I wrote this quite a while ago but never published it. My thoughts have evolved a little further, but this is still a pretty good reflection of how they ‘ve changed over time. At the moment, none of my children are currently in private education, but it’s likely that at least one of them will go to a private high school, with the other in a special character school and/or homeschooling arrangement.

I wrote about private education a few times on my old blog.

Most explicitly, I wrote about how I money in 2019 and said:

“It is extremely unlikely that we will pay for private primary or secondary education for our children. For one thing, we’re zoned for very good public schools. For another, it’s insanely expensive …. We won’t rule it out, but our preference is to go public.”

(In 2022 I wrote an updated article how how I money and didn’t refer to private education.)

In 2018, I described the decision to put a child into a private school as a $500,000 decision.

In 2020, I shared a worked example to show the cost of private education:

Every single time I run through [the exercise of “flawcasting” and factor in private secondary education, the cost of private education stuns me.

As an example, if we make one set of assumptions to map out John and Jane ’s financial trajectory it might look as follows:

(The horizontal axis on the chart relates to Jane ’s age from 39 to 100, and the vertical axis relates to the value of John and Jane’s financial assets (excluding their home and stuff) in today’s dollars.)

The assumptions above assume that John and Jane provided assistance of $20,000 per year to each of their three children for four years once they are 18 (ie, ages 18, 19, 20, and 21), presumably to assist with education.

If, instead, I assume that John and Jane want to provide $20,000 per year for each of their children for nine years once they turn 13 (ie, between ages 13 and 21 inclusive), to also cover private secondary education, their financial trajectory looks like this:

Whoa!

Of course, other variables would also change. In the second scenario, John and Jane would probably reduce their spending. One of them might work, or work longer hours to help fund education. They might retire later. They might accept a lower cost of living during their twilight years. They provide provide less one-off support to their children once they get older.

But still!

Private education may be expensive.

That ‘s not the say the choice is a bad one. It might still be the right decision for John and Jane and their children.

One way of thinking about it: it’s like putting your life into hard mode , financially.

Looking back on what I’ve written, I’m surprised. I thought I would be more anti-private education. It feels like that was my view. And speaking with some readers of this blog, they had that impression.

What I haven’t mentioned was:

  • I went through public education (in a decile 2 high school) and ended up okay.

  • My wife went to a public school and ended up more than okay. (Truth be told, she went private for intermediate, but didn’t think it was worth the money for her parents, and went to a public high school. Admittedly, it was a school people pay elevated property prices in order to be in the school zone.)

  • I’ve been sceptical about the benefit of private education. For instance, in my how I money in 2019, I added:

“(And don’t get me started on the fact that many of the most ‘prestigious’ private schools get most of their great grades from students who are buy-ins/scholarship students, rather than students who would otherwise attend that school.)”

Every few years there are also news articles with messages like these:

“Research from the OECD ‘s programme for international student assessment (PISA) suggests that private schools perform better academically than public schools as a whole, but not better than public schools with student populations from similar socio-economic backgrounds.” (The Herald, 2016 )

  • Finally, there is something about private versus public school that offends me. Basically, I’m a bit of a Rawlsian and I’m heavily invested in the concept of equality of opportunity.

(Note that equality of opportunity is NOT equality of outcome, which I think is an unrealistic goal and not even desirable, for reasons I won’t get into here. There’s room for good faith debate about what level of equality is “appropriate” or “good”, but that’s another discussion.)

I was pretty committed to the idea that private education wasn’t actually that beneficial or socially good, and it was simply a good way of separating social x-rays and well-intentioned-but-busy-and-monied people from their wealth.

HOWEVER. For a variety of reasons, my wife and I have started to consider private school for our children. And I can feel the cognitive dissonance. I can feel arguments (or rationalisations?) building up, and other arguments (rationalisations?) breaking down.

For example:

  • I like living in a society where options are available for lots of other people. There are lots of products that are on the market that I don’t like – but I like that they’re available. Like life tracker funds. Or drinking glasses that are made of really thin glass. (If you collected any glasses from New World recently, you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

My recent experience is that sometimes you need to consider a wider range of choices for where your children are going to spend a huge portion of their time (and childhood). If you restrict options (for example, by zoning), you severely limit their options.

  • One practical challenge that threatens my commitment to the concept of equality of opportunity is a simple fact: that people work really hard to help their children. True equality of opportunity would require you to bite the bullet that parents can’t, or shouldn’t, try to help their children out to get better life outcomes. In truth, for many people, providing for their children is a motivating factor behind a lot of what they do. It removes an important incentive for people to work hard to create value for the world.

  • I don’t like kneecapping people, and stopping them from reaching their potential. If I can help my children go further and faster, why should I stop them? By providing them with the benefits I can, I’m not disadvantaging anyone – at least, in absolute terms.

Admittedly, it’s a little more complex than that. Arguably, providing advantages to one group is likely to provide that group with relative advantages. However, this isn’t being done by reducing the total amount of human capital that is in existence – ie, kneecapping children who have less opportunities. The net effect is that the total amount of human capital is (or may be) greater.

(Arguably, it’s a little more complicated than that. If private school didn’t exist, then it’s quite possible that more resources would be available to all, and this would be distributed more “equitably”. In this counterfactual world, the aggregate amount of human capital is higher. Unfortunately, we in something of a prisoner’s dilemma situation, where this isn’t going to happen so the best we can do is try to pick the “optimal” solution from a range of “sub-optimal” options.)

  • There are some children who simply don’t thrive in a normal school environment. I have a child on the autism spectrum and one with dyslexia. In each case, these weren’t identified at school and – in my view – haven’t been addressed particularly well since the issues were identified. The current schooling model (particularly modern learning environments) just doesn’t seem like a good “fit” with my children. They will benefit from smaller classes and environments where more resources are likely to be marshalled for these forms of neurodiversity.

  • Over the past few years I’ve become a lot more passionate about the value of human capital. In the most recent iteration of How I money, I said:

“Our most valuable assets aren’t on our balance sheets. It’s our human capital. The question is whether and to what extent we translate our human capital into income and other forms of capital as time goes on.”

The same is true of my children.

  • Sometimes, people end up okay, but the journey is harder than for others. Would I have gone further and faster with a higher quality education? If I’m honest with myself, the answer is probably yes.

  • I might have been overly credulous regarding the impact of private education. I’ve read quite a few news articles over the years that have suggested that students of private schools tend to have better learning outcomes (not just in primary or secondary school, but in tertiary education) than students of public schools. However, the gap narrows between outcomes once you adjust for factors such as educational levels and socioeconomic characteristics of the child ’s parents and guardians.

Basically, my assumption has been that the major impact on educational outcomes has less to do than the actual school a child attends, and more to do with the household they are raised in.

Typing this, it strikes me that this is a fairly significant assumption driven only by reading a few paragraphs in newspaper articles over the years. It’s an assumption that needs interrogation.

Re-reading several of these articles, one thing that strikes me is that most articles on this topic don’t strike me as being the types of articles that have been painstakingly researched and fact-checked according to the journalistic ideal. Many of them read like articles that have been written to meet a deadline (and in more recent years, to get clicks by appealing to the biases and prejudices of the general audience).

When I try to read the research in New Zealand and beyond, I find it hard to have a strong opinion. A lot of research is international in nature. Research relating to New Zealand isn’t particularly new. The sample sizes aren’t particularly strong. And to the extent they might be a good representation of the data, they are likely to say more about previous learning regimes than the current one.

I still think that the household plays an important role, but I am less confident of this conclusion, and my priors have adjusted so that I think there is a good chance that private education will result in better outcomes, and potentially significantly better, even after adjusting for educational levels and socioeconomic factors.

The risk of regret

This is a regret minimisation framework.

What will I regret more:

  • Putting my children into private education and thinking they would have ended up just fine if I’d kept them in the public system, and coming to terms with the fact that we are less financially well-off than we would have been, and less able to help our children in other ways during their adult lives; or

  • Keeping our children in the public system, feeling more comfortable financial and able to help our children, but having a sense that we maybe coulda-shoulda-woulda given them more assistance during their early schooling?

It’s still a personal decision

I think the “fit” between a student and school is essential. There is no single “best” school in the world – what is “best” will depend on the student in question, including their affinity with certain teachers and the good (or bad) fortune of the peers who are in their classes.

But whereas I had previously written off private education, I am opening up to this.

If I make this decision, am I increasing the level of financial difficulty in my life? Yes. I’m going from something resembling “easy” mode to “harder” mode.

But it might put the lives of my children into “easier” mode. In which case, it’s not an expense but an investment.