What It's Like To Be A Student At The Best Boarding School In America

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phillips exeter academy, becky moore, class, harnkess table

Melia Robinson/BI

Students in class sit at the oval-shaped Harkness Table, the cornerstone of Phillips Exeter Academy's unique, student-centered teaching method.

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Phillips Exeter Academy, recently named the best private high school in America by academic review site Niche.com and regularly called America's best boarding school, has educated some of the most powerful people in history.

Its alumni base includes 19 state governors, five US senators, five Olympic athletes, two Nobel Prize winners, a US President, and even tech moguls like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Quora founder Adam D'Angelo.

Many millionaires and a handful of billionaires are products of the Exeter community, and have helped grow the school's endowment to $1.2 billion. The fund supports many students' tuition, which otherwise costs $46,905 a year for boarding students.

When Dr. John Phillips, a graduate of Harvard and resident of Exeter, New Hampshire opened the Academy in 1781, he set out to teach young men "the great and real business of living." More than two centuries later, the now co-ed school prides itself on the strength of its network, its commitment to spreading kindness, and on its use of the Harkness Method, a unique teaching model that schools around the world strive to imitate.

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I recently spent the day as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, located in Exeter, New Hampshire, to see why it's the best.