Stats

Parents of kids in Australia’s leading private schools now spend an average of $800k per student over the term of their incarceration, buying something they can get elsewhere for free, without bothering to check whether they are getting any value for the outlay.

If everyone is doing it, and it’s very expensive, then it’s gotta work. That’s the sort of critical thinking that results from an expensive education. You end up owning an electric car too.

The evidence suggests that the expensive schools add remarkably little to the kids’ eventual outcomes, even when measured prosaically by money and social status.

The problem is that they can’t all simultaneously buy social advantage for their kids. Unless they really don’t understand statistics; there’s that private school maths problem again.

Australia is a rent-seeking haven. Household wealth and business profitability depends on exploiting lazy capital, controlling scarce assets, regulatory privileges and access to government expenditure.

Private schooling fits this rent seeking pattern perfectly. And yet it still doesn’t make any sense, in any context.