Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

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This is a problem in the UK too.

The independent school (aka private school) sector has seen fees double or triple over the last 10-20 years. This is largely driven by rich foreign students, primarily Chinese, sending their kids to these schools.

I don't particularly regret these bastions of class division destroying their reputation for money, but there are a lot of knock on effects. Independent schools used to be one of the few paths for middle class mobility - scrounge enough to send your kids there, and they are basically guaranteed entry into the elite of British society. But these days the tuition is prohibitively expensive and prices out almost everyone. This just exacerbates the class divide even more in the UK.

The main issue though is that independent schools in the UK have non-profit status - so pay NO tax on the fees they charge. With the rising fees locking out most people from access to them, there is very little societal benefit to these schools. But as a taxpayer, I have to subsidize education for the very rich or rich foreign nationals. It's ridiculous.

> I have to subsidize education for the very rich or rich foreign nationals

Not a penny of your tax goes to subsidising their education. The charitable status of private schools means that the money used for their education isn't taxed twice.

I agree that private schooling tends to exacerbate divisions. The majority of state school provision in the UK is atrocious. I have more concern that very little is being done about the second rate schooling we have than I do about the, relatively small, amount of first rate schooling in the private and state sectors.

> The majority of state school provision in the UK is atrocious.

I don't think this is really true anymore. I agree state schools were truly awful in the 80s/90s (my partner who went to state school didn't even learn times tables). Quality of state school has improved tremendously over the last 20 years, and I'd say it's very good these days. Especially as middle class families are priced out of independent schools. In fact I'd even say it may be better for your kids to go to the local state school nowadays, otherwise you are isolating them from their local community.

> Not a penny of your tax goes to subsidising their education.

I, of course, totally disagree :). I toured many London independent schools last year for secondary, and you just need to take a look at the amazing school grounds to see the benefits of charitable status. [1] These are for-profit institutions with huge bursaries that avoid paying almost all taxes. Any tax exemption is equivalent to a subsidy that I am funding as a taxpayer.

1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charities-detaile...

Turns out I'm about 5 years out of date [1], I retract. Schools have improved markedly in the last 5 years.

In what way are they for profit institutions? Who is profiting financially? They're charities (for the most part) and are legally obliged to be run like charities. Now if you're suggesting that some or all of them are paying dividends to some secret investor then sure. But you're not, presumably.

Again, it's fine for you not to agree with private schools. I understand that. But to suggest that you're somehow paying for them doesn't bear scrutiny.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-50563833

> These are for-profit institutions with huge bursaries that avoid paying almost all taxes.

If it doesn’t have beneficial owners it’s not a for-profit. Eton is in the same position as Oxford as far as having owners who receive profits from it goes. Neither do. They’re run with some regard to the idea of a mission, on inertia with the biggest impact coming from current staff.

That’s not saying they’re perfect, or that they should be allowed to continue to exist. Plenty of UK citizens hate them and the class they represent and want them destroyed. If they get a government elected that wants them destroyed they will be. Nothing lasts forever.

>Not a penny of your tax goes to subsidising their education.

An entity not paying some amount of tax in practice means the rest of us will have to cover that amount with our own taxes. Same thing with corporate tax evasion etc.

It's only boarding schools. Many, if not most, independent schools do not offer boarding and thus don't have foreign pupils at all.

Boarding schools have always been for a minority and this hasn't changed because of foreign pupils.

Now, boarding schools are often keen on foreign pupils (esp. Chinese nowadays) because it IS actually good for their reputation: The Chinese education system is such that these pupils tend to ace maths and science subjects in exams and so the school can then market their outstanding GCSE and A levels results.

As for taxes: People who send their children to independent schools fund the public sector through their taxes in the same way as everyone else but do not use public sector resources at all. I think it is fair that they are not taxed twice on top of that.

There were three Chinese students in sixth form at my independent day school when I was 16-18. They lived with a host family.

Searching for "family boarding" shows this isn't unique.

> Boarding schools have always been for a minority

I sincerely doubt this. I’m not sure if my father’s school had day students when he attended but boarders were definitely a large majority. The omnipresence of boarding schools in post WWII British fiction doesn’t make any sense unless there was at least rough parity among independent schools. CS Lewis, George Orwell, Roald Dahl, off the top of my head. Seamus Heaney after looking it up.

I think it might have been more common to send children to boarding schools among the elite, but that does not mean that it was not a small minority overall.

Obviously boarding schools are always going to be much more expensive than day schools.

Independent schools were always for a small minority. Among independent schools I’m reasonably confident boarding schools were a majority. They were not for an elite. They were for the economically successful, a middle class much smaller than what we have now but it was not unusual in small town or rural Ireland in the ‘60s for the children of shopkeepers or successful farmers to send children to board for secondary school. That’s a definition of elite so expansive as to be meaningless.

Another reasonable hypothesis is that only the elite had the opportunity to become authors

Lewis’ father was a solicitor, Dahl’s a shipbroker. Orwell and Heaney both attended boarding schools on a scholarship. Their fathers were respectively a civil servant and a farmer. Even by extremely expansive definitions of elite at most 50%.

Given enough time it could go the other way - the schools' increased income from foreign students would subsidise more scholarships for local students. I'm under the impression they are nonprofit, so the money has to go somewhere?

It doesn't require any more time, it's happening already. UK universities charge non-Europeans more than double the tuition they charge Europeans. The foreign nationals are subsidizing the education of Brits, not the other way around.

OP is talking about schools, not universities.

Where independent schools are leading the way, universities are following.

There was an ongoing political debate on some of the news sites before everything got taken over by coronavirus: independent schools have charity status (which includes exemption from business rates tax that goes back to the local area) because historically they were indeed typical examples of charities. For example:

> "Eton College was founded by King Henry VI as a charity school to provide free education to 70 poor boys who would then go on to King's College, Cambridge, founded by the same King in 1441." (Wikipedia)

The debate was whether a school that mainly serves and lives off rich foreigners should still enjoy the benefits of charity status - public opinion seemed to be moving in the direction of "tax it like any other business".

And people were, very cautiously, starting to ask the same of universities. Meanwhile in faculty meetings, I've heard this from many different places, it's an unspoken rule that you don't refer to home students as "second class students" or anything like that but management is finding increasingly creative ways to paraphrase that. Things like "pivot to high-margin students".

HPSquared was talking about international students (effectively) subsidising scholarships for UK students in private schools. As far as I know, there is little evidence of any such "trickle down" effect at present, or reason to think that there will be one in the future. That is, it is unlikely that a typical British student at a private school will be paying lower fees owing to the contributions of their international classmates. I think you are going off on a tangent.

It's a tangent, yes. My point here (which I didn't articulate earlier) is that one of the arguments against independent schools having to pay business rates is they're indirectly helping the local community through this trickle down effect - sure they're taking in huge sums from overseas students, the argument goes, but that means home students get cheaper education than otherwise. As you say, there's very little evidence for this in practice.

That isn't what happens in reality.

It's interesting comparing hospitals with universities, since both are supposedly non-profit but make obscene amounts of money. In the past 15-20 years, both universities and hospitals have increased their administrative staff and the percentage of revenue that goes towards paying administrators, and invest the increased revenue into new fancy buildings and a "better experience", treating their students/patients as customers instead of people who need education/healthcare. Universities have been relying more heavily on adjunct professors, who are paid very little compared to full time professors. The money they make is not being reinvested into education (or better healthcare, in the case of hospitals).

I'm under the impression they are nonprofit, so the money has to go somewhere?

Charity status for public schools is a tax avoidance strategy. They're not really non-profits.

The money goes to the Bursar, the headmaster and various reputational pursuits. I know of a school that was asking alumni to donate to buy heart rate monitors for their gym, and a portable electronic score board - not because they didn't have an electronic score board already, but so that they could take it to away games.

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