(Guest post by Greg Forster)
NRO blogger Jim Geraghty has a good post today about Obama and school choice. But what I particularly want to point out is this, which he notes in passing:
These numbers from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics for the 2003-2004 school year put average tuition paid by private elementary school students at $5,049
It looks to me like the word “these” was supposed to have a link, but there’s no link. I wasn’t aware NCES had collected any private school tuition data since 1999. And that figure looks a whole lot like the figure NCES was reporting back in 1999. Did Geraghty find the tuition number and assume it came from the most recent iteration of the Private School Universe Survey? (Actually the PSS has just released its 2005 data, but we’ll overlook that for the moment.) Or does NCES still collect private school tuition data, and somehow I missed it?
I’m not sure which outcome to root for.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
The 2007 Digest of Education Stats has it. Table 56.
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_056.asp
$ 5,049 for 2003-04 like the man said.
It also gives the 1999 tuition as $3,267
Thanks for the tip! I should have mentioned that I was rushing out on a trip when I posted this, or else I’d have taken the time to poke around first and see what I could find.
I will have to find out where NCES got that datum, and whether it had been previously disclosed, once I’m back in the office and settled.