The Costs of American Education

From Edspresso comes this article by Dan Lips who explores what the cost of American education is. On the one hand:

How much does K-12 public education in America cost? One way to answer that is to look at direct taxpayer expenditures on education. In July, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that the average per-student expenditure in public schools was $8,310 in the 2003-04 school year. State's per-student expenditures ranged from a high of $13,338 in New Jersey to a low of $4,991 in Utah.

Altogether, spending on all elementary and secondary education topped more than $500 billion in 2003-04, or about 4.7 percent of the entire economy as measured by GDP. The U.S. spends more on K-12 education than the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, or Sweden spends on everything.

Based on the most recent per-pupil expenditure figures, the average student enrolled in public school for the next 12 years can expect to have about $100,000 spent on his or her education.

Half a trillion dollars, and decidedly mixed results. But Lips points to another, even more drastic concern--remediation--that is the expenses and lost productivity incurred by businesses and colleges and universities on teaching their workers and students that which is expected to be taught in elementary and high school.

Another growing cost of our failing public education system is remediation, which is the burden that other institutions like colleges and businesses shoulder to help people develop the basic skills they should have learned in primary or secondary school. The Department of Education reported that 100 percent of all community colleges and 81 percent of four-year colleges offer remediation. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy estimates that remediation costs colleges and business in just the state of Michigan approximately $600 million per year. If the other 49 states and the District of Columbia are anything like Michigan, the country spends tens of billions of dollars each year making up for public schools' shortcomings.

To do the math on that score alone, we are looking at $30.6 billion dollars spent on remediation, on a conservative estimate.

Education today, as it has been for a number of years, is a black hole for money. Even now, despite decades of effort, we are just now coming to the realization that money doesn't buy everything--and it particuarly doesn't buy an education.