Is it possible to accurately estimate the cost per student for a public school.
Do schools, state, release enough info to calculate this cost?
NO, You can not compute the “COST” of anything provided for by the government as you can not compute what the tax payers would have done with the very real resources otherwise. Cost is an individual value. It can not be determined when government at the point of a gun steals property from one person a tax payer and gives it to another person in the educational bureaucracy.
You can however determine a numeric value of the education of the average person. You will not get within plus or minus 40% as there is no accurate way to assign all the inputs of stolen wealth into the education bureaucracy. There are hidden bureaucracies sending money to education systems. Then the education systems work with law enforcement, social services, engineering etc so their additions must be accounted for. Then there are volunteers whose time would be sold for money otherwise.
Is there not an averge cost per student in public schools that’s updated every year?
My English teacher told our class that the cost for the average student at our school (public) was around $6,000 per year.
I wish she would have said where she got that number from…
A few school districts will put out numbers on the monetary costs of the school, sometimes even with per child done for you. My own district does that reporting: $5,542 per child per year, though that will go down in the next school year because of budget cuts. (Have you ever noticed that the first cuts are in schools, police, and the like, and they never start with welfare or salaries?)
It’s a he, but I would guess that number comes from a school district publication.
I wonder what they calculate into that…
federal money?
In his series on public compulsory schooling, John Stossel referenced figures of $11,000 per student minmum going as high as ~$27,000 per student in certain areas, like DC.
Your teacher must be using an old number. According to the census bureau, it was a national average of $9,000 per student.
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/010125.html
that’s 3 years old…
Do they not release this important data every year?
The TRUE COST of government schools is much higher than government tries to tell you. The government is lying as usual. They leave out things such as pension costs and costs of school buildings.
Watch this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzvKyfV3JtE&feature=player_embedded
DC spent almost $30k per kid. LA spends over $28k per kid.
How much do private schools usually cost per kid?
I send my son to Catholic school, and it cost me $3150/year. You get discounts with additional children.
When it comes to government school you’re not getting your money’s worth.
With that much money spent on a child per year I could just buy the entire Mises store library!
In Trenton (NJ) the government spends $25k per child per year. Think of what could be done with that waste of money!
Or invest it and retire early. The idea of general education for financial purposes is stupid regardless of who dispenses it. Specific vocational training is far more efficient and you can save so much that you can get contingency training and still make off like a bandit compared to trying be a Leninist superhuman.
Rasmussen: 55% of Americans think government should raise education funding. 20% think they should lower it.
Too bad most people don’t understand just how much money is spent (and wasted) on education.
They don’t understand, because apparently this is extremely difficult data to get a hold of.