I recently read that it costs the taxpayer $123,000, per student, for primary and secondary education. I would like to adjust that figure with post-secondary estimates if I could locate how much student loans/aid/grants etc cost the taxpayer
Wow I didn’t believe it… but I remembered when I was doing research for a debate tourney that on average, public schools spend $7-8k/yr-student K-12. If we’re only talking about tuition, the national average for a 4 year school is $4k/yr-student, so the cost of higher education will actually be lower than K-12 even if it were universally funded.
Anyway, I briefly looked and couldn’t turn up any pie charts… But still, this is funny. Everyone complains about increases in college costs while lower education has been consistently more expensive for decades.
According to a Wall Street Journal article that quoted the figure from The organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the closest to k-12 costs is Japan at ≈ 73,000
“but I remembered when I was doing research for a debate tourney that on average, public schools spend $7-8k/yr-student K-12.”
nah - it’s more than that, governments typically lie about these figures. DC is about 30k/year/kid.
Being totally funded would make it go up.
Right sorry. Forgot that paying for stuff with the printing press increases the money supply.
But if the state OWNED the means of education and abolished their pricetag, then education would have no cost, just like it should.
Actually, Caley’s point is that government funding for K-12 would greatly increase demand and reduce competition, thereby driving prices up.
Education would still have a cost, that cost would just not be directly placed on consumers. Consumers would pay through higher taxes, slower economic growth, worse education, and lower standards of living.
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Its early.
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Sarcasm failed.
Washington DC pays about 10k per student and they have the highest paid teachers in the country…yet their dropout rates are the highest in the country, go figure.
DC pays much more than 10k per student.
By now, I’m sure DC pays more than 10k per pupil. I was going by numbers I read in like 2005.
Haha, my bad Snowflake. Sarcasm is rather difficult over the internet.
My math has DC public schools spending about $16,000 per student this year. I don’t think it’s gone up 40% in the last 5 years. Either way, it’s a huge rip off. Alexandria City Schools just outside DC spends about 18k. I’m not entirely sure those are accurate numbers either, because by my cursory glance I didn’t see any mention of retirement in the budgets.
I teach at a small private academy in the South and we probably spend $5k per student.
the folks over at CATO say that DC spends something closer to 28K per student, which is almost enough to send kids to some of the more expensive private schools in the country.