Circling the Wagons

A few months ago I asked readers to help me by giving me any tuition figures that they knew for specific yeshivas. I was hoping to be able to compare yeshiva costs across a wide number of different yeshivas. I'm throwing my hands in the air on this project and crying uncle. Trying to find out precisely what tuition costs is an exercise in frustration.

For one thing, some yeshivas won't tell you over the phone; they will only discuss the particulars with prospective parents who come to the school offices. For another, a lot of those tuition amounts don't come as rounded figures. A few schools will list "base tuition," but that base tuition gets a lot higher when they start adding on other charges that aren't optional, such as lunch program costs, book costs etc.. Then there is this: I asked a few parents who I knew had children in a particular yeshiva what the tuition cost was. Their answers were different, and yet both believed themselves to be paying full tuition for the same number of children.

I have a friend who is a yeshiva principal so I called to ask what yeshiva tuition was for her school. Her answer? "For whom?" I pushed a little, trying to pin down at least a minimum working amount. No luck. "We look at the individual family" was the basic answer.

An ex-co-worker's husband is an administrator at a yeshiva. I'm stubborn so I called him and asked if he would give me what the target figure was for full tuition. Again, I got one of those answers that is not an answer. Basically he told me it's around $9-14K, depending on the base services to be included and the grade of the student. Huh? He had a little pity on me and said that the formula is not a simple one and takes into consideration a lot of factors, such as how many children in the family, how many in the school, what grades the children are in, what extra educational services are required by a particular child. They also deal with student-based expenses and school-based expenses when figuring out tuition. Also, they look at income and fixed expenses, they look at homes and cars, they check tax returns. And when pushed he admitted that "familial input from other sources" is also figured into the equation--you know, grandparents.

One school that I called asked me why I was interested in the tuition figures. I told the truth--I was looking to write an article about yeshiva tuition. They hung up on me before I could finish my sentence.

So here's the thing, trying to get information directly from the schools only results in their circling the wagons to keep anyone from knowing what is really going on. Parents don't seem to be a good source of information because many of them don't really know if the tuition they are paying is the same as other parents in their school are paying. And there is also this: tuition, or at least the bottom line for parents, includes within it a lot of charges that aren't precisely tuition-related but are school related, such as the charge for lice checks and mandated health record keeping.

So no, I couldn't gather sufficient information nor accurate enough information to be able to report anything of worth to my readers. But this exercise in futility did raise some questions for me. Why, of all things, should tuition be 1)so complex and complicated and 2) such a secret? And once again it comes down to accountability. Just who are the yeshivas accountable to? Who looks at the monies expended and the monies collected and says yea or nay?

Just an interesting side note: One yeshiva I contacted I asked what the salaries were for the limudei kodesh teachers and the secular studies teachers (this was an elementary school). Basically I was told that unless I'm applying for a job, and then only when I'm actually sitting with them interviewing, the figures were none of my business.