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Comment by yxwvut | Hacker News Reader

What's your solution to stop runaway education costs in this 'voucher first' world? It's not exactly going well in secondary education.

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Private schooling is already on average cheaper than public schools in primary education at the dollars spent per child level.

The reason education costs are screaming out of control in secondary education is because the government isn't responsible for student loans but students are and they have no opportunity to discharge to bankruptcy and there are no normal consumer debt protections for them. It's guaranteed free money for universities without any underwriting process and an albatross on the neck of the middle class.

Tuitions will remain high for as long as they have students desperate or ignorant enough to make poor financial choices.

The sad part is that this continues despite universities largely not meeting society's needs nor the needs of the students.

Private schools are mostly quite bad and worse than typical public schools. A few outliers distort the general picture.

Multiple decades of studies produced by the NAEP directly refute your argument.

I would reference the confirming NAIS studies as well but they've got some self-interest in those results.

I was curious and only found: https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/studies/2006461.a...

the data is very very old (20 years), but they did not find significant differences after adjusting for the schools / students characteristics. Unadjusted scores however do look better for private schools.

They release this very easy to find data every year (although items in the chart may be ~10 years old).

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboa...

Private schools outperform in nearly all subjects.

thanks, but I think that comparison is not fair, if you're throwing all demographics in one bucket. E.g. I'd bet income explains most of those differences. I'm on the fence about public schools in the US as I'm originally from a different country where private schools are a rarity, but I've learned how bad schools can be here. Anecdotally here in NC public schools have a much better reputation than private.

Anecdotally, but the private schools in my large city are miles ahead of the public schools. The difference is so dramatic. I graduated from the same public school system. The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place.

Do you have any evidence private schooling is bad? This is the first time I've heard it's worse than public school.

> The children that went to private schools ended up in a far better place.

Is this a result of the private schooling or does the socioeconomic status of their parents play a significant role?

I attended both and the people that were rich enough to attend private school but were sent to public school anyway still did very well for themselves, not obviously different from those that attended private school.

Could be parenting too, yeah. I don't think it can be discounted the level of violence in public school. Even when I was in school it was closer to a prison than a learning environment. Both in culture, and in construction. I'm sure this had an effect on kids.

The public schools in my city weren't even accredited when I graduated, as the students were not able to achieve the graduation rates and test scores required. This was despite the influx of billions of dollars to modernize the facilities, equipment, and lesson plans. Beyond that they were dangerous from middle school through the end of high school. Private school was really the only option for anybody who had the funds to escape the public school system.

My point is that vouchers distort demand elasticity, just like unchecked student loans, employer-provided health insurance, low mortgage rates, etc distort their respective markets. The fact that costs (not even prices) may be low at present is not an indicator that prices will not balloon in the wake of a voucher system. The private education profiteers are counting on it.

> What's your solution to stop runaway education costs in this 'voucher first' world?

This assumes a lot of facts not in evidence. In general schools that accept vouchers generally operate on much smaller per-student budgets (especially if you include the capital budget -- buildings and facilities) than public schools do. In many voucher states, the public school gets some level of funding for a student even a parent gets a voucher and sends their child somewhere else.

There are no government backed & guaranteed non-defaultable loans in K-12, unlike secondary education.

The funding wouldn't be unlimited. Schools would have to figure out how to deliver services with the funds available. This is not totally different than how many public school systems are funded. My local government sucks $12,000 a year out of my paycheck. About 70% of it funds the pensions of local public school teachers, the remaining 30% pays for the actual schools, with a smidge left over for police and fire department, etc.

They can and do raise my property taxes, but it's much harder than colleges simply demanding higher and higher tuitions.

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