What price education?

What does it cost to send your kids to private school vs. public school? In Hawaii, the difference can be substantial. No, it is substantial. Is there a corresponding difference in the education a private school student receives vs. a public school student?

Assuming day-to-day food and clothing costs for students are about the same, tuition at Punahou School will be almost $17,000 per student for 2008-2009. That’s about $1,400 a month, which means a parent must earn an additional $24,000 or so each year just to pay for the child’s tuition.

By the way, $17,000 does not cover all the costs. Parents must ante up for other optional fees and a few other mandatory fees not included in the tuition. Matson calls that a surcharge. Punahou calls it a privilege.
A good education at Punahou is so expensive that the tuition and mandatory fees still do not cover the school’s entire cost to educate a student. Punahou School says the deficit is covered by the school’s endowment, which appears to be money collected by the school from graduates and donors and parents of graduates as some kind of surcharge on a surcharge.

All that money exchanging hands brings up a couple of questions.

The first is, what is it about Punahou School’s education process and methodology that makes it cost so much more to educate a student than it does in public schools? After all, Hawaii’s DOE manages to educate (I’m stretching this to make a point) students in public schools using about 10-percent of what it costs to educate a student a Punahou School.

The second is, are Punahou’s students 10 times better, smarter, more well educated than public school students? On average, do they earn 10 times as much money?

What price education?