What to Expect When You’re Applying

What to Expect When You’re Applying

The private high school application process can be daunting for many families. While it’s not as all-consuming as the college application process, there are a similar number of moving pieces, and the eventual outcome – where your child will spend the next four years of their life – is similarly important. At The New School, we’re firm believers that the environment where your child will grow out of adolescence and into adulthood really does matter. But that doesn’t mean the application process needs to be stressful. In this blog post, I’ll get you up to speed on the application steps, and, I hope, bring the anxiety level down.

There are formal steps in the admissions process, such as touring schools, going to open houses and info sessions, writing answers to application questions, requesting transcripts, and asking teachers to complete evaluations. Some families have checked those items off their lists by this time of year, while others are just getting started. It’s not too late to get started! Filling out the application, and requesting transcripts and teacher evaluations in an hour or two at the most (at TNS, we have a Parent application and a Student application, but the student part is even easier to do). And for families applying for financial assistance, we have a separate financial aid application that takes most families under an hour to complete.

Those elements are pretty straightforward, and they’re important, but the application step that’s most meaningful to us is the half-day student visit.

Student visits are in full swing here during January and February; one or two mornings a week we welcome a group of prospective students into our community to experience a day in the life of a TNS student. Although these visits only last a few hours, those are typically the most critical hours in what can be a months-long journey. That’s because student visits are when the vast majority of students figure out whether or not a school is going to be a good match or “fit” for the student. You can often get a feel for whether a school might be a good fit before a student visit, but you get a much deeper sense of when you spend a half day embedded in a school, going from class to class, talking with a wide array of students and teachers, and spending time closely observing how students interact with teachers and with one another.

Those first hand perceptions are often based on intangible characteristics, like what an environment feels like and whether the people in a community seem interesting and inclusive. There are numerous quantifiable measures that factor into selecting a school—reputation, proximity to home, college placement data, etc.—but if an environment doesn’t feel right to your child, it probably isn’t their place.