Admissions decisions were sent to accepted students at 12:01 AM this morning! Proctor had another record setting admissions cycle, but when asked why there is such strong demand for a Proctor education, we often struggle to articulate a concise answer. Proctor’s educational model works not because of a single program, but because of the unique combination of programs and culture undergirding each student’s experience.

The concept of fit is one of the oldest ideas in strategic thinking, but has largely been lost as schools have looked to refine core competencies, critical resources, and seek to measure key success factors on an individual, program by program manner. Schools too often fall into the trap of worrying about what other schools are doing and lose focus on what makes them unique.

What we realize at Proctor is a program’s value is enhanced by the quality of other programs around it. Iron sharpens iron, and when the ‘fit’ of your school is contingent upon the collective success of your programs, you cannot decouple a single program from the whole. 

This is what we continue to observe at Proctor. Sure, we have amazing programs that initially entice families to INQUIRE and eventually to visit campus. Term-long off-campus programs like Ocean Classroom, Mountain Classroom, and European Art Classroom intersect seamlessly with AP courses and one of the finest academic support programs in the country. 

But realistically, each of these individual factors are wholly replicable by other schools (if they chose to do so). We are not the only school to offer a term-abroad program, nor do we offer the only wholly integrated academic support program. We are not the only independent school to have a remarkable student and faculty culture. But we are the only school to offer the entirety of the Proctor experience. It is not individual programs that families come to value most about Proctor, but rather the ‘fit’ of these programs within a comprehensive whole.

As families consider other schools in addition to Proctor, we encourage them to look at the power of the whole, and not at individual parts of the whole. It is easy to fall in love with sparkly programs that operate independently, and some schools may be able to offer parts of our whole, but there isn’t another independent school in the world able to provide the Proctor experience in its entirety.