Well, to a certain extent. Assuming most of the families that can afford an elite college education may not able to also afford expensive private high/middle/elementary school, I know people who would feel that only graduate/professional school is worth investing that amount of money while some others value undergraduate education more as they believe the kids are of a particularly impressionable age at this stage and their experience in college will go with them for the rest of their lives and have a long lasting impact. Still others believe that a high quality K-12 education and the solid foundation built up out of it trump a top college that costs a lot. So the financial situation is one piece of the story and the belief or value a family holds is another. </p>
<p>I don’t understand the shock value of this thread. The title is misleading in that the cost is not to get your kid inot an Ivy. Horace Mann and such schools will out and out tell you that is not their mission. It’s simply to give their students the best possible educational and growing up environment a school can. For some kids, going there would reduce their chances of getting into the most selective schools. That these schools, exist, is no big shock, or should not be. You should get a load of what people spend on housing, cars, entertainment, travel, at least those who have a lot of money. Makes the cost of Horace man look small in comparison.</p>
<p>I was raised in NYC - poor by any measure yet with subsidized housing and grad school parent - and did public school through 6th grade (when I took the Hunter test, not sure why that isn’t listed as one of the magnets). Didn’t get in (I actually fainted during that test, I was so nervous) so continued in public school through 8th grade when I applied to/tested/auditioned/interviewed to 10 schools and was accepted to almost all including several mentioned in the article. The privates that accepted me gave me very generous financial aid and I chose one of those. </p>
<p>NYC is a weird place to deal with school as no one goes to “regular” public school if they can possibly avoid doing so. It’s not just about getting into college, it’s about getting into a good school K-12 too.</p>
<p>My app process in 8th grade was more than my D will do for college. I totally get the concept of avoiding all the lower-middle-upper school admissions rigamarole if you can afford to do it. Of course, this is a city where a monthly parking spot in a garage can cost almost what HM is charging for tuition…car in garage vs guaranteed education for one kid? Maybe sell the car.</p>
<p>^^^^
And not all high school’s are created equal Miami. Try telling a kid at Andover that getting straight A’s in high school is easy if you “just do the homework.”</p>
<p>Boy Miami, with your brain, what the heck are you doing on CC?
Shouldn’t you be out solving world crises?
We need you!</p>
<p>Both kids attended co-op preschools, but that isn’t practical for many because not only was it for only a couple hours, three or four days a week, so not more than 10-18 hrs, but one of those days, the parent was in the classroom. </p>
<p>Then they both went on to private kindergarten as public school wasn’t appropriate, unfortunately.
As a blue collar family, we were underrepresented in that milieu, and so financial aid was quite generous.
Both their schools were very casual and low key relatively, so it was a little surprising when scions of the Bezos & Gates families et al., enrolled.</p>
<p>I do think that part of the steep tuition is so they can attract teachers who can afford to stay for a while.
They deserve much more than minimum wage, but with a class size of 10 or so, and specialists like dance, art and music, not to mention everything else, costs add up fast.</p>
<p>Agreed Benley that family values plays a role. But if a family does not have the disposable income then it really doesn’t matter because there isn’t the “choice.” And if the family has some disposable income to pay for a segment of what they deem “quality” education, then the choice is what segment they choose to underwrite. But the constant is still disposable income.</p>
<p>Yes, this confuses me as well. I never understand people who complain about the (city, state, country) they live in and don’t make any effort to leave. </p>
<p>Well, well, that seems to ignore the sizeable number of people who do vote with their feet … when they are capable to do so. It is not hard to see what happened to urban schools after parents started to look for suburban Shangri-Las. Throw in the other folks who have the means to stay closer the city centers but pay for private tuition or try their hands at homeschooling, and you have a pretty good number of people who ARE entitled to complain about having to make expensive or taxing choices. </p>
<p>Fwiw, it is not because one fails to present a cogent argument in perfect English that they are totally wrong! Some people just express their thoughts as fast at the keyboard allows. </p>
<p>In the meantime, the beauty of a free society is that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, and even to a stack of erroneous ones. And some just do not like to have to hear or read opinions that diverge from the silent majority. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Some are trying to make it better! And face the biggest hurdle: convincing the patient that it is really sick! </p>
<p>Its not hard to figure out the calculus. Part of it is how many kids you have and how far apart in age. Another part is their admittability to suitable private schools in the city. And the other part of it is your income and commuting/travel schedule. If you are able to move to a suburb with decent schools like Short Hills or Bronxville, you are looking at an out-of-pocket savings of nearly 40K per kid…annually. This gets people’s attention, as this thread shows. </p>
<p>My best friend is currently going through the process and Horace Mann is on his list. The family is diverse, so their process is a little different than others I have been aware of. People not from NYC often find it hard to understand how utterly sadistic the high school application process is here, so they may not get the lengths to which families who can afford to will go to avoid it. There is also the issue of peer group. If you live in an area where kids go to these schools, your child can be isolated if she doesn’t.</p>
<p>It can be a very brutal process in NY but a chunk of the private school kids go off to boarding school for high school. And that broadens the field as there are so many to choose from. The BS’s seem to love the NYC kids so the process can be tempered somewhat if you take that route. </p>
<p>A couple years ago we thought we were moving back to NY and thought St. Ann’s would have been perfect for one of our children. I must say that they are quite a different breed and the application process was amazingly stress free and straight forward. At the end of the day we moved out West so we never got to experience high school NY style.</p>
<p>A substantial number of private school kids in NYC go to public high schools. We have 2 friends who tried out test-in schools (Bronx Science and Stuyvesant) and went back to their private schools within a month or two. It’s not for the faint-of-heart to go from classes with 10-15 kids to classes to classes with 34 kids (maximum allowed by the teachers’ union contract for high school in NYC).</p>
<p>And a substantial number of public school kids lose in the bizarro, byzantine, totally arbitrary contest known as NYC public high school admissions and go to private schools. There is quite a bit of turnover at that level, especially at the private schools that are just below the tippy-top level of Horace Mann.</p>
<p>Are we seeing this in most large, diverse cities? LA, SF, Chicago, Boston, DC, as well as NYC? The HS process it hell. Might as well get on the “right” (appropriate, etc.) train in K (pre-K, nursery)? Or, head to education-rich, but equal access, select burbs. </p>
<p>When we lived in NYC we wanted our kids to go to United Nation International School (UNIS), so we chose the pre-school which was the feeder school for UNIS. We decided to head out to suburb to have our kids go to the local public school and they ended up at a private school because the public school was no comparison to UNIS when it came to diversity.</p>