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Tuesday, June 21, 2011

To pay or not to pay

I have gotten into the habit of checking out the featured Yahoo! stories that show up on the splash page after logging out of a Yahoo! Mail account. (The jury is still out as to whether this is a good habit: the content is generally horrendous, but it gives some idea of what the country is obsessing about at any given moment.)

An article about private school tuition topping $40,000 caught my eye. Not the most pressing of topics, but I'm always curious about how the rich spend their money.

There is fretting of the "where will it all end??" sort, of course, but as more than one observer quoted in the article resignedly noted, there are plenty of people who will be happy to foot the $40K+ bill at the Riverdale Country School in New York City. Riverdale is no outlier, by the way: the average private school tuition in the city is $39,700.

As a public service, let me strongly recommend that you not waste your time reading the comments attached to any Yahoo! article. If the article itself is mediocre in content quality and writing style, it nevertheless sounds positively erudite next to the hastily typed drivel readers share with the world. (It doesn't help that Yahoo!'s unmoderated comments attract scam artists.)

That said, I couldn't avoid glancing at the first comment presented for this article. The commenter's cogency and spelling are slightly above average and his or her point, therefore, came through (a rarity):
LMAO special perks like learning mandarin?? My public high school had that AND Japanese. Thankfully I live in California and can pay instate tuition for world class schools like Berkeley & UCLA.
I'll hazard a guess that the commenter went to school in one of the more affluent districts of the state, probably in an urban area and likely near the coast. California's public education system is in dire straits because its enormous costs invite slashing during budget deliberations. Well-intentioned attempts to remediate past years' (hell, past decades') funding cuts, such as voter-approved state measures that wall off certain education-related monies from the general fund, have in some respects only exacerbated the problem by allowing critics to portray the public education system at all levels, including college, as a giant, corrupt special-interest sinkhole for tax dollars. Tuition hikes in recent years at both the University of California system and the California State University system (think of them as "varsity" and "junior varsity" college systems) have routinely resulted in protests from students who claim, not without justice, that California's supposedly accessible public colleges are becoming out of reach for many academically qualified students.

The commenter's smugness is ill-deserved, because for better or worse, it's becoming more politically acceptable to advance the libertarian argument that subsidizing other people's tuition is unfair. California's public schools (K-12) are already in sorry shape; UC and CSU are wavering between becoming unaffordable and becoming mediocre. (My personal take is that CSU is well on its way down the path of mediocrity, but I'm highly biased because I didn't think many of the teachers I had were qualified to teach their subjects.) California's still-lousy economy guarantees its education systems' funding woes will get worse before they get better, if they get better. More affluent parents will start moving their kids into private schools ... and as demand drives up prices, Riverdale Country School's tuition won't look so outrageous to wealthy Californians.

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