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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3835 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

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If everyone was paying private school tuition rates I think you could actually build a Galt's Gulch for no additional cost.

Possibly.

If true, that raises the question—why is private school so overpriced?

My understanding is that private schools are commonly cheaper per student than public schools. And somehow have smaller classes. Public schools are wild profligates with our tax dollars.

I have never found a serious source for this in aggregate (probably publication bias), but I have a suspicion that outcomes correlate negatively with funding. It's not hard to look and see that the districts that spend the most per student tend to also be the worst performing overall.

Some of this is higher costs in urban areas, and frequently bad districts can have some really good magnet schools. And I'm also not really of the opinion that this means cutting funding would improve outcomes.

I mean, is it overpriced? Education is just expensive and we don’t see it up front with a public school because the government pays the bill. Indeed, Catholic schools typically cost less than public schools spend.

One of the Bernalillo County (where Albuquerque, NM is) Republican Party’s big talking points is that the Albuquerque Public Schools district’s total budget is poorly spent by government.

Divided by pupil, the cost is a few thousand dollars more per year than tuition at Albuquerque Academy, the swankiest of our two prep high schools and the one with the biggest, showiest campus. At that price, we should be turning out Silicon Valley/Harvard/MIT-level high school grads, but we’re not.

If existing tuition could fund education plus Galt’s Gulch, but you aren’t getting the latter, then yes, it’s charging too much.

I agree that those public schools are probably also overpriced. Catholics probably aren’t the only ones delivering education at that price point, but I haven’t really looked into it.

IIRC Catholic schools spend the same as charters for better results(how much of that is selection effects is an interesting question- Catholic schools avoid idiocy like the whole word method so it’s probably not 100%). So delivering education for that price point is definitely doable, public schools do a lot of cost disease.

Secular private schools are expensive probably in part because they’re funding things like chefs in the cafeteria and public-school quality athletics complexes. I’m not sure the difference can fund galt’s gulch- I think you can make a private club gated parallel society compound in the middle of nowhere, but it’s going to entail a big drop in standards of living or a wealthy(like billionaire tier) outside backer.

Well, there are all sorts of costs/benefits to moving out to the middle of nowhere. The real price of doing so isn't the cost of building a fence or housing or whatever, it's the price of moving away from any large center of commerce. Transplant a few thousand people directly from NYC to Podunk and even after improving their housing substantially you'll have hundreds of millions of dollars left over to build whatever else needs to be build, including a school.

Other prices, such as tuition, are also inflated by this--teachers need a place to live, after all. Taxes will be lower. Food will be cheaper. Everything will be better except for the one thing that keeps hundreds of millions of people from doing this--economic opportunity.

So yeah, if everyone kept their same incomes and bought in to such a society, I think you could build and run a comparable private school for a fraction of the price, but the "if" is certainly no settled matter.

One of the costs of middle of nowhere living is lower incomes.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. We're talking about whether you can fund a Galt's Gulch for the price of a private school. I think you can, but you probably need to make it much cheaper, because the people funding it will be taking pay cuts to move out and participate in the project.

Gatekeeping through price is its main feature, so it's just following demand.

That seems likely. But then where does the money go? Higher salaries? Marginal improvements in materials?

You could imagine a private school which gets 90% of its performance from <90% of its dollars. In a public city, it has to spend the extra dollars on inefficient stuff to keep the poors out. In this gated community, the gatekeeping is done, so it’d be able to stop spending.

I suspect distinguishing which dollars are which is nontrivial.

To a lesser extent this is true of housing in general. I think plenty of people would be happy living in much smaller houses/apartments if they were sure they could do so in a good neighborhood with other successful, like-minded people.

It makes me wonder about the legality of constructing some kind of "landshare" where people need to literally buy their way into the community. Most of the money would be going not towards the land they're buying, but some kind of community trust holding an index of stocks. This way you still get the price gatekeeping without the inflated land prices.

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