If you remember the old days, was private school this expensive compared to HHI?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is the same with colleges. I went to a good private college that had plenty of normal families that could pay with perhaps just a small student loan. It was not a huge stretch from a state U to the private school. Now the cost is 3x as much! Now a student loan does not make a dent in the price tag.

Kind of feels like "something's gotta give", right?

[Anonymous]

No head scratching here. I think this is part of a larger problem in the economy. The gap between the super wealthy and everyone else is growing with every decade. I fear that soon there will be no upper middle class or middle class, just rich and poor.

[Anonymous]

rich, upper poorer class, and poor...lol......

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here, I could have run the numbers like you did pp, thanks. But my bigger question is was there as much head scratching and asking ourselves why we are doing this.

I'm not the number-crunching PP, but her analysis does answer your question -- no, there wasn't as much angst about whether private school was worth it because tuition didn't take as big a bite out of family income.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here, I could have run the numbers like you did pp, thanks. But my bigger question is was there as much head scratching and asking ourselves why we are doing this.

I'm not the number-crunching PP, but her analysis does answer your question -- no, there wasn't as much angst about whether private school was worth it because tuition didn't take as big a bite out of family income.

I am the number-crunching PP, and if i did the math right, I think it does answer that question as well.

[Anonymous]

Doesn't matter they can make it as high as they want if there is dwmand to pay it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Doesn't matter they can make it as high as they want if there is dwmand to pay it.

True, but not relevant to the question asked.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is the same with colleges. I went to a good private college that had plenty of normal families that could pay with perhaps just a small student loan. It was not a huge stretch from a state U to the private school. Now the cost is 3x as much! Now a student loan does not make a dent in the price tag.

And here's a big piece of the problem: the families that have to scrape to afford $30k/year for private school are often putting off saving for the $60k/year colleges. My parents managed private school and also fully-funded our private college educations. For a middle class family, it's much harder today to manage both private school and private college.

[Anonymous]

No one that is middle class can afford either private school or college at full cost.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Doesn't matter they can make it as high as they want if there is dwmand to pay it.

Perhaps that's correct. If so, from a supply-demand perspective, private school education may have been underpriced previously. Or perhaps demand has increased.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Absolutely OP, this is my impression as well. No question, it changes the nature and the population of these schools. Now it's a "barbell" population, at best.

Yes!! I know that analogy.

We have an HHI of 425K. Our kids go to public school.

Our parents did not make nearly as much as we do. My DH and I both went to well known privates in the northeast.

We are very happy in our public school. We tried private and it wasn't woryh the 30K in tuition that was a struggle for us a couple of years ago when our HHI was about 100K less.

Plus, we couldn't relate to any of the families. There were no "normal" people.

Most of our friends from growing up also send their children to public schools for many of the same reasons as us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is the same with colleges. I went to a good private college that had plenty of normal families that could pay with perhaps just a small student loan. It was not a huge stretch from a state U to the private school. Now the cost is 3x as much! Now a student loan does not make a dent in the price tag.

And here's a big piece of the problem: the families that have to scrape to afford $30k/year for private school are often putting off saving for the $60k/year colleges. My parents managed private school and also fully-funded our private college educations. For a middle class family, it's much harder today to manage both private school and private college.

Agree. We just pulled kids out of private school because we decided saving for college is more important and we can't do both.

[Anonymous]

all these posts make it sound like there is a significant attrition rate for privates, is that the case?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Let's take a certain percentile of HHI from the census data. Say we want to know what the 95th percentile HHI was in 2000 and 2012, and then compare the change in those HHI's versus the change in tuition.
2000 95th percentile HHI: $145k
2012 95th percentile HHI: $191k
So that's just about a 33% increase in HHI if you stay at the same percentile over those 12 years.
If, as PP said, in 2000 they were paying $12k for tuition in 2000 and were paying about $30k in 2012, that tuition increased by 150 percent during that time.
So, clearly, increases in tuition were WAY outpacing increases in HHI over the same period.
If you take incomes at the 75th percentile, it's:
2000 at 75th percentile: about 82k
2012 at 75th percentile: about 104k
So, at the 75th percentile of HHI, we are looking at about a 27% increase in HHI over those twelve years. Compared to a %150 increase in tuition at the same school.
No wonder we feel like families that used to be able to afford private can't anymore.
In the year 2000, if HHI was $120k and tuition was $12k, that person's HHI was in the

Your whole premise is flawed because you are juxtaposing nationwide HHI figures with Washington-specific tuition. (My sister's tuition at a fine private high school in the Midwest $8,000. )

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:all these posts make it sound like there is a significant attrition rate for privates, is that the case?

Not in my experience at my daughter's private. There's normal ebb and flow - some families move, some kids change schools at middle school or upper school, but it's a small amount. Fewer than 1 child/year left in her lower school career. Middle school looks similarly stable. As a data point, my daughter's last year in lower school cost ~120% what her first year cost.

I think private schools would do people a service if they showed prospective families what a student graduating "now" (the year of application) had paid for an entire career at that school, and indicate what percentage tuition increase occurs each year. I think both the $ amount and the percentage can be important; I think a lot of people underestimate how much percentage increases can work out to be. Seeing actual dollar amounts (e.g. tuition increasing from 25K to 32K over 6 years) might better allow them to determine long term affordability.