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This article brings attention to the rarefied world of elite boarding schools. Despite their reputation for excellence, these unique educational institutions remain largely outside the gaze of educational researchers and the scope of public debates about education. One reason for this absence is a lack of knowledge about what exactly defines an elite boarding school and the characteristics that stand them apart from other schools in significant ways. Drawing on a review of the relevant literature, the article outlines five criteria by which elite boarding schools can be identified: typologically elite, scholastically elite, historically elite, geographically elite, and demographically elite. Although the "elite" status of any given school in any of these criteria may be open to debate, it is the particular combination of these five dimensions that defines an elite boarding school. After a discussion of these five characteristics, the article outlines some implications for future research that considers elite boarding schools as an integral part of the educational system in the United States and presents some of the challenges facing the study of privilege.
KEYWORDS: boarding schools, elite schools, prep schools, private schools, academies.
Despite their reputation for excellence, elite boarding schools remain largely outside the public gaze, and debates about schools rarely consider these highly selective, privileged institutions. Indeed, these particular educational contexts are so rarefied that most education scholars, concerned as they are with improving the education of the majority of students, have paid scant or no attention to them and to their role in the broader system of education in the United States. Yet, although few in number, elite boarding schools have played an important role in the history of the American upper class and continue to exert their influence on the social, intellectual, political, and economic elite of the United States (Domhoff, 2006; Karabel, 2005; Useem & Karabel, 1984). This is at least one reason why elite boarding schools have stimulated the sociological imagination of scholars, from C. Wright Mills (1956) to Theodore Sizer (1964b) and Arthur Powell (1996).
In his study of power elites, Mills (1956) asserted that the elite school is "the most important agency for transmitting the traditions of the upper social classes, and regulating the admission of new wealth" (pp. 64-65). Baltzell (1958), in...