About His Deposit ...

This from the New York Times, illustration by Peter M. Fisher:

CAROLINE HALL was supposed to sign the contract a month ago guaranteeing a kindergarten spot for her son at an Upper East Side private school. He had already spent two happy years attending its early-childhood program.

But Ms. Hall, a corporate counsel, began ducking the school’s calls. Where was her deposit toward the $22,000 tuition? The school had an eager waiting list.

Her son, 4, knew the answer: “I can’t go here next year because Mommy didn’t get a big enough bonus.”

An annual rite is well under way, as families around the country receive their private-school renewal contracts or acceptance letters. In conventional years, grumbling over tuition aside, their outgoing mail would include signed forms and a registration fee.

This year’s hand-wringing over tuition might be dismissed as the latest hardship for the patrician class, which, like everyone else, can simply educate its young in the public system. But of the more than three million families with at least one child in private school, according to the 2005 census, almost two million of them have a household income of less than $100,000. According to a Department of Education survey, in 2003-4, the median annual tuition of nonsectarian schools was $8,200; for Catholic schools, $3,000.

So for every family that pays $30,000 and up to attend elite schools in Manhattan, thousands more will pay tuitions closer to $2,700 — next year’s cost for St. Agnes Catholic School in Roeland Park, Kan....

Tuition time

This from Nancy at C-J's Learning Curve:

Tuition -- and how much they will rise at public postsecondary institutions next fall -- will be the subject of a special meeting of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education on Monday.

The council will not make any decisions at the meeting, which begins at 1:30 p.m. at the council's offices in Frankfort. Instead, the meeting will serve as a primer on institutional budgeting and tuition setting criteria.

It is expected the council will set ceilings for how high institution will be allowed to raise tuition for the coming academic year. The council is expected to vote on tuition parameters in March...

A School That Cost $20,000 Not to Go To

About six weeks ago, Michele Bender, a freelance writer who lives in SoHo, took out her checkbook. She wrote a $10,000 check for the balance of what she owed a desirable West Village private school, the Little Red School House, bringing the total she had paid to $20,000. She put it in the mail. Then she called her husband and cried.

Many New York parents paying private school tuition probably feel some pain when it comes time to pay the bill. But for Ms. Bender and her husband, David, an artist, it really hurt — they were paying for a school their daughter will never attend.

It seems quintessentially New York that someone whose daughter landed so many options could still end up thoroughly miserable. In February 2007, their daughter was given a coveted spot in the kindergarten at Little Red.

More than three months later, in June, they learned their daughter had also been accepted into one of three gifted and talented schools available citywide, the equivalent of a Stuyvesant or Bronx Science for elementary-school children.

They had fallen in love with Little Red, but “for us, the financial aspect is huge,” Mr. Bender said, and they knew the public school was stellar. After agonizing for a few weeks, Mr. Bender called Little Red officials in early July to tell them their decision.

He knew they would lose their $2,500 deposit; he even feared they would have to fight to get back the other $7,500 they had already put down. (That’s crazy talk, his friends told him.)

But he was shocked when a school official immediately informed him the school would hold him accountable for all of it — the whole tuition, a commitment he had made when he signed the contract back in February...

This from the New York Times.