Tuition Datum Mystery Solved!

August 6, 2008

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In this recent post, I noted that a blogger had cited a datum for private school tuition levels in the U.S. in 2003-04, attributing it to NCES. Since I knew that tuition levels aren’t collected in the Private School Universe Survey, and that the most recent datum I’d seen from NCES was from 1999-2000, I wondered whether the blogger had mistakenly used an old datum, or if NCES was putting out new private school tuition data and I missed it.

Turns out it was neither! Well, not really.

I’ve been offline for a few days while moving, and when I got back I discovered a very nice note from Bill Evers at IES. He says NCES does indeed still collect private school tuition data, but in the Schools and Staffing Survey, not the Private School Universe Survey. (You can’t tell your surveys without a scorecard.) It’s collected every four years.

But I don’t have to feel bad about missing it, because the updated data haven’t been incorporated into the NCES web tables yet. If you know exactly where to click, though, you can access it.

Many thanks to the good people at IES for 1) collecting the data we need, which is a huge job that they do very well, and 2) taking a minute to straighten me out on this question. I’ve said some hard things about IES’s recent misadventure publishing that HLM study of private schools, but I hope nobody doubts my respect for their work in all other regards.

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Posted by Greg Forster

Where Did You Get That Marvelous Datum?

July 31, 2008

(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.

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Posted by Greg Forster