Edit previous ^ : @Sue22, We are as rich as we want to think we are, even if we have a big mortgage and finance all of our vehicles and chose to wear the most expensive clothes, on credit, to fit in with the crowd. The majority of us aren’t rich like Donald Trump or William Gates. Most are putting on a show. Their kids are spending too much and saving little while waiting for their inheritance by the people that really worked hard.
As far as the ‘elites’ telling others the best way to do things (like education), the ones who send their kids to private schools but pay taxes for public schools, my answer to that one is simple, take a look at the worst and best performing school districts and chart that against where the ‘elites’ actually have influence over the public schools and school spending, and you will generally see that those places have better schools. Chat the states with the best education systems and the worst (usually Arkansas and Mississippi and other low spending states are at the bottom of the pile in terms of the quality of public education) versus what is spent, and it will be a pretty strong correlation.
@Zinhead points out that spending more money on a failing school district doesn’t necessarily end up with better results, and I totally agree with that, but I was talking about something different, that if you look at the school districts that achieve by and large they spend above a certain level per student, and districts that don’t spend that tend to be behind.There is another aspect to this another poster made,that was a brilliant observation, and that is that with well off districts it isn’t just the direct spending via the budget that is involved, that well off districts have the equivalent of something boosters in poorer districts do for things like football programs, in those districts to get around budgetary limitations (like the ones they tried passing in NJ to try and prevent the growth of property taxes, that came up with a set value/student that represented a ‘good education’, I think it was 7500 bucks, and it was hard to spend above that), and well off districts had people doing things like donating computer labs, buying books, and funding prep programs for the SAT and so forth, to get around these limits, something a poorer district cannot do, it is why where you live matters.
One of the problems is as others have said, that economically we are probably more segregated then we ever have been, some of which is racial discrimination, a lot of which is economic. For example, suburban towns are notorious for zoning plans that require houses to be on relatively large lots (half acre, acre) and restrict any kind of high density housing like rentals or townhouses, and when they have those they will allow them as long as the units rent/sell for above a certain level. NJ requires these units to have a certain percentage of them be below market rate, but often towns get around that by having them rented to senior citizens or the kids of local residents who being young, are likely to meet the income requirements. The problem with this is the obvious, that this locks out modest income families from living in the town and using the schools, so the schools become more and more homogeneous. The town I lived in when I was growing up still had more than their share of working class people, there were still ills in the town, there were kids of truck drivers and people who worked in supermarkets and the like, so there was at least a range from working class to white collar middle class to upper middle class. These days, that isn’t true, there aren’t a lot of blue collar families, the smaller houses that were usually occupied by blue collar families have been torn down and replaced by tract mansions or have been expanded to the point where they are unaffordable to people much below upper middle income status.
I agree with others, it isn’t about guilt, no one should feel guilty about what they have achieved (unless they did it in a morally or ethically questionable way), but on the other hand I would hope people would have an awareness of the things that allowed them to achieve and wanted to find solutions that could help others achieve, far too often when talking about schools (but also about a lot of other things as well), too many people look at those struggling, with bad schools for example, or other ills, and say “well, if I could make it, so can anyone” or give bromides like “all it takes is hard work, if they are floundering it is because they are lazy”, and that is both dead wrong and also very, very blind. It is kind of ironic that many of communities that are now floundering, that are facing economic marginalization and ills like rampant drug use and so forth, a generation or two ago when times were better would look at those struggling in let’s say the inner city, and blame the people there for their fate, now these same people are bitter and angry and what has happened to them and also quite angry when people who are in a better position ‘look down on them’. Maybe one of the reason that the ‘elites’ actually care about those less fortunate is that they understand the old statement “There but the Grace of God go I”, understand what they have that has allowed them to be successful and understand that could go away for them and their kids just as easily.
We’ve been over this before. There’s a weak at best correlation between NAEP scores and per pupil funding at the state level. You have high spending areas like New York, which doesn’t do any better than the national average on 8th grade NAEP math and reading scores, and DC, which despite its high spending, manages to perform worse than the national average. Then, out of the five lowest spending states, three, Idaho, Arizona, and Utah, do just as well, if not better than the national average.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2015/06/02/the-states-that-spend-the-most-and-the-least-on-education-in-one-map/?utm_term=.be4a3771fe11
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2015/#mathematics/state/acl?grade=8
https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading_math_2015/#reading/state/comparisons/NP?grade=8
If the problem is expensive privates and elite public schools get too many slots in elite college admissions, the AOs could address that directly. Harvard could decide to admit no more than two students per high school or cap admissions at some percentage of a high school’s senior class.
@roethlisburger, why would they want to do that? The reason these schools are considered elite (in particular the privates with highly rigorous admissions processes) is because their graduates are better prepared for college than most. It would be like saying that Harvard Medical School should only take 2 kids from Yale and 2 from Princeton no matter how many 4.0 students apply to give other kids a chance.
I’m sure they wouldn’t want to do that, but the original article was about economic mobility between quintiles.
As if often the case on this site, people paint with broad brushes influenced by their own experiences. May not be true across the country. We do not have zip codes that have only high end housing. Pretty much every zip code I can think of has a cross section of housing options from extremely expensive to relatively cheap/affordable. And school spending per kid doesn’t correlate to success of students in the region. Some of the highest spends per kid are some of the worst performing schools in the state. And some of the best school districts in state spend well below the state average (and often times 1/2 what the higher spending/worse performing schools spend). Again, the answer to problems of the country are complicated. No silver bullets or easy solutions.
It would be nice if people acknowledged this in the threads where the OP bemoans a high EFC stating they couldn’t possibly pay it because the cost of living is so high where they live. I think there needs to be an awareness – not guilt – that most of us have it better than somebody. Some of us have it better than a lot of somebodies.
IMHO, the EFC is one thing, how much a college puts in to get a family to the EFC, or 120% of the EFC, or 150% of the EFC, that’s the issue.
I’d love to see, or maybe I missed it, a list of colleges that guarantee 100% of FAFSA EFC is how much the family will pay, excluding books of course.
Please point me to the affordable housing in Portola Valley CA. Or Atherton CA.
@“Cardinal Fang” Please point me to where I said there is affordable housing in every city in the US.
Major segue–on another site I read that someone from India said the most surprising thing about America was that
“all your homeless are fat”. (meant as a compliment actually as to how rich the USA is–and we don’t appreciate it.)
Back to our regularly scheduled program…we should always seek to improve the circumstances of everyone and appreciate that we’ve gotten this far. Long way to go.
Saillakeerie, you said there is affordable housing in every zip code. Please tell me where the affordable housing is in 94024.
I think more to the point @“Cardinal Fang”, is if housing is so unaffordable in Los Altos, where do all your store clerks, baristas, and gas station attendants live? Somewhere near there must be housing where the service people live.
Usually, in threads where people talk about the high cost of living areas it turns out there is lower cost housing close enough to commute to their jobs, but it’s in what they consider unsafe areas or the school districts aren’t to their liking. I live in Downstate NY. There’s very reasonably priced housing to be had here and the commute to the City or CT can be done in 2 hours. I don’t believe the service staff is making enough to live in expensive homes, so there must be lower cost options reasonbly close to that zip code too. Maybe not in it, but within commutable distance.
As a Bay Area resident, I cannot think of one town within a commutable distance of Los Altos that has a cost of living that is affordable for service staff. And I do not consider a 2 hour drive a commutable distance.
“but it’s in what they consider unsafe areas or the school districts aren’t to their liking. I live in Downstate NY. There’s very reasonably priced housing to be had here and the commute to the City or CT can be done in 2 hours.”
Isn’t this what this thread is all about? Unsafe neighborhoods, inferior school districts, 2 hour commutes (time, money, less time with family/parents around for kids) - these are all huge disadvantages that continue to reinforce and propagate the imbalances between SE classes.
Yes, but much of the inequality of opportunity is caused by government size and intervention. Lack of quality school choices, high taxes forcing businesses elsewhere, lack of security, even the high rates of single parent families are all barriers to SE mobility, and all are government related.
When people post about high cost of living areas they are comparing living in a comparable home and neighborhood. Even the cheapest apartments for a single person in not desirable areas are quite pricey. A friend living on disability had to move to a studio while waiting to get off of a waiting list, even in a local city where the schools are not good. In contrast, my son lives in another state and he and his roommate pay the same amount for an entire house.
@“Cardinal Fang” If you look at what I said in context, that isn’t what I said. I used the royal we.
We have choices where we live. Not all areas are high cost areas. There are a lot of places in the US with affordable housing and very good schools.
And no doubt the purpose of the article is to expand the group from which money can be taken to give to others. Why else would you give the average income for the top 20%? With such a large range and knowing its a bell curve, why do that unless you want to make it look like that group has more to give?
But the best states for K-12 education tend (but are not always) the ones that spend the most on education and also have high cost of living - Massachusetts, NJ, NH, Conn. are near the top of both lists. Iowa is an exception as it is near the top of K-12 education, but in the middle in terms of per pupil spending. The states that spend the least, Miss, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Idaho all rank near the bottom of K-12 educational quality. The big exception is Utah, which ranks last in per pupil spending, but in the middle on educational quality (although lower on college readiness).
It is easy to say move somewhere less expensive, but very often the highest concentration of jobs are in areas that have higher cost of living. My friend’s kid is a nurse in a high paying city and there are nurses that fly in for a two-week stint (putting shifts together) and then fly home. They may share a tiny apartment in the work city. The pay vs cost of living make even the plane ride worth it.
But I completely acknowledge that I am lucky, while having worked hard to be able to afford a decent home in a very nice town (but which has gotten much more expensive since we moved in due to the tear-down craze in which very serviceable but small (and thus less expensive homes) are being replaced at an alarming rate by much larger and very expensive homes).