The Price We’ll Pay for Our Children’s Education: Are There Better Options?

A friend of mine is a White, male hedge fund manager. He makes a 7 figure salary and had a beautiful home in one of the most expensive parts of Connecticut.

The city he lives in is home to some of the best private schools in the country. Tuition costs in the area are about $30,000 a year. Still, private school tuition for his 2 children would be well within his budget if he believed it was their best option.

I was surprised to find out a few months ago that my friend and his family were selling their beautiful home and moving to another part of town. When I asked why, he told me it was because they were moving to a district that had better public schools. It also came up in our conversation that he would never spend what’s asked of parents and caregivers to spend on private elementary school education. He pointed out how he and his wife could hire tutors if they felt their children needed ‘more’ than they were getting at the public school at a fraction of the costs.

[Related: How Race Plays Out in Our Financial Lives: Part 1]

I thought about this deeply. My parents worked hard to send me to a good private school.  I’m doing the same with my child. As I take an honest look at the impact education costs have on total financial well-being, however, I can’t help but see the conditioning in myself and many in the Black community that a ‘good’ education is worth a big financial sacrifice. Many people also believe that private and independent schools are the only real option when it comes to a ‘good’ education, and that by sending their kids to expensive schools they are planting the seeds that will bring their children career success and financial well-being.

“African Americans tend to focus on their children’s education when they get money,” says Alfred Edmond Jr., BE’s Senior Vice President and Executive Editor-at-Large.

“It may have been necessary in our cultural history, and to some degree some people say it may still be necessary, but we often neglect our own

retirement savings. That can leave us unable to sustain ourselves in retirement and we become burdens to our children and grandchildren because we haven’t saved. Our good intentions boomerang,” he adds.

In addition, in my 20 plus years as a financial journalist I have seen countless cases where ‘good’ schools as children did not translate into positive financial outcomes in adulthood.   Most of the people I’ve seen create healthy financial lives had someone, at some point in their lives, teach them fiscal responsibility by making choices and setting examples in their own behavior that represented this ideal.

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Here’s some food for thought.  Sun Trust Bank has a program called Lightstream, which provides loans for K-12 education. I crunched the numbers for a $100,000 loan over a 7-year term.

• The loan would cost $1,555.63 to $1,657.02 per month at an annual interest rate of between 7.94% and 9.94% depending on your credit score.

• The same amount would cover about 16 to 30 hours each month in tutoring costs, considering hourly rates between $50 and $100

$100,000 invested in the stock market for 7 years – assuming its historic average annual return of about 8%  – would grow to about $170,650 over a 7-year period. That number grows even more if you take advantage of some of the time horizon, tax, and compounding opportunities that are available for your investment through things like retirement accounts.

No one is underscoring the importance of education, it’s just important to keep it in context in terms of how much of our choices regarding education costs are due to our conditioning; how much are we buying into the notion that a private or independent school is the best option; and how much is it costing us in terms of our overall financial well-being and our ability to pass on generational wealth.

“A child’s success is not based on how much one spends for an education, as long as you find the right environment for your child to thrive in. There are options out there, but you have to be a savvy consumers,” says Wendy Van Amson, ‎co-founder of Independent School Diversity Network.

Van Amson also understands from personal experience that you have to strike the right balance between your beliefs and your budget.

“My mother was a school teacher. There was a big emphasis on education when I was growing up, particularly early childhood education. When we looked at options for our own children and looked around at public schools, we felt it was necessary to invest in a private school education for early childhood. We knew when it was no longer affordable, our children could go to public school and would have a strong foundation because of their elementary education,” she says.

The intended morals of this story are to get you to explore all of your options, and to be honest about the messages you tell yourself that drive your financial decisions. Ask yourself if they are true. If you’re telling yourself that an expensive education is the best education, you may want to think again.

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