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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   4089 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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I want to raise my kids somewhere they'll have intelligent peers, an actually challenging primary school system, and no danger of state abduction if they say the wrong thing to a school therapist.

Yes to all. So my kid is in a carefully selected private school. In the suburbs of a major city. This is a service you could buy today.

How much do you pay for that though? Seems like a humongous cost.

Cheaper than building your own Galt’s Gulch?

If everyone was paying private school tuition rates I think you could actually build a Galt's Gulch for no additional cost.

Possibly.

If true, that raises the question—why is private school so overpriced?

I mean, is it overpriced? Education is just expensive and we don’t see it up front with a public school because the government pays the bill. Indeed, Catholic schools typically cost less than public schools spend.

If existing tuition could fund education plus Galt’s Gulch, but you aren’t getting the latter, then yes, it’s charging too much.

I agree that those public schools are probably also overpriced. Catholics probably aren’t the only ones delivering education at that price point, but I haven’t really looked into it.

IIRC Catholic schools spend the same as charters for better results(how much of that is selection effects is an interesting question- Catholic schools avoid idiocy like the whole word method so it’s probably not 100%). So delivering education for that price point is definitely doable, public schools do a lot of cost disease.

Secular private schools are expensive probably in part because they’re funding things like chefs in the cafeteria and public-school quality athletics complexes. I’m not sure the difference can fund galt’s gulch- I think you can make a private club gated parallel society compound in the middle of nowhere, but it’s going to entail a big drop in standards of living or a wealthy(like billionaire tier) outside backer.

Well, there are all sorts of costs/benefits to moving out to the middle of nowhere. The real price of doing so isn't the cost of building a fence or housing or whatever, it's the price of moving away from any large center of commerce. Transplant a few thousand people directly from NYC to Podunk and even after improving their housing substantially you'll have hundreds of millions of dollars left over to build whatever else needs to be build, including a school.

Other prices, such as tuition, are also inflated by this--teachers need a place to live, after all. Taxes will be lower. Food will be cheaper. Everything will be better except for the one thing that keeps hundreds of millions of people from doing this--economic opportunity.

So yeah, if everyone kept their same incomes and bought in to such a society, I think you could build and run a comparable private school for a fraction of the price, but the "if" is certainly no settled matter.

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