There are an indoor and outdoor swimming pool and vast sports facilities. Le Rosey is "aggressively sporty," as one student puts it. I visit the girls campus, where students eat and sleep, a five-minute stroll from the main campus. It reminds me of a sprawling off-season hotel in the south of France, with dainty garden chairs perched on gravel, wisteria climbing the walls, and sprinklers tending to the expansive lawn. Each student shares a bedroom and en suite bathroom with a roommate.
For families that provide students with allowances, the school recommends varying the amount with age. Tall, smiling Nicholas, who was raised in Beirutand whose father was here in the early '60s 40 percent of the students are children of alumni , tells me that "teachers are always ready to help you out and talk to you.
They are like second parents. His friend Beatrice, a pretty brunette from Geneva who, like most of the girls, has a curtain of loose, long hair, says that she came from an all-girls English boarding school, which she loathed. I speak to others—many of them half-this, half-that stateless types. They form a super confident and chatty bunch, and all regard Le Rosey as a second home.
The student body comes from 60 different countries the school boasts its own travel agent , and over the years you could map the shifting global economy by the students' countries of origins.
In the '90s, for example, Le Rosey was overrun with children from the Middle East, China, and Russia, causing at least one family to leave in protest; it's possibly the reason for a recent policy that puts a 10 percent cap on any one nationality. Many of the students I speak to are aiming to go to U. Success isn't defined purely by academia here. Le Rosey, it is plain, is much more than a school. It is where children learn to support the weight of family expectation and responsibility.
It's a subtle thing, but in addition to academics the school is teaching its students how to be very rich, as well as self-aware, in an uneven world. To accomplish that, the students must, in essence, feel as if they are already masters of their universe—the creators, in some ways, of Le Rosey. Or, as one student puts it, "We make the school, the school doesn't make us. The Scene. Type keyword s to search. Courtesy Le Rosey.
A student is picked up by his parents, in suitable style, in Jared Leto in his designer Le Rosey T. Faith Moran Splash News. Students prepare to ski in Gstaad in Getty Images. The Duke of Kent center hangs out with friends in their dormitory in The entrance to Le Rosey's principal campus, in Rolle. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.
He was aghast. I went to Lakeside in Seattle. Back in my day, the 70s, it was about half the kids of the local elite and half the kids of professionals who wanted their children to have the best education. I went from there to Stanford and sailed through my classes there as my prep school classes had been, for the most part, harder. R75, I remember reading about a Jesuit prep school not blue-bloodiest with one Jewish student. He was expected to attend chapel but not expected to believe, just learn.
I also remember they weren't allowed to write in blue ink as that was too informal. I wish I'd had a more rigorous education. I certainly wish I were a better, more disciplined writer. Francis Parker was too liberal to be "elite.
In the Midwest generally, however, private schools were not considered as good as the best public schools. None of the above were considered in a class with New Trier, even socially. It is similar throughout the Midwest, even in St. The South's private schools are mainly prized for whiteness and it most states are considered middling to poor -- only there are no good public schools to compete with either. Westminster in Atlanta has big plans but it's kind of mediocre now.
I'd say Florida has some of the best small private schools nobody ever heard of. National Cathedral School in DC has a reputation amongst the other all girl schools as being very snobby and there are plenty of very elite private schools in the DC area.
R, same. I grew up back east and schools in California just don't compare. Aside from Stanford and Cal Tech, nothing is elite. Apparently there's a "good" college out here called Harvey Mudd? I thought that was a joke I grew up amongst New England schools, most of which have been mentioned. My sister went to St. I went to Madeira and was there during the Jean Harris murder scandal. It happened over our spring break and it was mind-blowing to see our tough but proper headmistress in handcuffs on the national evening news.
Just hearing Peter Jennings say her name was surreal. ABC reporter Lynn Sherr covered the story for months The media kept saying what an exclusive school Madeira was and, yes, there were some extremely wealthy girls there but most were from upper middle class families not billionaires and several were on work - study scholarships. No different from a lot of private schools today. Some of the wealthiest girls dressed in old jeans and were very under the radar. It certainly wasn't a finishing school environment.
One of the alums was Katherine Graham of The Washington Post family and she was a big proponent of women breaking the glass ceiling, To me there was a sort of "Gloria Steinam" Hillary feel to the campus. We had some debutantes but more often than not most girls were the athletic or "Hillary" type. We didn't have classes on Weds and either interned at a local business or on Capital Hill for Jr year for a Congressman or Senator.
The murder of the girl in the woods on campus happened a few years before I got there. The rumor was that she was found tied to a tree. We had roll call at the start of every class and if someone wasn't there they would immediately go looking for you.
In hindsight, what strikes me as so odd is that the dorm that I was in one year had no adult on site. They wd lock the dorms at night so we couldn't get out but we had no adult supervision in the dorm other than an 18 year old student Head of the dorm. There was an adult on site for my other years at the school We ha d lacrosse games with Sidw ell where the Obama girls went and Sat night dances with Episcopal and Woodberry.
Seems like a million years ago. I don't have much to show for going there and live a quiet middle class life. Also re: Madeira, a former co-worker who always seemed like a regular girl to me turns out to be an alumna. Impressive to a hick like me. Pretty amusing that nothings up thread are shitting on Harvard-Westlake.
Not only would you never get in, you could never afford it. R, Why are you saying that if we were the correct age we still could not get in to Harvard - Westlake, other than the issue of choosing to spend the money for a private school. And in terms of ranking, I was responding to the poster who claimed that Rye Country Day is the top-ranked independent school in NY--I assumed he meant academically, and I just don't think it's possible that that perfectly good school outranks Horace Mann, Brearley, Dalton, and a number of other NYC private schools.
R, tuition has nothing to do with social or academic rank. A friend of mine and her older sister went to NCS. The youngest found the social scene so intense she transferred to a boarding school. Even though she was very popular. But there was a great deal of cruelty that was expected if you were top tier socially and my friend just hated it. I think it's a lot like Miss Porter's in that socially you have to be very tough and able to withstand and dish out a lot of bitchiness. Anyway, she transferred to a boarding school that had Contessas and Barons and other European royalty can't remember the name and she was happy as a clam.
Which tells you something about the degree of snottiness at NCS. R, Any explanation as to why private schools tolerate such a total lack of real class among students? Surprised there aren't attempted suicides, drug abuse, eating disorders, etc and serious scandals.
Or are they all covered up? Since such behavior would not be tolerated in today's SJW workforce one would think it's the duty of teachers and principals to monitor inappropriate behavior much more closely.
Yes I've been told that scholarship students and minorities have long been socially ostracized at certain schools. Who says there aren't attempted suicides, drug problems, eating disorders? These issues exist everywhere. Both had the experience you describe. Social cruelty is a blood sport there, and although they could have survived, they and their parents ultimately concluded that it wasn't healthy or worthwhile to engage.
My grandfather went to Mount Herman. He sent my father there, and my aunts to sister school Northfield. Then I went there, along with my cousins after the two schools merged and became coed. It was one of the largest prep schools until the Northfield campus was sold and the whole thing was consolidated at Mount Herman.
I actually loved it and thrived there. It wasn't until years later, when I started thinking back on it, that the strangeness of the place began to sink in.
NMH is definitely not in the top echelon of private boarding schools, but it still has a pretty amazing list of alumni. I think that's one of the distinctions about these places. Kids from all over the world are sent to these schools and there are a finite number of them. The parents of the full paying students are exceptional for one thing or another, and the scholarship students are usually exceptional for their own ability to swim in a new arena.
I went from being the rich kid at home to the poor kid at prep school. And in retrospect that was probably a good thing. The really rich kids, the ones from families of industrialists and DC politicos were often very fucked up. One girl was expelled -her father was the CEO of a Fortune company - and she left the school by helicopter.
It landed on a sports field, and before it took off she threw the contents of a couple of suitcases on field while screaming obscenities at onlookers. Another kid broke into the infirmary, stole a bottle of Demerol, and spent a Friday night getting his entire dorm high. There were also the international students. They invariably broke every rule in the book, but were never punished.
It was too complicated to enforce rules and expel kids back to Dubai. And they not only had money, but spent it there. They'd pay townspeople to keep their Mercedes convertibles in private garages and take off for Boston and NYC every weekend.
I was the head of my dorm my senior year, and one of the international students had one of the big audio visual places from Boston come in a couple weeks before school started and outfit his room with every conceivable type of high end sound and video equipment. For one year. When he graduated he left it all behind.
R, Of course I realize social problems exist everywhere. Perhaps you misunderstood my post. I was questioning why the faculty and staff of private schools didn't quickly intervene and act to prevent social cruelty and ostracism. Easy to see a potential disaster with outside media exposure and lawsuits if things went way too far. R, because it is expected and preferred. The head lady at Miss Porter's said as much when there was an article done about them for Vanity Fair.
I don't know what the value of it is, but I guess graduates are expected to run in elite circles and there is always a lot of cruelty there too. So how can you succeed if you haven't been exposed to such a situation in your early years.
But I think he's probably right. The girls are expected to work these things out on their own. Some do, some leave, some stay and are very unhappy, and some thrive and those who thrive are not necessarily awful people as adults. The Thacher School in Ojai--"most elite" prep school in California, less blue blood and more Hollywood types. I often wonder about this, and I don't think anyone's addressed it.
Namely, are the teachers in really elite prep schools superb? Smart, demanding, and inspiring? That's always been my fantasy--as someone who went to a pretty good public school, I can only remember one teacher in four years who was terrific. Maybe it's this way in private schools too I'd very much like to hear about the quality of instruction. R - R, Thank you for your honest answers.
However I've always thought such cruelty was the polar opposite of true class. I've known those who went to West Coast private schools such as the ones previously mentioned and thankfully they rejected such snobbery as being a characteristic of the nouveau riche.
Also knew a grad of Bronx Science who was proud of her educational advantage, especially being Black and graduating in In Virginia, old aristo horsey types go to Foxcroft girls and Woodberry Forest boys. Beto O'Rourke went to Woodberry. Yes, in my experience myself and my children many of the teachers in elite prep schools are really first rate. On the other hand, there are plenty in public schools who are equally smart and dedicated. I think it can be a huge advantage for a kid who's bright and motivated--completely apart from the snob appeal or social advantages that might accrue.
Class size can be quite an advantage. I went to a prep school in CA, and never had more than 8 or 10 in any of them. The Lawrenceville School, just outside of Princeton. My first college room mate was from St. Crossroads is a joke. Elliot Gould's son Sammy went there and smoked pot all day long and fucked everything in sight.
At Madeira our class sizes were small, no more than 20 people in the classroom. And often around 15 people That alone makes a huge difference in the quality of mentoring you can get. Instructors were solid in their backgrounds, some more than others There was a strong expectation that you would follow thru on homework assignments and do your best. Of course we had some students that went to state univ We got a LOT of mentoring and attention.
If you were struggling in any area your guidance counselor would be right on it and get you tutoring. The college counselor was extremely thoughtful in helping me pick out colleges that would be a good fit for me and very invested in me personally as well. We were exposed to so much you could sign up for a field trip to the Kennedy Center to see Barishnikov dance or intern for a senator or at a place like NPR.
The social and professional connections were there for the ambitious students. You were 1 to 3 degrees away from someone who was tight with the Kennedys, or whose father was a high ranking exec at a Fortune company or NBC, etc. A girl in your class could be the daughter of the head of Pepsi Cola, or from a publishing family that put out Nat Geographic, etc.
We even had a couple of Rockefellers. But when you're with these people all day and live with them in a dorm on a small campus, they just become another classmate that you either become close with or at least establish a passing relationship.
When they say "youth is wasted on the young" I have to painfully agree. I look back at all the advantages scholastically, socially and professionally that could have been seeded during that time that I wasted.
We were all ordinary people in a very advantageous environment but you don't always realize that until much later. Christopher's in Richmond. Webb in Tennessee. Westminster in Atlanta. Bolles in Jacksonville, Fla. Newman in NOLA. Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Romney went there. I went to another school and everyone hated Cranbrook boys.
I went to a K - 8 in NJ where we had to shake hands with the headmaster at the end of the day lined up on the staircase of the building that was originally a mansion. Girls curtseyed and boys bowed. Germantown Friends had a similar issue - but moved out of the inner city Germantown area to a safer, wealthier suburb. Lots of super smart Haverford grads teaching at the local schools - especially the Quaker ones.
Part of the strength of the Philly area schools - lots of well educated but non-capitalist college grads. Very egalitarian - and I think one of the oldest schools in America.
As the name sort of suggests, the school was chartered by William Penn. Both it and George School and probably the other Quaker schools in the area get a lot of faculty from Haverford, which is always a good thing. Still that WASPiest and snobbiest. Andover and Exeter have more the atmosphere of a really good public high school.
Interesting to read all those posts about social cruelty at NCS. I went to its brother school - St. My family was solidly middle-class and made huge sacrifices to send me there, but this was the s, when ordinary people could just barely afford tuition without scholarship assistance. R, Stoneridge is very good about keeping the social cruelty at a minimum but maybe that has to do with it being a Catholic school and part of Sacred Heart. I wonder if the difficulties at NCS are more recent, or spoken about more openly now.
The girls I knew were there in the mid- late 90s, and came in at middle school or high school from a private day school on Capitol Hill. They were not warmly welcomed. Possibly because they weren't lifers; possibly because the Hill is an entirely different planet than upper NW.
R, correct. I went to a public high school which was a joke but my nieces and nephews have all gone to elite private schools in the DC area. I'm amazed at the advantages they have had with that level of care and education. They were all lucky in that they did take advantage of those opportunities and had parents that were engaged.
All are attending Ivy or top tier schools and will, likely go on to grad school. If you have the means, private schools are the way to go. I do quite well for myself but often wonder what I would have accomplished had I gone to a private school. Brearley does have a high academic focus. Isn't is said Spence girls date doctors, Chapain girls marry doctors and Brearley girls become doctors?
See Link. I mean like the prestigiously named "Westminster Academy" in South Florida, which is a fundamentalist Christian school that teaches its students that the world is only thousands of years old and that dinosaurs are mythological creatures.
But it comes disguised as a fancy prep school. None of the schools mentioned in this thread are scams. They're all well-established, accredited schools.
Educating despot spawn for over a century. In any case, Westminster Academy may be ridiculous, but it's pretty upfront in stating its appalling philosophy. How is that a scam? Sorry, I should have phrased that differently not that it's an excuse, but I'm a native Dutch speaker. I meant that an unwitting outsider like a prospective employer would hear the name "Westminster Academy" and might think it was a traditional, East Coast-style prep school.
Americans have traditionally picked British-sounding names to make things like housing developments and shopping malls sound "classy," and that seems to be the case here as well. I don't know the background, but the name Westminster is closely associated with the Presbyterian Church in the U. Any Presbyterians hanging around who can shed light on the significance of the name? R Hardly. The most elite schools in Memphis are St.
Please stop with the Memphis, Dallas, LA etc schools. Celebrity spawn are not blue bloods and neither are children of parents that own a chain of bbq joints or gas stations. Stick to the topic. Hancock Park, Pasadena and San Marino, CA, became a winter haven for bluebloods in the 's due to easier train travel. Some remained year round. An east coast blueblood helped found the girls' school Marlborough, first in Pasadena; it was moved to Hancock Park.
Marlborough is 6th in the U. Of course, OP wasn't [primarily] interested in which schools are "the best. Believe it or not, cities west of Pittsburgh have their own blue blood hierarchies, and their children going to a fancy private school in that city are going to hold more cachet locally than going to an Eastern prep school.
So those schools hold more cachet within those cities than prep schools often do. People have heard of Exeter and Andover, but that's about it off the East Coast. If you tell Angelenos you went to Taft or Lawrenceville, they'll have no idea what you're talking about; but they'll know what Harvard-Westlake is, and be impressed.
The doors automatically fly open. The same happens with the elite colleges. Yes there are schools in west bumfuck that are door openers in that state, maybe region, but they don't carry the universal appeal of an Exeter. Re: writing discipline. My English teacher in prep school had two rubber stamps, which he used liberally on our essay papers.
Add Lovett in Atlanta. Most famous alumnus is Jon Benet Ramsey's brother. In Martin Luther King wanted his son to go there, and, needless to say, all hell broke loose. Once again DL's bizarre class obsession rears its head. Along with responses that were true 50 years ago when many DLers went to these schools. The truth is that none of these schools are as you imagine them--filled with characters from Philadelphia Story, heirs and heiresses to vast fortunes.
One part upper middle class to wealthy kids who live in a part of the country where even the local day schools aren't that great. There are fewer and fewer of them these days and the parents, who are the age of most DLers, often don't want to send the kids away unless there's an underlying reason divorce, kid is into drugs, etc.
One part black and Latinx scholarship students--smart kids with involved parents who knew how to get them the scholarship, many are also athletes. One extra large part foreign students--Chinese and Middle Eastern in particular, who want their kids learning how to be "American" and also setting themselves up for easier admission to top US colleges.
Day schools are mostly the upper middle class "meritocracy" families, a mix of kids who are second or third generation at the school and kids whose parents think sending them to Charlotte Country Day I have no idea if there is such a thing will make people forget they went to Appalachian State.
The others are more mixed and obvs places like Sacred Heart and St. David's are mostly Catholic. And they're all a mix, some of the moms show up in Chanel, others in sweats and it's more about the personality than the bank account, all NYC privates are largely Wall Street money, even BK schools like St. Anns and Berkely Carroll. So rarely the "blue bloods" the OP was asking about. No idea about DC schools, though Sidwell-Friends seems to attract more high profile liberal types--kind of like Brown U.
There are schools like Lakeside in Seattle that have reps outside their cities, but they're not as established as the East Coast schools and mostly new tech money, so a very different vibe than the East Coast schools. Ditto families who choose to live in towns with big houses but bad schools that part of Yonkers that's next to Scarsdale and Bronxville and factor paying for private into the equation.
But in the South and Midwest it seems like far more UMC kids go to private school, that public options are good but not at the level of East Coast. There are exceptions, I am sure. LA: Los Angeles is an outlier here. All of the private schools are relatively new.
Harvard-Westlake has only been what it is in the last years--it was a girl's school and a boy's military school as recently as the 80s. Mostly Hollywood families--the lawyers, producers and studio execs. Brentwood School, Crossroads and Windward are the other ones. I think you've been watching too many episodes of "Mad Men" featuring Pete Campbell.
That's really not the case so much anymore. I think it's more true with colleges--as I said upthread, I went to Yale, and I've certainly had a lot of benefits accrue to me from that connection. But I had friends in college who had gone to Andover and Exeter and Choate and Deerfield, and I don't think my friends who went to those schools got all that much more benefit from where they prepped compared to what they got from where they went to college, unless they went into investment banking.
It's just not the Fifties anymore. There are certainly a few places where the Eastern establishment really dominates particularly in the judiciary and in Wall Street , but it's more about where you went to college and professional school nowadays than where you went to prep school.
Lakeside in Seattle - Class of 80 here. Bill Gates was class of 75 and the McCaw cellular boys roughly the same so the tech money hadn't yet hit Seattle. It had been a boarding school originally and was architecturally designed to be reminiscent of Exeter or Phillips but boarding was dropped in the early 70s when Lakeside boys merged with St. Nicholas girls to become coed. Like comparing the class of to your class of And except for a small handful of firms, even on Wall Street, you'll find your connections from Great Neck North, Dalton or New Trier are far more valuable than any connections from Groton or Choate.
Guess where most of them went Ok enough with the Harvard Westlake. Do you work for the school? Seriously no one cares about that school except for you and maybe two others. We get it But stick to the topic. No blue bloods go there. Just rich celebrity kids or entertainment execs. The west coast is great. Beautiful weather and beautiful people. Can't that be enough for you? It's hardly a paragon of culture and intelligence.
That's why all the best schools are on the east coast. There's no LA society! Just a bunch of entertainment folks. You have your academy awards. Enough already. Sorry my post above was meant for R And how do you think most get into top tier schools? Top tier prep schools. Any top school trips all over itself to create the Most Diverse Class Ever Created and so they are particularly conscious of not taking too many kids from certain schools, prep schools in particular.
And I'm seriously doubting your story about your niece, no matter how nicely it illustrates your point. No college would bother to put the high school anyone came from other than a recently recruited athlete. During the course of the academic block, students wear the right and comfortable clothing essentials. Shirts should be properly tucked into pants. The girls are instructed to wear dresses that properly cover their shoulders and midriffs or the ones that have a reasonable length.
Wearing denim, leather jackets, revealing clothes, high heels are strictly prohibited. Beyond academics and the formal dinner, casual clothes are allowed.
The uniform for boys consists of a blue or white shirt, grey trousers, a navy-blue blazer, black shoes, and a Rosey badge. Girls wear a white dress, scarf, navy-blue blazer, sandals, and a Rosey brooch. Not just amid the school timings, the students also wear the same dress for all formal school activities like parties, conferences etc. Sports play an important and integral part in shaping up the life of every student at Institut Le Rosey.
Every year, the school offers more than 25 sports. The campus boasts of some of the best football grounds, rugby pitches, basketball and tennis courts, athletics track, beach volleyball arena, golf course, and two fitness centres. The school has a private equestrian centre that accommodates around 30 horses. The school also has a nautical hub on the Lake Geneva. It has facilities for sailing, rowing and water-skiing.
There is also a spa for the students to relax and unwind. The spa, housing an indoor swimming pool and a sauna room , can be availed by students and teachers alike on Sundays. Students can indulge in recreational and entertainment activities like going to watch movies, shopping in Geneva, bowling, go-karting when accompanied by their teachers.
Students are not permitted to consume alcohol inside the campus or during expeditions. However, wine tasting sessions are allowed in parties especially the ones organised under the supervision of teachers. Smoking is strictly disallowed on and off campus. The students are extended absolute peace of mind while they study at the two serene campuses.
They are protected by comprehensive surveillance mechanisms and security guards who meticulously patrol the premises. Those unlucky in hurting themselves have round-the-clock access to an experienced and expert team of medical professionals. The Swiss school is also involved in various charity and humanitarian pursuits that allow them to work during their holidays to build orphanages or pay donations, visit homes for the aged, hospitals, and other philanthropic undertakings.
The pupils from Le Rosey come from affluent backgrounds. But, the school has always upheld the cause of helping the underprivileged and giving the students an opportunity to have a normal life and upbringing. It is plain and simple that Institut Le Rosey is substantially more than being just a school.
There is an element of subtlety in this matter. In addition, the school teaches its students the art and process of becoming rich, mindful, and independent in an unfair and prejudiced world. In order to achieve that, the students, in essence, are encouraged to believe that they are the creators of their own universe.
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