Owl Boarding School Guide

Find Your Boarding School
Gender
Age

Announcing Our NEW “Inside the Owl Guide” Video Series!

Subscribe to our new video series, where we sit down with Admissions Directors to give you an inside look at what makes each of the schools in our Owl Boarding School Guide unique.

Welcome to the Owl Guide - and to the New Boarding School Landscape

Here at McMillan Education, our deep roots as former boarding school faculty and administrators (and in many cases, as students and parents, too) continue to inform our work with students. We have experienced firsthand the transformational power of boarding schools in the lives of hundreds of students we have worked with from across the country and around the world.

We invite you to watch our short video on how to best conduct your search using the Owl Boarding School Guide. Explore further by reading our information sheet on the 5 key features to take advantage of in order to enhance your search experience!

The Owl Guide was conceived and grew out of COVID, when we decided to host a series of Virtual School Fairs to broadcast boarding schools’ missions, which, in our estimation, became more critical than ever in the wake of the pandemic’s effects on education and student development generally. Not surprisingly, boarding schools met the challenge swiftly and effectively.


Bon voyage navigating this vast and varied world of boarding schools, including the new admissions criteria. Learn More About Boarding Schools

About McMillan Education

Over the decades, we have been privileged to have gained the trust of so many who understand that our close and personalized planning process means we strive to develop a caring relationship with each student and his or her family.

We frequently work with students throughout their educational career, guiding them from elementary school placement, to secondary boarding and day school planning, then to college, and even right through graduate school placement. Many students we have counseled return for guidance for their own children. Keeping in touch with our students and families long after they have left us is a constant source of inspiration and joy.

Learn More About Us

For our First Edition in June, 2021 we curated concise, objective information representing 90 traditional, primarily-boarding schools in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic and California. In November, 2021 our Second Edition added a couple dozen members of the Small Boarding School Association, including many from other parts of the country, and a couple international schools. See how we’ll be adding different types of schools to the Owl Guide in future years.

Highlighted in The Owl Boarding School Guide is this group of 12 special schools that recently hosted us for individual meetings to provide campus updates and share admissions trends! 

Second Edition: The Owl Boarding School Guide has Grown! Highlighting the Small Boarding School Association

We’re so pleased to add and highlight a special group of nurturing, supportive schools known as The Small Boarding School Association! In our school planning world, the SBSA schools are roughly equivalent to the Colleges That Change Lives consortium in our college planning practice: hidden gems with hands-on Heads of School, project-based learning, and individualized learning support. Most importantly, given the disruption adolescents have experienced due to COVID, SBSA schools cultivate community and provide caring dormparents thanks to their intentionally isolated campuses and small enrollment – generally under 200 students. That said, we invite you to explore the diversity of their curricular and extracurricular specialties here.

Find Your School

75%
Boarding
Co-Ed
Gender
Wallingford,
 CT
Location
Featured Matriculation
  • Yale University
  • Columbia University
  • University of Chicago
  • NYU
  • Boston College
100%
Boarding
Male Only
Gender
Westbrook,
 CT
Location
Featured Matriculation
  • Clark University
  • Bryant University
  • Syracuse University
50%
Boarding
Co-Ed
Gender
Saint James,
 NY
Location
Featured Matriculation
  • New York University
  • Cornell University
  • Boston University
  • Rutgers University

Don McMillan Explains the Latest Boarding School Trends