NBC News has a piece asking whether the cost of private schooling (K-12) is worth the cost. This part jumped out at me:
Despite a strong résumé that included solid grades and entrance exam scores, and an enviable list of extracurricular activities, Assaf — who attended the private, $29,800-a-year Branson School outside of San Francisco — failed to get accepted to Brown. {…}
“Not getting into Brown was the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Assaf, a vice president of sales at S.W. Basics of Brooklyn who ultimately ended up studying at NYU and has been accepted to the Harvard Business School.
The private school environment, according to Assaf, too often tended to engender in her and her classmates “an entitlement mentality.”
“At NYU, in a city like New York, nothing happens for you,” she said. “You have to earn every opportunity.”
When I think of a scrappy, nothing-is-free school, I can’t say that NYU is exactly what comes to mind. Later in the article:
Smith often advises his students to make nontraditional college choices — such as one student he encouraged to attend USC over an Ivy League school. However, he says he’s concerned with the dejection that students like Assaf experience, when the substantial investment in a high-priced secondary school education doesn’t yield the return they expected.
I suppose in one way, any non-Ivy school is a “nontraditional college choice” over any Ivy League school, and while USC is a private school, it’s larger than most state schools. Even so, I can’t help but find it interesting that in an article about the virtues of public versus private, it basically focuses on people looking at top-flight private schools for college.
As for the content of the article, given my aversion to private college, I have a stronger aversion to private school for K-12. At least, sending a kid to private school for the sake of “eliteness” (getting into the best college). I would consider a private school if there was something wrong with the local public school. Ideally, there’d be some measure of school choice where we end up and there would be an alternative public option, or a statewide math & science school as mentioned in the article (and like the one my wife went to).
The Branson School is in Marin County (home of Mike S). He would know more but I think it is very fancy. A quick google reveals that it is in Ross, CA. Ross is one of the fancier towns in an already very well to do county*
As an East Coaster, I find it fascinating to compare how the respective upper-middle classes feel about education.
On the East Coast, public school was perfectly acceptable from grades K-12. Most major East Coast cities have suburbs that are primarily known for their school districts. I grew up in one and so did many of my friends. However, when it came to college I think the preferences was for private and elite universities. At least in the circles I grew up in. People from my high school did attend the SUNYs but not many. We sent a lot of people to Ivy Leagues or comparable schools. The people who attended public universities tended to go out of state to schools like Michigan-Ann Arbor. Even the less academically stellar students tended to go to private universities if my memory serves.
The people I knew on the East Coast who went to private school tended to grow up in major cities where the public schools are a chaotic mess. Or they had very cosmopolitan upbringings and went to boarding school (at least for High School).
On the West Coast it seems different. I know a lot of people out here who went to private school from K-12 including very fancy private schools but then had no problem going to Cal, UCLA, Santa Cruz, UCSD, or UC-Santa Barbara. or a flagship public university in Oregon, Washington, or other Western State.
I think that there are a variety of reasons for this. One big one is that the UC system is filled with Tier I Universities. The SUNYs are all Tier II or lower. SUNY-Purchase is decent for arty stuff but that is about it. Also the West is newer and has fewer private schools and universities of note. On the West Coast you have: Stanford, the Claremont Colleges, Occidental, USC (which was known as a stupid rich kid school until about 15 years ago), CalTech, and Reed in Portland for prestigious private colleges/universities. That is all I can think of. Most people do not want to or are not allowed to apply too far for college. My parents dubbed Stanford and Reed as being too far from New York. I was allowed to apply as far west as Oberlin in Ohio and as far north as Colby in Maine. I imagine that many West Coast parents might make similar ground rules.
On the East Coast, we have most of the old and prestigious private universities. It would have been easier for me to get to any of them than Cal or UWashington.
I wonder if infamous Prop 13 generally ruined California’s public school system or perceptions of it.
I applied to NYU Tisch (the theatre school) so the standards for admission were different but when I applied to college in 1997-98, NYU had a reputation of being decidedly a B-student school. Other schools in this category were Boston University, George Washington, Washington University in St. Louis, etc.
Interestingly many of these schools rejected me because I think their size created a more by the numbers approach to admission. My alma mater was very prestigious and very small. I think this allowed them to take a more individualized and riskier approach to admissions.
Branson is ridiculously (though hardly uniquely) pricey. Many (many, many, …) years ago I went there to take the PSAT. (I vaguely recall having some conflict on the date it was given at my (public) high school.) It wasn’t snooty or snobbish; the teacher and the other kids were perfectly pleasant and welcoming.
Even in my day, before Prop 13, the different districts in Marin had different reputations, which were largely, though not entirely, correlated with wealth and housing prices. If you lived in a sketchier district, wanted a first-rate college prep course, and had the money, a private school was a perfectly rational choice. The schools were quite good where I grew up, so the only kids I recall knowing who didn’t go to a public high school went to a Catholic one.
There’s a Jewish school not far away (tuition 24K-26K), so I just checked to see if they go through high school. No, but they do brag about how their middle school graduates have no trouble getting into their first-choice high school (one of which is, of course, Branson.)
I went to law school with a lot of people from Marin.
IIRC most of them went to private HS. I can only think of one that went to public high school (she grew up in Mill Valley). The rest went to Branson or commuted into one the of the private high schools in SF. Usually Urban or Lick-Wilmerding.
This is interestingly part of an argument I have with my mom. She retired out to the Bay Area and decided to live in Walnut Creek. She is also a public school advocate (being a former public school teacher and admin) and shares Will’s apprehension against private K-12. She seems to think that in Marin everyone sends their kids to private schools. However, people who live in the tonier east Bay towns like Danville, Lafayette and Orinda send their kids to public school.
Can you confirm or deny whether this is true? I think there must be plenty of people in Marin who send their kids to public school.
In San Francisco, I seem to meet and know more people who went to private HS than I did back in New York.
people who live in the tonier east Bay towns like Danville, Lafayette and Orinda send their kids to public school.
Those schools are awesome; at least their test scores are, as is reflected in the price of houses there.
Anyway, most people in Marin can’t afford private HS.
I wonder if infamous Prop 13 generally ruined California’s public school system or perceptions of it.
Close, but not completely on target. After three years on the staff for the Colorado [1] legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, here’s my take on the problem(s). First, there’s a political limit on state/local government revenues at around 9-12% of state GDP. Most states have reached their limit. Restrictions on local property taxes have been offset by increases in state taxes (income, sales, severance, tourist, etc) until that limit is reached. Compare how much of typical state government budgets are K-12 spending now versus 40 years ago: enormous growth as a percentage. What started as “equalization” funds to support poor districts have become a general funding mechanism for all districts to one degree or another, largely to offset the inability to raise sufficient funds through local property taxes.
The other thing you see when you look at share-of-budget at the state level now that differs from 40 years ago is Medicaid: again, enormous growth as a percentage. I have long maintained that Medicaid is a long-term slow-motion disaster for state budgets. Combine Medicaid spending with the shift of revenue sources for K-12 education from local to state, and it is accurate to say that broadly, we have reached the “crowding out” stage. Other programs that were traditionally the states’ responsibility are being cut, in at least relative and in many cases absolute terms. The big four “others” for the typical state are prisons, roads, higher ed, and other human services. Higher ed has the least political cover, and has been taking the brunt of the cuts.
Political “cover” comes in many forms. In many states, K-12 spending is guaranteed in the state constitutions to one degree or another (Colorado, Texas, and Arizona have all lost court cases recently requiring the legislatures in those states to spend significantly more on K-12 education to meet constitutional language). Letting prisoners out early to reduce prison costs does not play well at election time. Same thing for having the roads fall apart, and most states reserve fuel tax revenue for road-spending only. Human services programs benefit enormously from federal statutory requirements. The costs of having the unemployment insurance program deviate from federal minimums is a large tax increase for employers; and many other programs are linked to federal matching funds, so cuts in state dollars are magnified from one to ten times because federal dollars are also cut.
[1] Colorado takes a back seat to no one in terms of conflicting constitutional provisions on taxes and spending. The JBC staff spent an unconscionable amount of time explaining, over and over, to the members of the legislature why their brilliant idea conflicted with the assorted constitutional provisions.
Also these kids did not choose the families that they were born into. No one does.
However many of the kids probably do swallow the kool-aid and will send their children to equally prestigious schools or will at least want to.
I find my sympathies partially in mix with you. All of this really has to do with tribalism and schools develop their own languages of affiliation and exclusion. This can be very grating to outsiders. Also the more prestigious and private are going to develop different senses of belonging than a big flagship state university or big school like NYU.
Interestingly this grates me when I see it more in people who attended exclusive and prestigious private K-12 schools like Branson than in people who attended exclusive private universities. Every now and then a friend (an adult friend) will make a post on facebook in the inside language of their exclusive private high school. Part of me finds it charming, the other part of me finds it off-putting and too twee. I feel like a working class sort even though I grew up just as economically advantaged.
You almost sound like a socialist based on your tone. You are going against the entrenched privilege and exclusion of elite, private education. 😉 I say this partially in jest but you do sound like my European friends who are astonished by the existence of private universities in the United States.*
*Though I think other countries fool themselves with how Eaglitarian their university systems are. Maybe all the universities are officially public but they are not all equal. OxBridge will always shine above all in England. The University of Toronto and McGill will always shine above York (My Canadian friends tell me the chant is: If you can hold a fork, you can go to York!)
OxBridge is also not without their admission controversies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Spence_Affair
One of the things that has had a lasting effect on my worldview is Mickey Kaus’s book, End of Equality. It opened my eyes to some things (that should have been obvious, and that I had sort of noticed, but hadn’t formulated very well). Combine that with my regional upbringing, and I get a bit of a ‘tude, I guess. Private schools for K-12 or at the university level aren’t as common, or revered, as they are in other parts of the country.
I actually think that college sports plays a role as far as universities go, interestingly enough. But anyway, you have your rich-person schools like SMU or Vanderbilt, and you have some very highly regarded schools like Rice or Duke, but they are really niche products, even among aspirationals.
For K-12, I find it odd when people talk about how the south doesn’t fund their schools because white people send their kids to private school. I suspect the private schooling rates are lower in the South than most other places.
That’s really interesting about Cali vs. New York. I’d kind of attributed the latter to being partial to private schooling for both K-12 and college, and the former to be neither.
“One of the things that has had a lasting effect on my worldview is Mickey Kaus’s book, End of Equality. It opened my eyes to some things (that should have been obvious, and that I had sort of noticed, but hadn’t formulated very well). Combine that with my regional upbringing, and I get a bit of a ‘tude, I guess. Private schools for K-12 or at the university level aren’t as common, or revered, as they are in other parts of the country.”
In the South? Most of the kids I know who grew up in the South had very fancy private school educations. Sometimes these are at schools that wear their country club/exclusive atmosphere with pride and honor.
Fancy private K-12 schools exist everywhere and they have the same brand of snootiness. I think you probably just did not realize it until you were an adult. Most kids tend not to recognize this stuff until they are in high school or later.
In terms of public school, I know plenty of people who went. Most of whom grew up in the Northeast or Midwest. I think that upper-middle class professionals fall into two types broadly: Those who think you should move to a suburb with good public schools with a small but significant minority who is against public school for a variety of reasons.
Perhaps it’s a subregional thing, but I very few people I know attended private school (even Catholic school, which I will grant is big in Louisiana), and I knew people from one end of the city to another thanks to BBSes. I know it was done, because such schools existed. But when you talk about the “elite” schools in the city, almost all of them are public schools. Suburban schools, enclaves inside the city, or charter schools. I couldn’t even identify the private ones (I know of one of them primarily because a movie was filmed there, another one because the child of a famous person went there).
Louisiana is a bit of an exception, because of the Catholic school system. But a lot of the things I see and hear about in the South, including the bad things like segregated proms and gerrymandered school districting, are built on the premise that the children of people of influence and some money will, in fact, attend public schools. A lot of that would be sidestepped if there was just the expection “Well, just enroll in private school…”
Private schools were generally a non-factor.
I’m going to argue that this is about regional perceptions and perhaps a bit of One True Scotsman ism.
Most people in the United States attend public school from K-12. Even at my very elite alma mater, 60-70 percent of the student body were the graduates of public schools. However, the popular culture would probably overly emphasis the minority that attended private school because the school has that kind of upper-class reputation. To be fair, the college was for women in the WASP elite for the first few decades of her history or until the post-WWII era.
Mike S above said that most people in Marin cannot afford private school tuition. This is true. Marin is an affluent suburban community but most people can afford their mortgage or private school tuition but not both. There are also less affluent sections of Marin.
Articles like the one you mentioned overplay the number of kids who go to fancy private school for K-12. So do books like The End of Equality. I think this is going to be especially true for places like the Bay Area or NY which are subject to fair amount of bashing for their liberalism and wealth. Often undeserved and from hypocritical targets.
A few things:
End of Equality isn’t really about education. There may be a chapter on it, but if there is I don’t really recall it which tells you how much that particular part resonated. It’s more about social institutions in general and how they contribute to social inequality, which Kaus argues doesn’t get as much concern as it should.
I agree that a lot of it is perceptual. The actual percentage of kids in private schools is roughly 10%. It may be a regional thing, or it may just be select areas. But private schools really do seem to take more prominence in some places than in other places. It’s not about one place being wealthy and the other place not being wealthy, it’s a matter of historical course and local culture. I’ve looked for state-by-state statistics but haven’t been able to find any. I would be surprised if it’s not a case where some states are closer to 5% and others closer to 15%. Which is a minority in both cases, but not an irrelevant difference in my SES.
Or the difference could be entirely perceptual. But it would be less born from resentful red-staters and more a product of media coverage (the New York Times spending more time talking about private schools than the Orlando Sentinel) and just the way that people talk about it. The primary place I have gotten the impression that I have is by talking to people from different places, and how they talk about public school and private school. There is a difference there, at least. These are things that never actually occurred to me until I started blogging and these conversations occurred.
And that’s not even getting into the university situation, where I think there are more differences and those differences are more pronounced. I actually chalk that up to history more than anything, though. The east coast got all of these great private schools up and running before the public ones became commonplace. Meanwhile, if the University of Colorado or Colorado State wasn’t the first school in its state, none of the private schools were nearly as established.
I will admit to being critical, in some ways, to the east coast’s approach to higher ed. But these things occurred over the course of history, not because one place decided to be this way and another place decided to be that way.
“For K-12, I find it odd when people talk about how the south doesn’t fund their schools because white people send their kids to private school. I suspect the private schooling rates are lower in the South than most other places.”
I don’t have anything to offer but anecdata here, but that’s in line with my experience. I grew up in NC and went to a reasonably selective liberal arts college in the region, and there was a decent mix of public-private high school attendees at said RSLAC. in my particular county the school system had extensive tracking and could provide a very good education for the upper-middle class and up set, so the cohort in private school was pretty small. I got the sense, however, that there were other parts of the South where private school was a more popular choice for the sorts of people who send their kids to RSLAC’s, e.g. the greater Atlanta area.
Davidson or Wake Forrest?
Davidson.
Having only read the excerpted sections here, I’m tempted to dismiss this article as rather silly.
Is private school worth it? I dunno! And I work in one.
Are luxury suites at sporting events worth it?
Is a Lexus worth it?
If we think there is a single answer to any of these questions, we’re being rather foolish.
I’m inclined to agree, though the piece itself doesn’t really come to a universal answer. If anything, it mostly questions the assumption that it is worth it. Socialist that I am (see ND’s comment above), I approve of this questioning!
But mostly I was interested in the different perceptions of NYU.
Oh, families absolutely ought to question it. But they should do it based on their particular circumstances and that which they hope to achieve.
I work in the “system” and have my own questions about it, both as a teacher and as a parent.
The problem with having a self-perception of NYU is that it is really, really big.
There are different colleges and different standards of application for each college.
Getting into NYU Tisch as an undergrad is probably more difficult than getting into other colleges at NYU because it is a conservatory program and the spaces are much more limited.
My perceptions are also completely blown off by the recent arms race of college applications.
“given my aversion to private college”
why? (forgive me if you’ve covered this before)
I don’t think you meant to respond to me.
I went to a private college/university for undergrad, gradschool, and law school.
I have no aversion to private colleges/universities. Maybe not very left of me but I see them as a fact of life in the US. Might as well use them.
yeah that was a misthreading (misthreadment) on my part and intended for mr. truman.
Dhex, my main sentiment is that it’s either the case that private college attendance is rarely necessary, or that it being necessary is an indication of a societal flaw.
Public universities ought to be able to offer everything that private universities can except the exclusivity.
“Public universities ought to be able to offer everything that private universities can except the exclusivity.”
are private universities particularly exclusive by nature? that’s really not my impression. i went to one as an undergrad that if it was exclusive, i shudder to consider those who didn’t make the cut.
Will,
1. Not all private colleges or universities are exclusive in admissions terms. Many are not.
2. Even in countries where all or most university education is public/government, there are still schools that are as exclusive or elite as the Ivy League and those that are not.
Dhex (and ND),
No, not all private schools are exclusive. What I’m saying, though, is that exclusivity is one of the big things that private schools can offer that I would not want public schools to offer. The other things, such as smaller class-sizes and intimate settings, are things I’d like to see public universities do a better job with. I single out exclusivity because I don’t want our public universities to be any more exclusive as they have to be (I’m not sure about universities going beyond 50k students, so flagships in states like California, Texas, and Florida are inherently going to be difficult to get in to).
gotcha. thanks for the explanation, i do see where you’re coming from.
however, i think we’re generally going to see more exclusivity than less – particularly on the smaller school end – as it’s a major way to differentiate an institution from competitors. and since they’re at least partially* in the business of selling hope, etc etc and so forth.
* or mostly, depending on how cynical/realistic you are.
No, not all private schools are exclusive. What I’m saying, though, is that exclusivity is one of the big things that private schools can offer that I would not want public schools to offer.
Just to point out that New York’s public colleges and universities back in the day did not have a uniform rate of acceptance of applications and were not open-enrollment institutions.
One metric you see nowadays is the frequency of completion on a four year schedule; that metric is all over the map in New York and varies between 20% and 72% in the SUNY system. You see the same with the CUNY system (albeit with lower rates across the board). Ditto the public system in Maryland. Some schools seem much more able to recruit a student body passably adapted to its faculty and curriculum. It is a reasonable inference that they have better prepared students, so there is selectivity as we speak.
Dhex, I agree. This is one of those “standing athwart history, yelling Stop!” things. All signs are likely to continue to point in the same direction.
Art, I think selecting for the ability to graduate is one thing, and selecting for eliteness another.
I think a big part of the problem is that American is filled with lots of good private universities and colleges whose basic roll is to function as a replacement for the ivies. Vassar, George Washington, Oberlin, Vanderbilt, Rice, Tufts, Boston University, NYU, etc. There is nothing wrong with these schools and the dozens like them in terms of the education they provide and the social life on campus. I guess we can call them Semi-Elite schools.* There only issue is that they don’t have the name brand recognition of the elite universities. However, most people seem to use them as replacements for not getting into an elite school.
The basic problem is that there are too many students qualified for an elite schools but too few schools that are recognized as elite. You have the Ivies (of which Harvard, Yale, and Princeton count far more than Columbia Cornell, Brown, and Dartmouth), Johns Hopkins for medicine, MIT, CalTech, Stanford, and maybe a couple of others. The number of elite schools are somewhere between eleven and twenty. There are dozens or hundreds of Semi-Elite schools that are really just as good but are mainly used as replacements for the Ivies rather than good schools in themselves. These are places like NYU, Vanderbilt, Vassar and the other Seven Sisters, Colby, etc. Everything else is viewed as unacceptable.
I think semi-elite is a weird way to talk about schools like Oberlin and Colby. They might not be in the public consciousness like the Ivies but people know about them and they are seen as being very elite if peculiar.
Thats why I call them Semi-Elite. Most of these schools are as good as Harvard and company but a lot of would be students at elite schools treat them as places of exile if you have to go there.
I don’t think that is true at all.
I grant that these schools might be elite in terms of education and admittance but I do not think they are elite in terms of status or the social imagination. To qualify as an elite school, the general public must perceive the institution as an elite. Since the Little Ivies and other similar schools barely register in the social imagination than they are Semi-Elite rather than Elite.
You’ll never see a movie where the hot-shot CEO of a corporation went to Vassar or Trinity.
I’ve somewhat heard of Oberlin, but have never heard of Colby.
Colby was my second choice after Vassar:
The small liberal arts schools are often roughly referred to as the Little Ivies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ivies
Many are just as old as the Ivies or were formed in the early Republic. Some started out as seminaries. Others started out as being the Seven Sisters, the female counterpoint to the Ivy League for the old WASP elite.
These schools are just as good as the Ivies but attract a bit more of a self-selecting bunch. They rest in a different part of the educational imagination. Most of these schools have very small student to teacher ratio and classes are small. When I talk to people who went to large universities, they took as a benefit that most if not all of their classes would be large lectures with 400 people or more. They liked the non-participatory atmosphere and general ability to skip class without notice. This does not happen when there are no TAs and maybe 25-30 max in a class.
Vassar, George Washington, Oberlin, Vanderbilt, Rice, Tufts, Boston University, NYU, etc. There is nothing wrong with these schools and the dozens like them in terms of the education they provide and the social life on campus. I guess we can call them Semi-Elite schools.*
That’s rather a jumble. You have six full bore universities of widely varying enrollment and two small liberal arts colleges.
1. NYU ( largest enrollment in the Northeast, public or private)
2. Boston University (large enrollment)
3. GW (largish for a private institution. hypertrophied upper division)
4. Rice, Vanderbilt (standard size private universities)
5. Tufts (small university, not quite small as it gets)
It has been decades since I had to rummage through college catalogues, but IIRC, Vasser and Rice were at one time considered as selective as the Ivies. I recall hearing Tufts spoken of as a ‘safety school’ among Ivy-league aspirants.
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton count far more than Columbia Cornell, Brown, and Dartmouth), Johns Hopkins for medicine, MIT, CalTech, Stanford, and maybe a couple of others.
I think the total enrollment of the schools you have named is around about 150,000, and that includes Columbia’s bulbous graduate division. Enrollment in baccalaureate granting institutions is, I believe, around about 10.4 million. Much of the advantage these schools have is the labor-market signal that their admissions standards send.
LOL and Penn has such a poor reputation that it didn’t even make your list of Ivies.