child, you will find it easy to get side-tracked. Nothing wrong with getting side-tracked. Just make sure that you get yourself back on track. There are three to five schools for you to visit. Lots of observations, evaluations, assessments, and questions. Make sure that you have checked all the boxes.

___1. Location

The location of the boarding schools on your list is essential simply because travel these days is never easy. Review the logistics involved carefully. Ideally, you don't want to be more than a few hours from the school. That may seem unrealistic, but practically speaking, it is not. For example, there are dozens of schools within an hour of Boston's Logan Airport. From there, you can get to many major metropolitan areas in two hours. Incidentally, those New England boarding schools are old hands at transferring students from campus to the airport. Those are precision operations honed over many years so that just about every travel eventuality is thought of. Naturally, cell phones make communications with you waiting anxiously on the other end much more accessible than when my daughters went to boarding school. So draw a circle 60-120 miles out from any major airport. If boarding schools fall within the circle, you should be all set.

___2. Academics

Once you have more or less decided where you are looking for schools, then you can begin to get granular with that very important item on

Finding the right boarding school for your child is one of the most critical and expensive decisions you will ever make. You might try to research thoroughly on your own, only to find that most websites look alike, and very few give information on the profile of typically accepted students. Families who want guidance often turn to “independent educational consultants” or IECs.

IECs are professionals who the family pays to advise them on the boarding school search and admissions process. Many offer full-service comprehensive packages that span over a year, and others have shorter packages or an hourly rate. A typical consultation starts with a focus on the student’s background and interest in boarding school. This includes a review of his transcript, testing, activities, interests, and academic successes and challenges of the past. An IEC talks with the student and parents about goals for the future and what they hope to get out of the boarding school experience. Consultants might give examples of nurturing schools, offer learning support, or provide extra help to students when they need it, whether they ask for it or not! IECs discuss the pros and cons of the more rigorous schools or might help a family decide whether to repeat a year. Families might hear about how the schools are different, why a single-sex school might be beneficial, or why a rural, primarily boarding community will feel different than a suburban school with a mix of day students. IECs

There are almost 40 boarding schools west of the Mississippi River. If you drive west from this great river, the landscape and climate slowly change, and, likewise, a perhaps previously unexplored region of boarding schools will begin to unfold before you. Like the Louis and Clark expedition many years ago, this voyage of discovery will be an astonishingly educational experience.

Start anywhere west of the Mississippi, from Manitoba down to Texas; head west across the Great Plains and even past California and British Columbia all the way to Hawaii. On this voyage, you will find the many boarding schools represented by the Western Boarding Schools Association. These boarding schools can rival anything found in the East, and we often offer more! For example, did you know that Hawaii Prep has 80% of the world’s ecosystems and a LEED Platinum Energy Lab? Or that one can safely predict that many of the ice hockey medalists at the Sochi Olympic Games will have attended high school at Shattuck-St. Mary’s in Minnesota? Or that you can simultaneously watch condors fly overhead while on your way to surfing each day at Cate School in Carpentaria, California? Or can we integrate marine biology and oceanography into our curriculum at my school, Brentwood College School, because we are situated directly on the Pacific Ocean?

Academically, our Western boarding schools stack up with the