As I said in the second post, I agree there is a world of difference between boarding schools and universities. But I think we need to explore the idea of "boarding schools" in a bit more detail, since the assertion was made that those who are left-leaning are against them. "It aint necessarily so."

My sister was deputy head at an army primary school in Germany. It being the nature of postings in the army, it happened several times a year that the parents of children were sent elsewhere and naturally the children went as well. So she would be faced with a new class, frequently arriving from mixed locations with little information about had been taught, which may well differ child to child. Similarly, I know some children of military parents who attended ten or more schools. It is exceptionally difficult, though not impossible of course, to give a child a good education with that level of disruption.

So part of the rationale for spending those large sums on the children of diplomats and the military can be justified in the best leftist tradition as means to keep a child in a settled location in order to give them a good education.

So that is boarding, and completely justifiable in the right circumstances. It is, in essence, why my wife and brother in law were boarders.

But while boarding can be justifiable, that is tied to private education because of the way our systems are set up. And the left objections are primarily about that, not whether the child is day school or boarder. True, as Steve said, boarding without some solid reason can be questioned in its own right, but it is mainly the private/state school issue that both left and right are more concerned about.

A lot of people seem to think paying for a school will give you a better education. It can, but it is far from certain. One of my daughters boyfriends went to a nationally famous public school (no names, no pack-drill), and had, in his mid twenties, never read a book. He had read the set pages of various books, and the precis of quite a few, but the idea that someone might read a book for pleasure was alien to him. (Maybe comprehensive schools have decayed to that level since my children left, I would not know.) Again, one of my sisters colleagues went to teach English in a private primary school but could not spell: she admitted to my sister to asking pupils up to the board to write 'more difficult words they should learn'. So do not assume fee paying gives a better education.
However, providing you pay enough, what is does buy is contacts. And, for the majority of people I have met whose children go to fee paying schools, that is one of the main things they want.