I just got back from Seminar, and I can say I had a nice experience. I wasn’t one of those girls who was “obsessed” with seminary, though. It was a hard adjustment.
Seminar has a nice mix of “out of town” type girls, and the staff is very yeshivish, though the girls are not necessarily so- it’s a nice, solid, Bais Yaakov crowd and pretty friendly. The work wasn’t very hard, but there were some times in the year when we had a bunch of reports. But you weren’t constantly staying up late on schoolwork.
BYA and Nachlas, as far as I can tell, are pretty Yeshivish. They both have good reputations (and Nachlas has a stunning dorm). I think Nachlas has a little bit of a hard academic reputation, but I’m not sure about BYA.
Machon Raaya is also a little hard, but from what I’ve heard, the girls are really nice and everyone I know who went there loved it. It’s probably the same as Seminar in types of girls.
Tiferes and Hadar are known as very frum and very academic- I don’t know many people who went to either, but those I do know are really nice, sweet people, but also very smart (I’m pretty sure there’s a heavy workload at both places.) Hadar is very centrally located, but I heard the dorm is small.
Bnos Sara is also academic- I heard they only teach in Hebrew. I don’t really know much about it.
Kesser Chaya is a new school Rabbi Meisles of Pninim started but he said (this is what he told us in seminary) that it’s supposed to be for Seminar-type girls who don’t want to work as hard. So I think what he meant is it’s for solid, nice girls who don’t want to be bad or crazy in Israel (like some slackers do) but they’re just not very academic students. I think it’s also accepting people Seminar doesn’t have room for (the dorm is totally full), but I also think they got a lot of applicants this year, because Binas, which just had it’s first year, was also started by this Rabbi Meisles, and it was really successful- somehow, he got a great group of girls and insanely amazing staff members (like Rabbi Heller), so now people think Keser Chaya will also be really good. It probably will be.
Binas is the school I probably would have applied to if I had known about it when I was applying to seminaries. The girls there are really nice, and the school has awesome teachers and seems to be run really well. It also got tons of applicants this past year.
I looked into Ateres, and only didn’t apply because I wanted a bigger school. I really like all the people I know who went there, but I don’t really know much about the school itself.
The schools you put down are mostly really top schools, and I think all of them have a good reputation. The most academic are probably Hadar, Tiferes, Bnos Sara, and Nachlas, but none of the schools are easy, with maybe the exception of Kesser Chaya, but it’s first year will be starting soon, so nobody knows yet.
Good luck!
What type of school do you want?