Affording the Woodberry Experience
Endowing tuition assistance secures the values of intellectual thoroughness and moral integrity that have guided the school since 1889 and remain at the heart of the Woodberry experience. We know that a Woodberry education — all boys, all boarding, surrounded by caring faculty who know, challenge, and love each student — has a transformative impact on young men. By investing in tuition assistance, we preserve the Woodberry experience for future generations of boys. Endowing tuition assistance ensures we retain the school’s unique culture while making the school more affordable, accessible, and sustainable.
Culture — Woodberry’s culture is shaped by several fundamental and important factors. We are all-boys and all-boarding, and our faculty live on campus. It’s critical that faculty see Woodberry as a community built on trust, a place where they can build a career, raise a family, and invest fully in their students. And it’s critical that the mixing of faculty and students happens on our beautiful campus in the Virginia countryside. Tuition assistance provides us with the resources necessary to commit to a culture proven to work for Woodberry boys.
Accessibility — Woodberry should be open to every boy with the potential and the will to succeed. We never want to turn away a student who will be made better by Woodberry and who is committed to making us better as a community. Since 2016 the school has been able to extend tuition assistance to an additional twenty students, reducing the number of boys we must turn away because we have run out of funding. We extend tuition assistance to a wide range of families, and many pay a substantial portion of the full tuition cost. Though we’ve made progress, there are boys we cannot admit because we’ve depleted the tuition assistance budget. Reaching our campaign goals for tuition assistance from the endowment will ensure boys who want a Woodberry education are able to afford the opportunity for generations to come.
Affordability — A boarding school education is a major investment. The Woodberry endowment provides essential support for tuition assistance, programs, and faculty to reduce the cost of Woodberry for all families. Woodberry’s tuition is substantially below the true cost per student, and since 2017 the board of trustees has committed to increasing tuition at or below the level of household income growth. The tuition increase for the 2022–2023 school year was 2 percent, the lowest increase at Woodberry in decades. Endowing tuition will make the school more affordable for all families for years to come.
Sustainability — Alumni, parents, and friends have given generously and invested in the future by providing endowed scholarships, which are invested and managed to provide tuition assistance in perpetuity. These resources give future generations the same opportunity provided for us: to grow into men of intellectual thoroughness and moral integrity who go on to become outstanding leaders and citizens in their community. A sustainable financial model ensures a stable culture focused on the values that have always mattered most.
The Woodberry community has an enduring tradition of investing in the school's future. In 1899 the Walker family built the Walker Building to house more than 100 students, even though fewer than fifty attended the school at that time. In the 1980s the board of trustees established the Triple R Fund to preserve and renew our beautiful campus in perpetuity. Now we are aspiring to establish a similar source of tuition assistance funding to ensure we can always focus on admitting the strongest boys and hiring the best faculty to advance Woodberry’s culture. Our financial resources will preserve and enhance the Woodberry experience, guaranteeing that we can sustain a residential community of boys and faculty on our campus in the Virginia countryside. We know this combination has produced outstanding results for more than 130 years, and we want to see Woodberry continue to thrive for decades to come.
