Here’s a good bit of trivia. Can you guess what the lead singer of The Strokes has in common with the Crown Prince of Yugoslavia? What ties Sean Lennon with King Juan Carlos I of Spain? How are the Niarchos shipping magnates connected to the Bhutanese royal family? You’ll find the answer on the shores of Lake Geneva, where, among the neat vineyards and chestnut trees, there is a boarding school that caters exclusively to the rich and powerful. Since the 1880s, Institut Le Rosey has taught Brazilian heiresses, Congolese politicians, Italian fashion tycoons and enough European royals to keep the revolutionary guillotine operators on the Place de la Concorde busy for at least a month.

Most things about Le Rosey can only be spoken of in superlatives, not all of them positive. For starters, it’s the most expensive school on Earth. Prepare yourself for the following sentence. Tuition and boarding fees are £110,000 per year for children aged 13-18. That’s the equivalent, if you’re into fatuous comparisons, to five new Volkswagen Golf Mk 8 cars, six Patek Philippe Aquanaut watches, or two Jetlev jetpacks. For pupils aged 8-12, it’s £80,000 per year. To fully educate one child there, it would cost £870,000 — that’s assuming fees don’t go up over nine years of schooling. That figure also doesn’t include the cost of trips abroad, extracurriculars and potential private jet flights to ferry children between Geneva and the family island in the Exumas. Only the wealthiest dynasties or the most kleptocratic dictators can afford fees like that.

Switzerland, like no other nation, has cornered the tyrant education market. Ten of the most expensive boarding schools in the world are in Switzerland, attracting the glitterati and oligarchy who want to be assured that their offspring will not be studying with anyone they don’t have to. Your conception of a school as a place where children learn sums, eat in canteens and use jumpers for goalposts does not apply to these elite Swiss institutions. These aren’t schools so much as pubescent versions of Davos.

Ice Hockey at Le Rosey&#8217;s Gstaad campus, 1950s

So what does a million pound education actually get you? Does Pol Roger champagne come out of the changing room showers and do they serve Strottarga Bianco caviar for lunch? Is the headteacher the reanimated corpse of Socrates? Well, almost. Many of the swankiest schools teach horse-riding, yachting and yoga, organise skiing trips to Argentina and hiking excursions to Kilimanjaro. They offer on-site spa treatments and serenade the kids with private performances by Phil Collins and the Berlin Philharmonic. Which sounds incredible. The question is, can you justify spending that amount of money on a 13-year-old boy’s education, especially when his principal interests at that time in his life are limited to Juventus Football Club and onanism?

There are around 400 pupils at Le Rosey who live like they are honeymooning at a grand hotel. The main campus is built out of a 14th century chateau in the town of Rolle. It boasts three pools, a wellness centre with sauna and steam baths, a skate park, an open air theatre, an 18-hole golf course, a shooting range, an equestrian centre, and a boating school with a 38-foot yacht. In winter, the entire school decamps, like some Russian tsar, to a second campus in Gstaad, the chichi ski resort. In any other country, pupils their age would be staring out of the window, disassociating from a lesson on simultaneous equations. Meanwhile the Rosey kids are racing through the Swiss Alps, perfecting their carving techniques and thinking about how many beers they’re going to sneak in afterwards.

Perhaps the school’s ski season is what convinced Elizabeth Taylor, Roger Moore and Diana Ross –– or indeed the Taittinger, Rothschild and Rockefeller families –– to have their children educated at Le Rosey. But the clincher must also have been its reputation as the “school of kings”. The monarchs of Belgium, Egypt and Burundi went to Le Rosey, in addition to the nobles of various obscure European households famous either for having far too much chin or not nearly enough. Prince Edward of the British royal family, Princess Zahra Aga Khan, and Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece, as well as her sisters Pia Getty and Alexandra von Fürstenberg, all attended.

Le Rosey is extremely proud of its heritage. “It is true that the school’s facilities are exceptional and that its students hail from wealthy and often eminent families,” its website intones. “The campus atmosphere is one of civilised, community values rather than privilege: students and their parents are more interested in academic results and a good all-round education than they are in prestige.” Among these civilised, community-minded alumni are the former Shah of Iran, the arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and the CIA director Richard Helms, who famously ordered the destruction of all evidence pertaining to the violent mind control experiments the US secretly performed on its citizens.

The Carnal Hall complex at Le Rosey, designed by the renowned Bernard Tschumi Architects

With great privilege comes great irresponsibility, or so it would seem. The students at Le Rosey, perhaps in anticipation of the dodgy careers ahead of them, used to run wild. The journalist Paul Klebnikov had a summer job teaching tennis there in the 1980s, and he recalled that the students referred to cleaners as “les esclaves” (the slaves), and the townspeople as “les paysans” (the peasants). Klebnikov described a playpen of coddled little hooligans whose staff cleaned their rooms, darned their socks, served them dinner and let them get away with all kinds of illicit behaviour.

He wrote how one student, the 14-year-old son of Saudi sheikh, enlisted his bodyguard to drive him to a prostitute –– whose background was vetted –– every Wednesday afternoon. The children of Russian oligarchs ganged up together, got drunk, and fought the other students. A layabout from Italy who was slapped by his maths teacher (this was the 1980s) called up his father, who arrived in a Ferrari with an entourage of hired goons. “As many students watched, the father apprehended the teacher in the central courtyard and humiliated him,” wrote Klebnikov.

Back then, the school didn’t place too much emphasis on academic achievement. “Le Rosey seeks neither an intellectual elite nor a set of ‘model’ students,” the school’s 1999 brochure used to say, modestly adding: “It does strive, however, to avoid academic failure and/or completely deviant behaviour.” Striving, as you might have realised, doesn’t always mean succeeding. In 1965, the school’s owner joked that the only reason he tried to meet parents visiting Le Rosey is because “it helps me to forgive their children”.

"One student enlisted his bodyguard to drive him to a prostitute every Wednesday afternoon..."

The school claims to have reassessed its priorities since. It says it has a stricter curriculum with one teacher for every four children. It sends a fifth of its pupils to the Ivy League and Oxbridge. Le Rosey’s website says “spoiled children used to always getting their way” will not thrive at the school, which sounds like a turnaround from the days of drunken gangs marauding the corridors.

To teach good behaviour, Le Rosey has a code of conduct that enforces a formal dress code for dinner and rules on how to behave at the table. It sounds like a stern Victorian manual instructing members of the clergy how to consume gruel. “One eats with a straight back and with the hands, but not the elbows, on the table,” says the guide. “One eats by lifting the food to the mouth and not by moving the head closer to the plate.” All this suggests elaborate menus designed by Michelin-trained chefs: fish foam and . That might be the case at other Swiss schools, although curiously one Rosean who attended recently describes his alma mater’s dinners as “terrible”. “It’s probably the worst food I’ve had in a long time,” he says.

In addition to the elbows-off-the-table rules, pupils must stand when adults enter a room and step aside to let them pass. It’s telling that the school rulebook doesn’t just address the students. “We know how difficult it is for parents to accept the concept of One Rule for All,” it says, presumably in the hope of avoiding a repeat of the maths teacher debacle.

It is one of the oddities about Switzerland –– in addition to the fact that it has no celebrities beyond Roger Federer (go on, try to name one) –– that it has earned a reputation for teaching the children of the world’s worst despots. At the International School of Berne, a mere £30,000 a year, João Micaelo, a 14-year-old Portuguese boy, remembers with great clarity the moment when his new classmate arrived one day in 1998. The teacher introduced him as Pak Un, the son of Far Eastern diplomats. He had a pudding-bowl lid and the beginnings of a double chin. João and Un sat next to each other and became friends, helping each other with difficult subjects like German and maths. An aggressive basketball player, Un was a regular on the school courts, cursing and pounding his head on the wall if his game was off.

Un turned up to school every day in a chauffeur-driven car, but so did many other children whose parents were diplomats. Friends who went round to his house after school marvelled at his gadgets –– a minidisc player, a PlayStation –– and his huge video collection, stuffed with titles that hadn’t come out yet in the cinema. His favourites were action movies starring Jackie Chan, James Bond and, above all, Jean-Claude van Damme. It was only years later, when João saw the news that a new supreme leader had been announced in North Korea that he realised his old buddy was none other than Kim Jong-un.

It would be hard to think of a more embarrassing example of how your education system is being exploited by villains than having Kim Jong-un pass through your school. Kim got his expensive Swiss education, returned to North Korea and then became a tyrannical dictator with a penchant for murdering rivals. What an advert for your school.

There are others following in Kim’s footsteps. The daughter of Leonid Slutsky, a Russian politician accused of sexual harassment and taking dirty money, sends his daughter Lida to TASIS, The American School in Switzerland. Based in Lugano, it costs £75,000 a year (a bargain compared to Le Rosey) and claims the actor Billy Zane and Isaac Tigrett, founder of the Hard Rock Café, as their most famous alumni. In her TikTok videos, Lida has shown off a private jet, a collection of expensive sneakers and stacks of $100 bills, raising questions about how her father, who claims to live modestly, can afford this.

President Tokayev of Kazakhstan, who like any respectable leader has a robust Swiss property portfolio, sent his son Timur to Collège du Léman. The £80,000-a-year school teaches children from around 100 different nationalities, including, at various points, the family of Mobutu Sese Seko, former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Prince Joel Dawit Makonnen of Ethiopia and the Russian figure skater Anna Ovcharova.

"It became common for pupils to use their MacBooks as umbrellas..."

But is it worth it? Not according to the novelist Judith Krantz, who says these schools turn nice boys and girls into little scoundrels. In her novel 

, she describes how a pupil goes to Le Rosey and develops “a sense of hauteur that eventually turns into the special, superior kind of lofty amusement which clings to the students, a secret, inward smile”.

Graduates who recently attended Le Rosey speak about pressure to keep up with each other. One old Rosean describes a “Louis Vuitton craze” that swept the school when he was 13, followed by a trend for Gucci, then an obsession with Loro Piana, the extortionate Italian designer that sells £23,000 coats. Even the teachers would be seen rocking Hermès belts. Another pupil claims that, when he was there, students were so profligate that it was “common for people to use their MacBooks as umbrellas” knowing that if their laptops got damaged by rain, they could easily afford a new one.

A student is collected from Le Rosey&#8217;s Gstaad campus, 1965.

They say the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, such were the values and importance of Britain’s most famous boarding school in shaping its establishment. The Swiss schools offer training for a different theatre, albeit one that is just as mercenary. Graduates have access to the most coveted contact book in business. Le Rosey students, after completing their studies, are given access to an online database of former pupils and their contact details, like a private Facebook for billionaires. It’s a rocket-powered career booster. That might be why old Roseans speak of their alma mater being “a school for life”, and often meet up for reunions. “I have classmates who party in Ibiza every weekend,” says one. “They invite the whole class to parties all the time.”

This kind of environment, according to a recent lawsuit launched by parents against the school, hasn’t always fostered the most inclusive atmosphere. Pankaj and Radhika Oswal, the Indian fertiliser billionaires, were initially impressed by the “Four Seasons” vibe of the school, and decided to enrol their two daughters. One of them was allegedly the victim of racist bullying. The Oswals say the school failed to properly handle it and unfairly booted their daughter out. “Standards have dropped in recent years,” Radhika said. “It is now fast becoming a playground for rich students to do as they please.” Which sounds, in her telling, like we’ve come full circle back to Klebnikov’s days.

"A superior kind of lofty amusement clings to the students — a secret, inward smile”

When news of the lawsuit first broke two years ago, Le Rosey airily dismissed the allegations as “a banal short dispute between teenagers”. A statement issued by the school said: “Unfortunately the family then declined to cooperate, stopped all communication and hired lawyers, and later on public relations advisors… The parents’ behaviour unfortunately led to an inevitable departure of their daughter.” The Oswals are seeking repayment of fees for the summer term their daughter missed and the cost of a private tutor they hired to make up the lessons, although the impacts of Covid and the meandering Swiss legal system mean that the case will continue for a while yet. Vasundhara Oswal, who says her younger sister was targeted first by bullies then by the school, tells the Gentleman’s Journal that her family’s case is ongoing. “All of this could have been prevented,” she says. “I wish it hadn’t gone this far but we will keep going until my sister gets a formal apology.”

If life at schools like Le Rosey sounds very strange, it’s worth remembering that the billionaire students who attend them are not normal. F Scott Fitzgerald said the rich are different because deep down they think “that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves”. What an education it must be, even before you open your first textbook, to know that you are attending the most expensive school in the world. Maybe that’s why Truman Capote took a potshot at the school in his novel Answered Prayers. One of his characters, an old Rosean, is said to have hosted a nightmare dinner party in which he kept “everybody sitting at their table for hours while he told tasteless jokes”. A friend responds: “Sounds as though he hasn’t changed much since we were at school together in Gstaad, Le Rosey.”

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