Subscribe to Receive the Daily Report

Sunday, July 23rd, 2017

Private School Is Becoming Out of Reach for Middle-Class Americans

Author:     Jordan Yadoo
Source:     Bloomberg
Publication Date:     July 19, 2017, 7:45 AM PDT
 Link: Private School Is Becoming Out of Reach for Middle-Class Americans
Stephan:   One the consequences of the growing wealth inequality in the U.S., now the greatest disparity in Europe or North America, is that rich children increasingly live in a world mostly cut off from interaction with young people whose families while affluent are of lesser wealth and, of course, they have essentially no contact at all with children of the poor. The effect that has on their early years is that they lack empathy or understanding of the world in which most Americans live, and this has a very negative effect on the health of our democracy. Here is a report on this educational effect; it is a very sad story.

These days, private school really is just for rich kids.

While the enrollment rate for children from middle-income families in U.S. private elementary schools has declined significantly over the last five decades, the level for high-income families has been relatively steady, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study released this month ― a trend that could come to perpetuate the nation’s growing wealth divide.

The shift is most apparent in urban areas, where the enrollment gap between kids from high- and median-income families increased from 5 percentage points in 1968 to 19 points in 2013, according to the study, which used national survey data on private elementary-school enrollment by family income over the last half century.

Part of the decline in middle-class enrollment coincided with the closing of many Catholic schools, though it’s unclear how much of that that was due to changes in the religious makeup of cities and how much stemmed from the Catholic Church’s struggle to maintain schools with the same relatively low tuition rates that parishes had historically offered.

But it’s not just Catholic-school closures causing the fall in middle-class enrollment. Soaring tuition has kept private-school education out of reach […]

Read the Full Article