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Comment by _9za9 | Hacker News Reader

$50,000 a year high school tuition can make anyone exceptionally talented

Pasadena High School, where Matteo went to school, is public.

Not all high school educations are created equal - See Carmel High School (Carmel, IN), New Trier High School (Winnetka, IL), or any other High School in a densely high wealth area.

Pasadena school district spends $28K / student for their total $390M expenditures across ~14k students in 2023-2024 school year. I would bet dollars to doughnuts it's $30k+ per high school student since they are more expensive.

While Pasadena is a relatively wealthy city, historically there has been significant avoidance of its public schools by affluent residents: https://southerneducation.org/in-the-news/new-polling-data-f...

The data says this is not true. Quality of education has almost no effect on lifetime income outcomes when you control for initial test scores.

Do you have a source on this? That’s really interesting if true.

Sure. There are many studies but here is one.

Will Dobbie & Roland Fryer (NBER)

This study uses regression-discontinuity around exam cutoffs at Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant. It finds increased rigor of coursework but little impact on SAT scores, college enrollment, or college graduation, which are key predictors of lifetime earnings (and typically closely linked to earnings outcomes).

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17286/w172...

The schools studied in that paper are free, or close to free. Not $50,000 per anum And I don't think OP was suggesting it's the quality of education that affects outcomes in attendees of expensive private high schools.

There are very similar studies for private schools, can't find this second

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