How Much Would You Pay For Pre-School?
Being a parent is an important job that many of us take very seriously and why shouldn’t we? After all they are our pride and joy and we want to do everything to keep them safe and to make sure that they get the best education we can give them, but how far will we go? Would you be willing to pay $30,440 to send them to pre-school?
That is the price of admission to the preschool program at New York’s Ethical Culture Fieldston School. Other private schools in big American cities aren’t much better. Bank Street, also in New York, will set you back $27,450; pre-K at Washington’s Sidwell Friends runs $26,790. Compared to that, The Center for Early Education in Los Angeles, with its $15,400 tuition, seems like a bargain. Sometimes the amount that one pays for these pre-schools is high because they are connected to with their own elementary schools also. More often than not you’ll find that the pre-schools by themselves will have a much lower cost for tuition.
But it is no surprise to us that tuitions have been rising at an 8% clip across the board, according to some experts. That’s more than the annual tuition increase at Ivy League colleges. But there is something to be said for the hefty premiums, according to Victoria Goldman, author of preschool guidebooks for New York and Los Angeles and mom of two New York private school kids. “You get what you pay for,” she says. Even if that means they are only playing with blocks and painting all day?
She is talking more about the facilities. The elite Episcopal School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, for example, which costs $14,500 a year, is housed in an elegant seven-story townhouse. Seven years ago, Boston’s nearly 100-year-old Tenacre School (pre-K tuition is $16,000-plus) built a new gymnasium, library and multimedia center. But paying the tuition is easy compared with getting in. Entrance to an exclusive private preschool is a painful right of passage for thousands of upscale New York moms every year, kicking off with a mad rush of speed dialing early in the morning the day after Labor Day to secure applications before schools run out of them. Not to mention you have to either meet with board personally or write an essay for them.
Many moms wonder though why they should pay so much for just a few hours of ‘baby-sitting’ It seems that the lure for many is the program itself. At the 92nd Street Y, a school that gained a fair amount of notoriety for its role in the Wall Street research scandal a few years back, kids are engaged in an archeology “dig” and sculpture projects. At other schools they are taught computer skills, foreign languages, drama, music, and even science.
It might seem a little over kill for just 4 year olds, but most parents are coming to the point where they want their children to get a head start so that they do not fall behind in the coming years. I suppose that it could be a good thing for some children, but the question still stands, would you really pay $30,000 for it?