$71,000 tuition for a 6th Grader!
September 6, 2016
There seems to be no such thing as sticker shock any more but I was surprised to find a private boarding school where annual tuition costs $71,000 for a 6th grade student. You might think this was one of the blue blooded academies located in New England, like Choate, where the wealthy have sent their children for generations. You would be wrong. Priced at about $49,000 all in, Choate is a comparative bargain. So where did I find this outrageously expensive school? It was simple; I was watching a high school football game on ESPN.
You might know that I love watching football. This time of year I begin to sense the smell of football in the air. Even before the start of college football, the programming gods at ESPN have found a way to satiate the demand of fans longing to watch a game. Their innovation is to broadcast high school football games to an eager national audience. As a result I was able to watch the fourth ranked team in the country, Grayson High out of Snellville GA, play the top ranked team, IMG Academy based in Bradenton FL. This was high school football on a different level. I knew nothing of Grayson, and had never even heard of IMG Academy.
IMG Academy is a private school with an intense focus on sport training and development. The school was founded in 1978 by the famous tennis instructor, Nick Bolletteri, whose early students included Andre Agassi. Bolletteri sold his tennis school to the power house sports marketing company IMG in 1978, and the IMG Academy was born. Sitting on a 450 acre campus, the school offers both day and boarding options and currently has programs in eight sports. The company plans to add programs in its efforts to attract gifted young athletes from all over the world.
The football program is relatively new having only started with IMG’s purchase of the John Madden Football Academy is 2010. Its first team was fielded in 2013, but in just three years the school has become the number one high school football team in the country, and groomed the starting freshman quarterback for Florida State this year!
This all comes at a steep price. The tuition at IMG for a football playing 6th grader starts at $70,900, and rises to $72,900 by 12th grade. IMG Academy fielded twelve of the top 300 ESPN high school football recruits in the game I watched. Grayson is no slouch either, and fielded five of the top 300. For the budget minded, Grayson is a free public high school in Gwinnett County, Georgia. By the way…IMG won 26-7.
If you have a star football player you probably know about IMG, and might be daunted by the cost of that school. It could be worse though. The parents with a gifted golfer must pay $80,900 for IMG’s tuition. It must be those nasty greens fees.
Carl Gambrell