I will be the first to admit it: I had been cocky. Self-assured. Proud, even, of my proactiveness in getting my daughter ready for the private school application process. It was March 2025, and applications weren’t due until January 2026. Never, I thought, would I be so well prepared so far ahead of a deadline.
Then I joined a private school admissions Facebook group and was promptly stripped of any confidence I had about the process—or our chances of getting through it.
I had expected parents to brainstorm age-appropriate essay topics or share open-house information. Instead, it was anonymous post after anonymous post describing a world that read like Ivy League admissions, not applications to elementary school. Stories of children waitlisted at a half-dozen schools with no acceptances. Parents trading positioning strategies and debating whether to reclass (also known as holding back) their child for an academic edge. Others bemoaning that a child with a clinically gifted IQ had been rejected from one preschool because their artistic skills were lacking. I slammed the laptop shut, realizing I was out of my depth before we had even entered the applicant pool. I didn’t know it yet, but I’d be back. Within a few months, I’d be one of the parents anonymously asking the same kinds of questions.
In Greater Boston, applying to private school has become a high-stakes admissions marathon—one that demands time, money, organization, and emotional endurance not just from prospective students, but from their entire families. The process is more intense in many ways than applying to college, because the schools aren’t only evaluating the applicant. They’re accepting the family—and the process makes sure parents know they are being judged just as much as the student hoping to attend.
We never anticipated being a private school family. My husband and I bought our home specifically for our town’s public schools. The first few years were wonderful. Then, as my daughter and her peers got older, small cracks began to show—the kinds any teacher will tell you about. Every so often, you get a difficult class. It isn’t one kid or a defining problem, just a collection of personalities that don’t quite mesh, paired with small disruptions that over time evolve into something larger.
By fourth grade, those disruptions had escalated into something we could no longer ignore. Our daughter was physically harmed by another student on multiple occasions, and the school did not meaningfully intervene. Their hands were tied, we were told. At the same time, she was bored. She would come home and finish her homework in under 10 minutes, then move on to reading books that weren’t assigned. She was already attending an enrichment program at a local prep school on the weekends. For fun. Private school was clearly the better fit. We just had no idea what it would take to get her there.
We never anticipated being a private school family. My husband and I bought our home specifically for our town’s public schools. The first few years were wonderful. Then, as my daughter and her peers got older, small cracks began to show.
After realizing that there were only three schools within a reasonable driving distance that we would consider, we hired an educational consultant to guide us through the process—at the repeated insistence of Facebook group members, who told us it was a necessity to ensure acceptance somewhere. It felt ridiculous at the time, but in retrospect, it was the best decision we made. Three was a concerningly low number of schools to apply to. The rule of thumb among families is to apply to five schools if you are not seeking financial aid, and 10 if you require assistance. In what already felt uncomfortably similar to the Educational Hunger Games, the odds were not in our favor.
I found myself justifying the decision to hire a consultant before anyone could ask. “We’re only applying to three schools, so I wanted to make sure we were giving her the best chance,” I would say. I knew the ability to hire a professional was a privilege many families don’t have, in a system that already requires a certain level of resources just to enter. But if this was how the game was played, was it fair to my child not to give her every advantage? And was it even an advantage when nearly every family we came in contact with was using one, too?
Acceptance rates at some of the most well-reputed private schools in Greater Boston hover in the low teens and single-digits—if you can find information on acceptance rates at all. It’s one of the many hush-hush parts of the private school world: admissions criteria, rates, and processes are not openly discussed, and information is not only hard to come by, but even harder to verify. How much a private school divulges about its admissions practices and criteria is largely up to the school. It’s not until you’ve committed to the process that you start to understand what is expected of your family.
That expectation is dozens of hours, thousands of dollars, and the constant awareness that a single misstep could change the trajectory of your child’s educational future. Each school required its own individualized application, and while any one of them felt manageable on its own, the cumulative effect was something else entirely. There were parent coffees and informational sessions, usually about an hour each and often scheduled during the workday. There were open houses that stretched closer to three hours. There were admissions Zooms, campus tours, parent and child interviews, even mahjong nights—all scheduled midweek, in the middle of everyday life.
And then there were the applications themselves. Each one took anywhere from four to six hours to complete, longer if we were being thoughtful, which we were trying to be. There were student essays to help our daughter draft, short answers to craft, and parent statements that felt like they carried more weight than they probably should have.
At some point, I stopped thinking of it as a checklist and started thinking of it as a job. I built a calendar just for school applications. Then I color-coded it by school. Then I started waking up in the middle of the night, mentally running through what we had coming up next. Days blocked off. Deadlines stacked. Emails flagged and re-flagged. There were moments when I would open my laptop and feel the low-grade panic of someone who had too many tabs open—on the screen and in my brain. And all of this was happening while we were still living our actual lives: work, school, sports, the daily logistics of raising children that don’t pause just because you’ve decided to apply to private school. If anything, those commitments took on even more importance, knowing that we would require letters of recommendation from multiple teachers, administrators, and coaches for each school.
When I finally did the math of how much time this process was eating up in our schedules, the job comparison didn’t feel so out of place. With the average family applying to seven schools, parents could spend nearly 100 hours between September and January on in-person events and applications alone. Add that on top of back-to-school events, fall sports, and other extracurriculars a child needs in order to be a competitive applicant, and the question of “Who has the time?” answers itself.
If the time investment alone had been the only cost, it would have been significant. But layered on top was the financial reality—another cost that, like so much of this process, isn’t often discussed openly. Each application costs between $50 and $100 to submit. On its own, that doesn’t feel prohibitive. But across seven or eight schools, it adds up quickly.
Then there is the ISEE or SSAT, the standardized tests nearly every private school requires as part of the application. Registration alone can be as much as $250. But for many families, including ours, the real expense was in preparation. Tutors in the Boston area charge anywhere from $200 to $400 an hour, and most recommendations suggest one to two hours per week for about 12 weeks. Even conservatively, that’s close to $3,000. And that’s assuming one round of testing. No retakes, no additional sessions, no extra support.
Then there were the less obvious costs. The educational consultant. Taking time off work for weekday admissions events. Childcare for our younger child while we were at admissions events with our daughter. Gas. Parking. Lunch, because by the time your child has wrapped up three hours of constant performance, you can bet they’re going to be starving. By the time we were deep into the process, it became clear that we were spending thousands of dollars simply for the chance to be asked to spend close to $70,000 a year in tuition and fees.
I expected the financial costs. What I didn’t anticipate was the emotional expense. Every interaction began to feel consequential. Every informational session, every admissions meet-and-greet, every email exchange carried an undercurrent of evaluation. It may not have been explicit, but it was impossible to ignore.
The school tours put this tension front and center. At many schools, you are guided around campus by an admissions director or current family and encouraged to ask questions. Our consultant had warned us that this was part of the interview. Schools wanted students who seemed truly engaged on the tours, parents who knew the right questions to ask—questions that couldn’t be answered on the website.
At one school, three other parents and I found ourselves in the worst-case scenario: Three kids, and not one willing to speak first or start the conversation. It was a painful hour that sent me into a near-anxiety spiral. Why was my daughter, who had 35 questions on the drive over, unable to think of a single one when prompted? I overcompensated. I asked too much. I asked too little. I replayed every exchange on the drive home, editing each one in retrospect, wishing I had phrased something differently or offered the insight that arrived 10 minutes too late. It felt, at times, like my child’s future was precariously balanced on the impression I made in a handful of 30-second interactions.
Rationally, I knew that wasn’t entirely true. But the structure of the process made it feel that way. We were presenting not just our child, but our family—our values, our priorities, our fit within a school’s community—and we were doing it repeatedly, in slightly different forms, to slightly different audiences.
It felt, at times, like my child’s future was precariously balanced on the impression I made in a handful of 30-second interactions.
The deeper we got into the process, the more another reality became difficult to ignore: The system assumes a certain kind of family. No school says it outright. But the structure makes the expectation clear. Parents must have the flexibility to take time off work to attend weekday tours, interviews, and shadow days. Application fees can be waived for families who need financial assistance. Time commitments cannot.
If you can’t step away from work on a Tuesday morning to drive across Greater Boston for a campus visit, the system doesn’t really have an alternative for you. If you can’t spend hours navigating application portals, coordinating teacher recommendations, and shuttling your child to testing centers and interviews, the process becomes exponentially harder.
And then there is the question that lingers in the background for many families: Even if your child gets in, will they belong?
Private schools in the Boston area attract families with extraordinary resources. It’s part of what allows them to offer the very things that make them appealing in the first place: smaller class sizes, expansive extracurricular programs, state-of-the-art facilities, global travel opportunities, and college counseling departments whose yearly Ivy League acceptance numbers many public schools don’t see in a decade.
Those are powerful incentives. But they raise a different kind of concern. Can a “regular” kid like ours—one from a family that isn’t flying to Europe for spring break or summering at their second home—truly feel comfortable in that environment? Is there a risk of trading one kind of discomfort for another?
Parents discuss this in private more than they talk about it out loud. The question underneath is simple, if uncomfortable: Is it worth it?
For us, the payoff is clear. Our daughter wanted to switch schools. She worked hard in the classroom, with her tutors, and through the application process. What I struggle with is whether playing into a system I know is broken sets the right example. Our child benefited from a two-parent household with flexible scheduling, the resources to make sure her best self was on display, parents who knew which group to join and which professional to hire. Most families do not have the time or money to go through this process and come out the other side. The advantages were ours. The benefit is hers.
My daughter knows her acceptance meant another child’s rejection. When I asked if she had told her friends where she’d be going next year, she said she wanted to wait until the end of the school year, so that classmates who wanted private school but couldn’t have it, for whatever reason, wouldn’t feel bad. I want her to feel pride in her accomplishment. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I also felt some pride of my own—not just for the acceptance, but because at 10, she had already clocked what the process was doing to other kids.
The pressure of applying makes it easy to forget who’s actually being excluded at the end of it: the kids who would thrive at these schools and don’t have the resources to seriously consider them. We did. We used them. Our daughter will start in the fall.
The pressure of applying makes it easy to forget who’s actually being excluded at the end of it: the kids who would thrive at these schools and don’t have the resources to seriously consider them.
I’m not going to apologize for any of it. We made the call we thought was right for our child, and we’d make it again. But I’m also not going to pretend the system we just navigated is anything other than what it is—a process built for families like ours and closed to the ones that aren’t.
