School Vouchers Will Just Cause Private Schools to Raise Tuition
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder argues that school voucher programs won't make private schools affordable — they'll just cause tuition to increase.
Key Takeaways
- Vouchers inflate tuition - When families receive vouchers, private schools raise prices to capture the subsidy
- Low-income families still can't afford it - Even with a voucher, private school remains out of reach for most families
- The money flows to schools that don't need it - Voucher programs effectively subsidize families who were already paying tuition
Transcript
School vouchers are getting a lot of attention lately, and there are a lot of proposals now to give parents voucher funds, you know, school vouchers so that they could enroll their kids with public school money, but in private schools.
And this is something that I've been studying since I was an undergraduate.
I remember going to my college library and photocopying articles out of Phi Delta Kappa and looking at the research on school vouchers, an idea that has always been around.
It's kind of a zombie idea.
It's never really caught on, and now it's back.
And I think one of the reasons that this idea has never really caught on is because people realize very quickly If you take the amount of money that every public school gets and give it to parents to take to a private school, private schools are going to behave in a pretty predictable way, right?
Like let's say you run a $15,000 a year private school and $15,000 is what?
public schools get on per, you know, per student basis.
So the voucher could cover the full amount of tuition at your private school.
If that occurs, if people get vouchers, are you going to say, yes, please come to our school and we will take that $15,000 voucher and we'll be square.
We'll be good.
You Would you say our private school tuition is now $30,000 and it's just as affordable as it was before because now everybody has a voucher.
You're still paying us $15,000, but we're getting twice as much.
Which of those would you do if you ran a private school, all else being equal?
I can't see any universe in which private schools keep their tuition the same because it's not like they have...
huge capacity to just take lots and lots more students.
Usually, private schools don't want less money and they don't want more students if it's not going to mean more money.
Yes, more students could transfer to private schools, but the idea that Private schools are going to stop charging parents as much as they can doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Like, where are these private school seats going to come from?
And it all sounds great to people maybe who live in an area where they see a lot of private schools and think, man, I wish my kids went to that school.
But you have to remember that most kids don't have a whole lot of options when it comes to which school they go to.
Does that mean there could be all these new schools popping up?
In a lot of cases, no, because there's just not enough population.
If you live in a rural area, your school is probably already small.
Imagine your school being half the size.
Imagine having to drive twice as far to get your kid to school because the numbers are just not there to create all these new schools.
I get that people want something that will have the appearance of creating social mobility, but I think what would really happen is private school would simply get more expensive.
Let me know what you think.