Tuitions point up fallacy of a classless society

Tuitions point up fal­lacy of a class­less society

THE VILLAGE IDIOT by Jim Mullen

Thanks to a story in The New York Times, we learn that median tuition at the 61 elite pri­vate schools in New York City has hit $36,970 a year for 12th-graders. A new school in the Chelsea neigh­bor­hood plans to charge $39,750 for a year of nurs­ery school.

Seri­ously? The tuition at Har­vard this year was $36,305. Hard as it is to believe, some par­ents will be relieved when their kids get accepted into Ivy League uni­ver­si­ties because, at last, they can start sav­ing some money. Of course, if you’re pay­ing $39,000 and change annu­ally for grade school and high school tuition, it’s inevitable that your kids will get into the uni­ver­sity of their choice.

But tuition is only part of the cost at these schools. Just like most pub­lic and parochial schools, they are con­stantly hold­ing fundrais­ers, the dif­fer­ence being that if you don’t con­tribute heftily, Junior may find him­self tossed into the pub­lic school sys­tem next year, sit­ting next to the chil­dren of gen­eral prac­ti­tion­ers, pub­lic defend­ers, plumbers, elec­tri­cians, wait­resses, reporters or, heaven for­fend, mem­bers of your own house­hold staff.

The good news is that these exclu­sive schools don’t let in our kind. If you weren’t rich enough to get a cou­ple mil­lion dol­lars in a taxpayer-paid bailout bonus, there is no way your kids are going to get into one of these schools. Which is OK with me, because face it, exclu­sive pri­vate schools rarely pro­duce any first-round draft picks in the big money sports. While many team own­ers have grad­u­ated from exclu­sive schools, almost none of the play­ers have.

You might guess that with these kinds of stratos­pheric prices, fewer par­ents are apply­ing to get their kids into such schools in these tough times. Ah, but you would guess wrong. The demand for exclu­sive pri­vate schools is up — way up — which is sure to drive the price of tuition even higher. Tuition of $40,000 a year to teach your third-grader mul­ti­pli­ca­tion is right around the corner.

Even with that kind of money, there is no guar­an­tee Junior will get in. What if he suf­fers from NOCD (Not Our Class, Dear)? But wait — con­sult­ing ser­vices can advise par­ents on how to get their over­priv­i­leged prog­eny into these schools. That’s right, many bailed-out bro­kers and bankers will hap­pily spend $20,000 of for­merly pub­lic money on con­sul­tants to help get their lit­tle heirs and heiresses into the “right” schools. The fee for con­sult­ing will prob­a­bly rise, too, because of the demand. Even so, the chances of get­ting Junior in with­out hav­ing some kind of legacy at the school are slim or none.

So what do the stu­dents get out of all this that they won’t get from New York’s fine pub­lic schools? Well, at a pub­lic school they might not be able to take Zen Dance, a class offered at one of the pri­vate schools. Their Man­darin teach­ers may not be as good as the ones at the pri­vate school’s pre-K. You know, the neces­si­ties. They may suf­fer from low self-esteem when they find out that the chil­dren of non-rich peo­ple can be just as smart and tal­ented as the chil­dren of the wealthy. Some of them are even smarter and may get into col­lege for free on things called “scholarships.”

Most impor­tant, they will miss all the diver­sity of exclu­sive prep schools, where some of the par­ents make only $5 mil­lion a year, while oth­ers make $500 mil­lion. Imag­ine, the chil­dren of hedge fund man­agers and the semi-impoverished sixth gen­er­a­tion of the rob­ber barons going to school together. It warms the heart. It’s this cross-pollination of old and new money that makes this coun­try great.

Surely these kids will come up with entirely new ideas to make them­selves richer than their par­ents. They’ll have to. Kinder­garten could cost $80,000 a year by the time the next gen­er­a­tion starts hav­ing kids.

Posted by Guest 2 Columnist on Feb 28 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.