Frequently Asked Questions about Boarding

The Boarding Program has been a valued part of the Hockaday community for more than 100 years. However, long-term market pressures have led to persistent challenges in the program, affecting enrollment, finances and the student experience. Based on a review conducted in 2005-07 and another in 2020-21, Hockaday’s Board of Trustees voted on April 14, 2021, to phase out the School’s Boarding program by May 2025, allowing all current Boarding students to graduate.

The Boarding Program was established in 1914 as the “Home Department,” housing six girls on Haskell Avenue.

The vote follows more than 20 years of discussion about the strengths and challenges of the Boarding Program and how best to fulfill the School’s mission, including an exhaustive, six-month examination completed in April 2021 by the Ad Hoc Committee to Review the Boarding Program.

The Hockaday Board reaffirmed the School’s commitment to fully supporting current Boarding students through to graduation and to honoring the legacy of Boarding at Hockaday. 

No. In March 2020, we closed the Residence Hall because students would not be safe living in close quarters there during the COVID-19 pandemic. Short-term decisions about the pandemic were separate from the long-term, strategic deliberations of the Ad Hoc Committee and the Board of Trustees.

Boarding is a valued part of Hockaday’s history and future legacy, and our Boarding students and alumnae remain — now and in the future — a vital part of the Hockaday family. We are looking at a variety of ways to document, honor, and celebrate the Boarding Program and to keep our Boarding alumnae actively engaged in the life of our School. We will share more details as we develop these plans.

Before the Ad Hoc Committee was launched, Hockaday’s Board of Trustees made a commitment to Boarding students and families that all current Boarding students would be able to continue their Hockaday educations through to graduation. We look forward to welcoming them back to the Residence Hall in January 2022.

No. We will not recruit or enroll new Boarding students.

The Committee learned that Hockaday’s Boarding Program has suffered from declining demand in the U.S. and internationally, a reality that has led to persistent low enrollment (below the School’s capacity). In response, the School has had to offer increasing amounts of financial aid are needed to yield students into the program. The combination of under-enrollment and increasing financial aid has led to a large, and growing, structural deficit in the program.

There has been a multi-year trend of declining demand in domestic and international boarding school markets, along with growing competition for that shrinking pool. The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) documented that enrollment of domestic boarders fell about 1.5%, or 400 students, each and every year from 2000 to 2015. TABS began forecasting sharp declines in international student enrollment, both day and boarding, beginning in 2019. Current prospective Boarding student interest is highest for larger East and West Coast schools; the most successful boarding programs tend to have a distinctive niche, such as a specialized sport or activity, while Hockaday does not.

Hockaday has made many efforts to enhance recruiting, including hiring a full-time, dedicated recruiter for Boarding, engaging in additional marketing efforts, continuously cultivating strong relationships overseas, and refining our recruitment strategy based on emerging data. Our enhanced recruitment efforts since 2007 have led to short-term increases in inquiries and applications to Boarding but have not ultimately increased the number of applications from academically qualified students.

The Committee determined that Hockaday would need to make substantial changes to ensure the quality of the student experience. In our peer benchmarking, we learned that other successful programs have a much larger, live-in staff and faculty who support an excellent student experience and help to integrate residential and academic life. Hockaday’s current staffing is insufficient to provide the experience we desire for our students.

The Committee found that the persistent structural deficits over the past 30 years are too large to be addressed by increasing enrollment, raising tuition, reducing financial aid, or fundraising.

Hockaday donors have given generously to Boarding in the past, and we are extraordinarily grateful for their support. The Ad Hoc Committee conducted a break-even analysis to consider a variety of financial levers to close the deficit, including fundraising. The amount of endowment funds that would need to be generated to support the program’s deficit far exceed the School’s demonstrated capacity to raise funds for this program.

Hockaday is deeply committed to diversity, equity, and to sustaining a “genuine culture of inclusion and belonging” – it is a one of four key priorities in our strategic planning. Through focused efforts across the School, Hockaday has grown considerably more diverse today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. The Day student body currently includes 40% self-identified students of color, an all-time high.

 

Our Hockaday 360 research also found that alumnae and families want the School to be more socioeconomically diverse — a commitment shared by School leaders — and we have more work to do to ensure a Hockaday education is affordable for students of all backgrounds.

Boarding students have contributed a wonderful breadth of experience, culture, and perspective to our School. Even so, Hockaday’s research shows that we have not been reaping the full benefit of the diversity in Boarding, because students have experienced the Boarding and Day programs as fairly separate. Families tell us they want a more global learning experience across the School. Going forward, we will review our curriculum and co-curriculum to create a greater global focus across our courses, programs and student activities. It is not sufficient simply to recruit international students and think that is making us a globally focused school.

The Hockaday 360 research found untapped opportunities to recruit diverse students from Dallas-Fort Worth, which is the fastest-growing metro area in the United States. This includes opportunities for greater outreach to students of color as well as international students who are right in our backyard. Non-Hispanic whites now represent less than a third of the population of Dallas, and two thirds of Dallas students under age 10 now identify as minority. More than a quarter of Dallas residents are now foreign-born. Hockaday is committed to building on efforts like our Institute for Social Impact to deepen engagement with the Dallas-Fort Worth region, increasing access to a college preparatory education for girls from a wide range of backgrounds.

In 2005, faced with significant challenges to the Boarding Program’s enrollment and finances created by a shifting market, Hockaday’s Board of Trustees created an Ad Hoc Committee to study Boarding. That committee reported back in 2007, and as a result the School pursued the ambitious set of recommendations it offered. While some of committee’s stated goals were met, however, many others were never achieved, including making the Boarding program financially self-sustaining by 2012, consistently enrolling a full class of academically qualified students, realizing international diversity, and better supporting students with faculty and staff who live in residence.

In 2018, the Board of Trustees identified the Boarding Program as a topic for future attention. In 2019-2020, the School gathered detailed feedback about Boarding from students, parents, and alumnae as part of a comprehensive research project, Hockaday 360.

 

In October 2020, in light of ongoing questions and the length of time since the prior review, the Board of Trustees formed a new Ad Hoc Committee to Review the Boarding Program and charged it with developing recommendations about the program’s long-term future. This evaluation was completely separate from the short-term decisions about the Residence Hall necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hockaday’s Board of Trustees is the body charged with making decisions about long-term changes to the Boarding Program. As it has before, in October 2020 the Board appointed an Ad Hoc Committee to conduct analysis and develop recommendations. The Ad Hoc Committee kept the full Board and relevant Board Committees apprised at every step throughout its six-month review. The Ad Hoc Committee’s recommendations were forwarded to the Board of Trustees, and the Board called a special meeting to discuss and vote on whether to accept the recommendations. According to the Board’s bylaws, programmatic changes to Boarding must pass with at least a three-fourths supermajority of all voting Trustees.

Following the Board’s charge, the Ad Hoc Committee examined:

The Committee was composed of Trustees — including many alumnae, former Hockaday Boarders, former Boarders at other schools, parents with children attending other Boarding schools, current Hockaday parents, and two Life Trustees — and members of the Hockaday Leadership Team with specific, subject-area expertise.

Two Hockaday Boarding alumnae were appointed to the Committee, along with alumnae of other Boarding programs. To supplement their input, the Committee made an extra effort to personally interview more than 40 alumnae of the Boarding Program from a wide range of graduating classes. The Committee also paid close attention to what Boarding students, parents, and alumnae told us through focus groups and surveys. Additionally, in March and April 2021 members of the Committee invited many groups, including all Alumnae and all current parents, to learn more about the research and analysis through a series of Zoom meetings.

The Ad Hoc Committee engaged in a thorough process of research, deliberation, and engagement with the Hockaday community, reviewing hundreds of pages of data and history and conducting more than 100 meetings and interviews with stakeholders between October 2020 and mid-April 2021.

 

Over the past six months, the Ad Hoc Committee met 15 times; presented 13 updates to Board Committees, the Hockaday Parents Association and Alumnae Association; interviewed dozens of Boarding alumnae and reviewed additional research among Boarding students, parents, and alumnae; conducted benchmarking research with 12 peer schools with both day and boarding programs; and reviewed extensive Hockaday, national and international data and trends. Its outreach and data-gathering efforts have been at least equivalent to the work of the prior committee, if not beyond it.

The Ad Hoc Committee found that many Boarding alumnae and current students rated their experience well and experienced many positive outcomes. It also found that some of the efforts invested in Boarding over the last 15 years had made a positive difference, but were not sufficient to overcome the significant, long-term market forces that have affected small boarding programs everywhere. The Committee found that the inability of the program to enroll a full class of students for more than 30 years, along with increasing amounts of financial aid needed to yield students to Hockaday, had created decades of significant structural deficits in Boarding that would likely grow worse in the future.

 

Most importantly, the Committee determined through research and benchmarking that the student experience in Boarding, while regarded positively by students and alumnae, was not commensurate with the best boarding programs nationally. The Committee found that in an era of changing student needs and expectations, Hockaday would have to make major additional investments in Boarding, including far greater staffing, in order to ensure the program lived up to Hockaday’s standards for students’ academic and residential experience.

The Committee looked at a range of options. These included growing the program, shrinking the program, or focusing on specific market segments (such as only international, only regional, or only full-pay). The Committee also looked at whether there could be an opportunity to carve out a specialty or niche. And it has considered whether Hockaday could create a more robust live-in program for faculty and staff in Boarding.

 

The Committee agreed on several key elements that must be present for Hockaday’s Boarding Program to be successful in the future. Its list of “must-haves” includes:

The Committee found that the original reasons why Hockaday’s Boarding Program was both necessary and distinctive have changed over time. Hockaday, meanwhile, does not have the capacity or scale to mount a best-in-class Boarding program, the Committee found.

 

The Committee concluded: “We believe that for Hockaday’s Boarding Program to be competitive in the future, it would need to make significant investments in the program and facilities — and even with such investments, success is not guaranteed. We are resolved that if Hockaday cannot deliver a program that it can say with confidence is among the best anywhere, it should direct its resources and attention to other efforts that better serve its mission, enhance its leadership and distinction, and deliver, in the words of The Hockaday Difference, ‘an extraordinary student experience’ and ‘a model for how to educate girls.’ ”