The topic du jour was: whether we should send our children to public or private school in Sydney.
For context, Sydney could be considered an extreme version of what is seen in other places with respect to private schools. I say extreme because I suspect that there are few other places in the world where the position of your child on the waiting list is inversely proportional to the number of days from when you put them on the waiting list to the day that they were born.
So we talked about the relevant factors, and I believe that we boiled it down to three.
- The Cost (approx $35K/yr)
- The benefits to the child, this can be broken down into;
- Benefits in terms of improved scores at the end of high school
- Benefits in terms of improved social network access
- Benefits in terms of options for the child
- The benefits/cost to the community
There is clearly a tradeoff between cost and the time that you are able to contribute to the school community (not many investment banker-cum-soccer coaches out there). Given money’s fungibility, we must also note that the opportunity cost could be a great many of the things that we talked about in the last LEG. We cannot deny that the benefits of private eduction:
- Students in Catholic +5 and other private schools +11 have higher ATARs than public school children reference this declines somewhat for catholic schools and to +7 for private schools when controlling for selection bias. Full study
What is the conversion rate from ATARs to $?
More data to follow on this topic…