Schooling

The New York Times reported on Sunday that tuition at New York’s private schools is or soon will be $40,000.  As someone who has just spent four years living in England, it strikes me that not being able to afford Spence or Andover is not the same disadvantage in America as not attending South Hampstead or Eton in the United Kingdom.  The British character of Lane Pryce on Mad Men once comments that he loves New York because he has been there for six months and no one has asked him where he went to school.  (A cynic would tell Lane this is because of Yankee prohibitions on talking about such things, but school simply doesn’t play the same role this side of the Atlantic.)  

Still, the remarkable resilience of these institutions in a liberal democracy is somewhat remarkable.  In France or Austria, private schools are the haunts of dim-witted aristocrats.  But in America, and particularly in New York and Boston, they remain the province of the elite.  Boston magazine ran a story a few years ago about the number of parents who are taking their students out of Milton or Commonwealth to attend a public school.  The tenor of the story is nothing if not angst.  

The role of property taxes is a ghost in the attic here. What seems to matter to parents is where their students go to college, and the feeling remains that the better the school, the better the college, the better the career, etc.  A smart student at Stuyvesant or Wellesley High will go to a very good college.  But if property prices push out the middle class in Manhattan neighborhoods where there are good schools, students who test into Stuyvesant may be traveling an hour to get to school because the school down the block isn’t good enough.  Does a parent pay $31,000 at Saint Ann’s, or saddle their child with two hours of commuting rather than doing homework?  And why would someone choose to live in a city that forces such a choice?