An urgent letter to the Richard E Rich Academy Community
It is Better To Be Bottom Tier
As an outgoing member of the Board of Trustees, I have attended hundreds of hours of expensive and annoying meetings with consultants who promise Richard E Rich Academy the chance to become a top-tier prep school.
Why Bother?
Attempting to climb the prep school hierarchy is the antithesis of the effortless entitlement and indifference to vulgar worldly concerns that epitomizes prep ideology. Preppies should not be seen to (visibly) grasp at status and seek the approval of the multitudes. The entire point of prep life is to languish at a threadbare distance from the hordes clutching a soggy cucumber sandwich and hoarding the tiny remittances of a long-gone fortune.
How did we stray so far from our values as to spend what is left of our endowment pandering to Top Ten lists and listening to Music Men tell us how to carpet our alumni lounge?
Over the course of my tenure at Richard E Rich, I have identified the three historic factors that have made prep schools unnecessarily and unproductively competitive with each other. Each of these pivotal moments has contributed to a marketing race that undermines all but a few prep schools and threatens the integrity of exclusive independent school education.
The Three Events That Made Prep Schools Overly Competitive
1. Kids started looking up prep schools on the internet. The way you should discover Richard Rich Academy is on a car kidnap ride after a family argument not from a google search. But with offspring online, schools were forced to market to these digital consumers and compete within suddenly visible hierarchies
2. Preppies started selling prep school services. With prep fortunes falling, some alums started selling off their cultural capital to pay their own kids’ private school bills. A consulting industry started to surround rich prep schools rivaling the gold rush around university services. For those alums who didn’t get Gentlemen’s C’s in math, quantification started to creep into the selling of prep schools.
3. Over the last forty years, prep schools became attractive to international students looking to break into the American university system. Prep schools short of cash to renovate crumbling brick buildings, pay health insurance for alcoholic staff, and keep up with the richest schools in the ratings game, began to monetize international tuitions, donations and bribes. As international money became more important, prep schools were pressured to show value for the dollar and to compete against each other.
Forfeit The Fight!
The true sign of status is not the eminently searchable top name, but the obscure insider institution hidden behind a dusty privet hedge and inaccessible via GPS. These are prep schools whose long traditions of mediocrity are a badge of honest New England modesty. A glitzy gym with icing chambers and helium rooms paid for by right-wing dark money goes against everything the elite boarding school should stand for: cold showers, flooded playing fields, slate that rains from the roofs in storms.
Aging preppies such as myself can no longer afford to serve on the Board of Richard E Rich Academy. The expected dollar contribution from Board members (set by consultants) is so high as to be prohibitive for any alum living an old-style shabby-genteel gin and tonic life. Only very high rollers, not themselves true preppies, can now afford to sit on boarding school boards. These high rollers bring with them their own culture of hard-hitting competition and their internal race to endow name buildings and promote themselves within the class of the mega-rich. They do not have the best interest of our school at heart.
I implore the community to rethink our relationship with new money and embrace the bottom tier. The essence of prep school is money old enough no one can remember how it is earned/stolen (or at least until an enterprising young faculty member starts digging in the archives above the old gym). We are never going to win the race to top the best-endowed schools, whose portfolios have been expanding geometrically in the time since we began refinancing debt and selling off acres in the 1970s.
Instead let us cherish what we have: the slightly limp preppy handshake, the delaminating pair of old Sperry’s, the silver hip flask with the monogram worn off at a hundred lacrosse games.
To that end, I have founded a new company, Old Retreiver Prep School Services LLC, which will assist bottom-tier schools in their quest to remain bottom tier. I aim to make my firm the top in its class and I am only accepting a select list of pre-screened clients. Please contact my assistant for an initial consultation for which you will be billed whether we take you on or not.
Bottoms up!
Roger Moffat
Old Retreiver Prep School Services LLC
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