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Just on the language piece, Spanish is absolutely and infinitely more useful in the US. Wikipedia says that in the US it’s something like 42 million vs 3.5 million and the Spanish one feels like maybe even an underestimate. I’m not saying Chinese is useless - personally I’d view it as #2 most useful second language? But a 10-fold difference increase in speaking opportunities is pretty stark. Frankly everything after that falls off pretty quickly in usefulness, possibly with the exception of French, where the point of learning is more for its own sake rather than an actual expected ROI of any kind. (They say that a second language eventually can help mental development, after a brief confusion period depending on the age, so language of any kind might still be a mild net benefit even without a lasting return, but the significance of this is debated.)
You may have a point about the Chinese school. It’s not all sunshine and roses though, as noted below, but I’d say directionally it sounds like an idea worth exploring for sure.
I'm okay at Spanish and haven't found it very useful. Whereas I feel like I'm somewhat blind to one of the largest cultural and geopolitical transformations of our time by not being able to understand Chinese.
See my other comment but I'm puzzled that you'd feel Chinese is a bigger cultural transformation when there are more Spanish speakers, as a percentage of the population, than there are Black people in the US. I might be biased from living in the West, though.
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Speaking spanish is the only other language as an American that doesn't correspond with an increase in income, though (I believe this fact is from a freakonomics podcast ten years ago).
It's definitely true that most Spanish-only-speakers have developed coping strategies already, or are bilingual to an acceptable extent, so the returns aren't as starkly defined as with other languages. However, it does expand your ability to vacation in most all of the hemisphere, allows you to be a better "neighbor", and furthermore allows you to communicate somewhat acceptably with those who speak Italian or Portuguese (French to a more limited extent), so there's that extra marginal effect too. I just yesterday had a whole conversation with someone from Brazil, cross-language with him in Portuguese and me in Spanish, and it was pretty effective. So you kind of get 1 + 2 * (1/2) languages for the price of one. On top of that, since the linguistic roots are so similar, learning Spanish also has the effect of boosting English vocabulary (and vice-versa)! It's extremely common for regular-use Spanish words to have less-used English equivalents. As a trivial example, the word for "to chew" in Spanish is "masticar", which you might recognize as related to the more archaic English word "masticate" with an identical meaning. By contrast, Chinese offers practically zero cross-over knowledge in vocabulary, the script itself, and some intonation.
Again Chinese is definitely #2 on that list of most-useful languages, though. It's just hard to argue with the numbers. Most people rarely leave the country, and even if your Spanish is functionally decorative with 80% of all Spanish-speakers, there's still twice as many Spanish-speakers where it would be useful as there are Chinese speakers domestically (for which similar arguments could be made anyways). Sure, there are still 2-3 times as many global speakers of Chinese, but IMO you really need to weight that heavily by exposure chance. An unused language is still vaguely helpful developmentally as I mentioned above, or as a hobby, and might get you some attention from women, but overall it would still be a poor investment to learn a language never used.
Status-wise, there's no doubt Spanish has a lower socioeconomic association, so if you're trying to raise your kid to me a major climber, Chinese might be better if that's your primary goal. However, Spanish is the kinder and more practical option. So it might come down to values/priorities in some sense.
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Surely learning Georgian is unlikely to increase your earning power meaningfully, so the claim must be about correlation, not causation. Most Americans who speak Spanish are Latinos, and Latinos tend to make below-average incomes. Most people who speak other languages are either positively selected immigrants, or natives who were smart and conscientious enough to learn another language as adults. So they tend to make more.
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