About The Boarding
School Guide
The Boarding School Guide was built by McMillan Education, America's oldest and foremost educational consultancy and the leader in international educational planning, founded in 1955.
The expertise and institutional relationships built over those decades remain at the core of everything it does. Under Don and Sarah McMillan's leadership since 2008, that foundation has continued to deepen.
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McMillan EducationThe Institution Behind the Guide
70+
years in educational consulting
10K+
families served
65+
countries represented across our student community
300+
schools where students have enrolled
90%
of families come through referrals
15+
countries where boarding students have been placed
Who We Are
The McMillan Education team behind The Boarding School Guide is made up of seasoned educational professionals who share the same educational philosophy and are at the top of the field.
Each consultant averages more than 20 years of educational experience. A team of experts who know much more than best practices for admissions. They know students, and they know the schools where those students will thrive. Those relationships run in three directions.
With the Schools
We foster strong partnerships with every school on this platform, united by a shared belief in the uniquely positive and powerful nature of boarding schools.
We are the only objective, non-biased search platform that eschews artificial rankings and pay-for-play positioning.
The result is a guide families can trust completely.
With Families
Through a commitment to providing the most accurate, unbiased information available anywhere, we prioritize our expertise in student development and school programming to empower families to go beyond the superficial to the substantive in their decision-making process.
Every data point, every filter, and every comparison tool on this platform exists so families can research and decide with full confidence.
Between Families and Schools
The relationship between families and schools, is the one the Boarding School Guide was built to make possible.
The platform has been engineered with the sophistication to get past the surface to detailed, helpful information that really allows parents to make informed decisions that speak to their greatest hopes and fears. That connection, between a family and the school that will shape their child's life, is the relationship that matters most.
The People Behind the Boarding School Guide
Sarah McMillan, Ed.D.
CEO/Developmental Psychologist
Don McMillan, M.A., M.F.A.
CEO
Jill Hutchins
Director of School Planning
Chris Curl
Educational Consultant for UK Boarding Schools
Noah McMillan
Educational Consultant, Director of Marketing & Digital Content
Susanna Beckwith, MALS
Educational Consultant
Bill Southwick, C.A.G.S.
Educational Consultant
Rachel Leja, M.S.
Educational Consultant
Tony Lambert, M.A.
Educational Consultant
The Belief
The Boarding School Guide was built on what the evidence confirms and what the McMillan Education team has witnessed firsthand – that boarding school transforms young people in ways that are real, measurable, and lasting.
As students, as teachers and coaches who knew their students far beyond the classroom and the field, as advisors who watched something shift in a young person over the course of a single school year and understood, from the inside, what had caused it, and as school leaders who built the environments where that shift became possible.
That is what this platform was built from, and what it was built for.
We believe boarding school builds a sense of community unlike anything a young person will find elsewhere. The common campus, the shared meals, the faculty who are present not just in the classroom but across every moment of daily life – these create the conditions for self-awareness, social, emotional, and behavioral development that build the maturity and preparation young people carry into every challenge that follows. Friendships formed in that environment grow deep quickly and have a way of lasting a lifetime.
Part of the W.I.S.E. Ecosystem
The Boarding School Guide is one part of something larger. McMillan Education has spent seven decades and served more than 10,000 families, building an ecosystem of educational planning services, customized technologies, and relationships that extends far beyond any single resource.
At the center of it all is the W.I.S.E. Method®, the intellectual framework built on student developmental, admissions, and school expertise that runs through everything we do.
McMillan Education
The flagship consultancy behind the ecosystem. Since 1955, McMillan Education has guided thousands of families through school, college, and graduate admissions in the United States, building a depth of specialized expertise and institutional access that remains unmatched in the field.
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McMillan Education International
Decades of work with international families formalized into a dedicated expertise in international admissions advising, bringing the same unrivaled planning methodology, expertise, and relationships to university, boarding school, and graduate admissions for students from over 65 countries.
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W.I.S.E. Admissions Playbook™
McMillan's one-on-one educational planning expertise, now accessible to any family, anywhere. Self-guided online courses, including boarding school-specific curriculum developed for each of McMillan Education's international regions, bring the full depth of McMillan Education's insider knowledge and proprietary W.I.S.E. Admissions Playbook™ to families looking to navigate the admissions process on their own terms and timeline, at a fraction of the cost of private consulting.
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Take the Search Further
Interested in going further than the guide? McMillan Education's consultants have been inside these schools for decades, and they know exactly which ones will open the right doors for your child.
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