Private School: The Sacrifice of Tightening Budgets
One sign that this recession is much more serious than those we've suffered before: Parents are doing the unthinkable and condemning their precious offspring to a free education, thus ruining any chance they might have of growing up to have a decent life. Yes, private school enrollment is declining, since people's straitened finances can no longer accommodate annual tuition fees that can run as high as $30,000.
The Times, ever vigilant in its efforts to empathize with the quote-unquote problems of the upper middle-class in order to provoke testy reaction, has reached out to some representative local parents who are now faced with the prospect of neglecting the "bedrock definition of doing the best by their children."
Lawyer Caroline Hall, for example, can't pay for her 4-year-old to continue at his Upper East Side school, a decision she found "devastating." Another Manhattan mom, a psychologist, too-ed and fro-ed about whether to pay the $35,000 a year to send her "bright, sensitive daughter" to "one of the city's most sought-after schools," before deciding to bite the bullet, even though it means committing "financial suicide." Oh well, at least when this sensitive tween is traumatized from being the poorest one in her class, her mother should be able to get discounted shrink sessions from a colleague.
