Category: education

The $1,000 Catholic High School

What Ohio’s school voucher system may have done to the cost of private education

I attended Catholic schools for most of my K–12 years.

I went to a public kindergarten. From first grade through eighth grade, I attended a parish school on the east side of Cincinnati.

I completed my high school education at a Catholic school that was also located on the east side of Cincinnati. (And, as we will shortly discuss, still is.)

I’m not here to apologize for attending Catholic schools. Nor do I have any horror stories to relate. My educational experience was almost uniformly pleasant. My teachers were dedicated, responsible adults. As for my peers—well, high school was high school—but most of them were pretty nice people, on balance.

My public school options were not horrible by the standards of the 1970s and 1980s. But I’m glad my parents spent the extra money to send me to Catholic schools.

But how much money?

When I graduated from high school in 1986, my parents were spending about $1,000 per year on my tuition. That’s about $3,100 in present-day dollars.

Tuition at the high school I attended now costs more than five times that inflation-adjusted amount. Tuition at my former high school costs about $15,000 per year. Additional fees bring the total to nearly $17,000 per year.

What the heck happened?

Back in the 1980s, tuition-based Catholic schools operated under market constraints. All private schools did, for that matter. They could charge only what families could feasibly afford. Therefore, they had to keep their operating costs in line.

In the mid-1980s, my high school had two full-time administrators. There was one full-time guidance counselor.

And that was for a student body of about two thousand kids.

The high school I attended now has fewer than half that many students. According to the internet, about 700 students now attend my alma mater.

But, as you might have guessed, my old high school now has more administrators. (In fact, one of my former classmates is the Director of Admissions there.)

I’ve also noticed that the school has gone on a building spree in recent years. When I was a student there in the 1980s, we all used more or less the same facilities that my mother and her classmates had used in the 1960s. (My mother was a 1964 graduate of the same school.) Our accommodations were comfortable, but not luxurious. (And when you’re 15, 16, or 17 years old, who really cares about plush surroundings, anyway?)

But now every alumni newsletter from my former high school seems to feature some new building project. I was last inside the school for an alumni activity about a decade ago. I could barely recognize the place.

So…what the heck happened?

Government money is what happened.

Ohio has a program called EdChoice, aka a “voucher system.” In Ohio, families can receive up to $8,408 in voucher assistance for private high school tuition.

If half of the students at my alma mater are receiving the full EdChoice stipend, that would mean an annual influx of about $2.9 million. Give that much money to any group of educational administrators, and they’ll spend like drunken sailors on shore leave.

There are two sides to the school voucher debate. The first is that school vouchers siphon money from the public school system. While that issue is well worth considering, an equally serious problem is that school vouchers can artificially inflate costs at private schools. I know—because I had a quite satisfactory educational experience at a private Catholic high school during the mid-1980s for about a fifth of its current, inflation-adjusted cost.

Government money, I should note, is not the only type of external funding that can inflate costs. I’ve noticed a sharp increase in the cost of glasses and eye care over the years. (I’ve worn prescription lenses since 1978.) A few decades ago, insurance companies were not involved in routine eye care to the extent they are today. Now they are, and the costs we all pay have risen concomitantly.

You’ve no doubt had the experience of receiving a $1,600 bill for some routine medical test. Why do these tests cost so much? Because, in most cases, an external insurance provider will ultimately be paying the bill.

Whether that insurance provider is the government or a corporation is immaterial from an inflationary standpoint. Third-party insurance payments tend to weaken the market constraints that would otherwise keep prices in check.

So do school vouchers, it seems.

Meanwhile, public education funding is in a perpetual mess here in the Buckeye State. Many of the local districts do not have regular bus service. Each year, there are rancorous debates over school levies and property taxes, which fund public schools in Ohio.

These are problems that we did not have in the 1980s. Granted, I was not a homeowner paying property taxes in 1986, but I don’t remember my parents complaining about the property taxes they shelled out. (Nowadays, everyone in Ohio grouses about how high their property taxes are.) Nor was there ever a problem providing school buses for both public school kids and parochial school kids.

I reiterate: I am not a foe of Catholic schools. On the contrary, I’m both a fan and a beneficiary of them. But they were a lot more affordable—for both parents and taxpayers—before school vouchers came into the picture.

EdChoice is not a panacea for parents. If a family receives the full $8,408 in EdChoice assistance for tuition to my old high school, that still leaves about $8,600 out of pocket. That’s an inflation-adjusted net cost of nearly three times what my parents paid in the 1980s.

—ET

Homeschooling: the wrong solution to a real problem

A large number of school levy issues were on the ballot throughout Ohio this past Tuesday. Most of them were rejected by voters. Reading the comments on Facebook, I noted that those who voted against the levies were largely unapologetic.

There is a general dissatisfaction throughout America with public schools: their management, their methods of (taxpayer) funding, and the instruction that is taking place within them.

This dissatisfaction with public education has fueled a concomitant rise in homeschooling. When I was a kid, during the 1970s and 1980s, one never met anyone who was homeschooled. (Fewer than 1% of Gen Xers receive their education this way.) But nowadays it seems that every other young adult one meets is the product of homeschooling. Every young couple with children is at least talking about educating their kids at home. The percentages rise as the neighborhoods become whiter and more affluent.

I understand the dissatisfaction with twenty-first-century public schools. It seems that no news day is complete without a fresh report of some weirdness being taught in public schools, or some flagrant example of teacher misconduct.

And yet…I had a very different experience in the 1970s and 1980s. I attended both public and working-class Catholic schools, both at the grade school and high school levels. I received an excellent education. And while I liked some of my teachers better than others, almost all of them were intelligent adults who were deeply committed to their calling.

What happened, then? Sometime during the mid-1980s, one began hearing the catchphrase, “if you can’t do, then teach”. The careerism of the 1980s taught young people that teaching was a second-rate profession. If you were smart, if you were a capable student, then you didn’t want to be a teacher. No, that simply wouldn’t do. You had to be an attorney, a CPA, or a CEO.

Another important trend occurred during the Gen X growing-up years: a decline in the number of capable young women entering the teaching field.

As recently as the 1970s, teaching was considered a top career choice for the most capable young women. While some of my teachers were male, they were disproportionately female. Many of my female teachers were absolutely brilliant. My junior high science teacher, a woman named Mrs. Tierney, was as knowledgable as many college professors.

That all began to change in the 1980s, with the rise of “girl power”, and the idea that the brightest young women must compete in all traditionally male careers. The result was more intelligent young women working in law and finance, but fewer intelligent young women becoming math and science teachers.

Did society benefit most from more intelligent young women entering law firms…or from more intelligent young women entering the field of education? I’m going to let you draw your own conclusions on that one. (I don’t want to deal with the hate mail.)

What I will say is that there are trade-offs to all societal changes. Forty years ago, we began subtly denigrating the teaching profession (“if you can’t do, then teach”) and we began telling young women that they were passively accepting the patriarchy if they didn’t go toe-to-toe with their male classmates in the corporate boardroom.

Forty years have come and gone since all of those trends began. The excellent teachers who provided my education during the 1970s and 1980s are all retired. After casting the teaching profession as a second-rate career choice for four decades, many people are shocked to discover that—lo and behold—the field is now populated by mostly second-rate people. (In one of their Freakonomics books, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner documented the decline in teacher IQ within my lifetime.) Many parents are also shocked to discover that a disproportionate number of those teachers are left-wing ideologues who shouldn’t be trusted with anyone’s children. But that tends to go along with the second-rate thing.

And now many of those affluent white suburbanites have decided that public schools must be abandoned wholesale. Parents who once believed that a teaching career was beneath them have decided that they should take a break from their law firms and corporate offices to…educate their children at home. Can no one see the irony here?

I reiterate: I experienced public, industrialized education during the 1970s and 1980s. It really isn’t that bad when the right adults are in charge. The problem is that the right adults are no longer in charge, because the right adults are off doing other things. Among those other things (note irony once again) is now homeschooling their kids, because they no longer trust the people working in education.

I am grateful that I wasn’t homeschooled. I loved my mother dearly, but she would not have been capable of teaching me Spanish and algebra at home. In my experience, very few parents are well-equipped to provide competent instruction beyond the fifth- or sixth- grade level. Teaching at the junior high level and above really is a task that is best left to trained professionals.

The proof is in the pudding. I’ve met many of these young adults who were homeschooled in recent years. Most of them are nice enough, but there are noticeable gaps in their knowledge and social development. I would not have wanted to trade places with them.

Another important factor is the socialization and people skills that the organized educational experience provides. I was neither the captain of the football team nor the most popular kid in my school. But my high school experience was anything but four years of living hell. In fact, I rather enjoyed it.

More germane to our discussion here, my school years taught me about friends, enemies, rivals, and conflict management. These are skills that many screen-bound Gen Z young adults sorely lack. 

The solution to the crisis in public education is not for a million concerned parents to isolate their children and retreat behind suburban walls. The solution is for a million concerned parents to become involved and take back their public schools.

This is not like trying to take back the national government. Education is still largely managed at the local level. It is possible for organized groups of adults to bring about substantial changes.

This would be a lot more beneficial (for their children, most of all), and practical, than for every parent to try to become a do-it-yourself calculus teacher.

-ET