It's a school in which the students learn no practical skills, and certainly no life-skills, and in which the main concern of the staff and student body seems less with education than weird elaborate rituals and contests. None the less, everyone is perfectly convinced that everyone will somehow end up in lucrative and rewarding jobs, because that's how it's always worked.
All of which is to say, it's an entirely typical English public school, they just added broomsticks.
(that's not a joke, the whole setting is a romance of the british class system before 1914. there is literally no working class or even lower middle class in the potterverse, there's only aristocrats and bourgeois. the "poor" family has a father who is employed as a mid-level senior civil servant, ferchrissake, he just has too many kids and no financial sense. you can't explain any of this in an american context because it doesn't make any sense in an american context. the real fantasy is that, when everybody goes off to war, enough of them come back to keep their ridiculous social system intact.)
