$14,000 per pupil means we are paying for a class of 20 students, on average nationwide, $280,000 for a K-12 education per school year.
That’s an insane amount of money to teach a small group of kids the things which the average K-12th grader are actually being taught.
The problem is definitely not that the cost of living for the average teacher for that class of 20 average students is anywhere near even $60k. Or that the depreciation on the capex for the portion of the facilities used by those 20 kids and 1 teacher is anywhere near $20k.
The problem is the other $200k is being burned in an administrative and political dumpster fire.
Again, I agree with you on the prodigious increases in admin costs - many of which are forced by the politicians frequently complaining about costs.
But also, pre-college education is funded completely differently from tertiary (large parts of the US actively hate higher level education, so its much easier to defund)
There’s $1.5 trillion of student loan debt. ~$800 billion of that is Stafford loans. 11.4% is delinquent.
How much of that debt could have been issued without the Fed guaranteeing it? That is a huge subsidy in and of itself.
Also, whether it is [currently] dischargeable or not, a massive percentage of that debt is probably not actually serviceable.
That means the Day of Reckoning will come where the Fed takes a haircut on that loan balance. And that will amount to the largest ever recognized subsidy in tertiary education in the history of the world.
It was sold as a Federally guaranteed loan program, but when you make a massive loan to someone who can never repay it, it’s actually a grant. It’s just not politically convenient to admit it (yet).
That’s an insane amount of money to teach a small group of kids the things which the average K-12th grader are actually being taught.
The problem is definitely not that the cost of living for the average teacher for that class of 20 average students is anywhere near even $60k. Or that the depreciation on the capex for the portion of the facilities used by those 20 kids and 1 teacher is anywhere near $20k.
The problem is the other $200k is being burned in an administrative and political dumpster fire.