Private School Demand Dips as New Yorkers Evade Cost, By Janet Frankston Lorin (Bloomberg)

To read this article at the Bloomberg website, click here.

Feb 26, 2010

Darren Foster and Carol Cate with daughter Cait

Anxiety over the recession is trumping the angst of New York City parents to get their children into elite private schools.

Fewer children took entrance exams for private elementary schools, continuing a decline that began last year, as the economy hurt parents’ ability to pay annual tuition of more than $30,000. The number of tests completed by kids applying to prekindergarten to fifth grade declined 4.4 percent, to 4,259, said Antoinette DeLuca, an executive director of the Educational Records Bureau, which administers the exams.

The public schools in the city, the most populous in the U.S., last year had their first increase in enrollment since 2002, mostly in kindergarten, said Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Education. Families that considered sending their children to private schools are turning to the public system partly because the cost of alternatives such as Ethical Culture Fieldston School climbed, said Carol Cate, 45, whose daughter is to begin kindergarten in September.

“I’d always fantasized about her going to Ethical Culture,” said Cate, who produces events for the Food Network, a television channel owned principally by Cincinnati-based Scripps Networks Interactive Inc. “I was hearing that public schools were getting better and private schools were getting so ridiculously expensive. Once we got serious, private schools were off the list.”

$36,000 Kindergarten

Ethical Culture’s kindergarten costs more than $34,000 this year, and the price will be $35,915 for children entering in September, said Ginger Curwen, a school spokeswoman. She declined to comment on applications.

Demand differs from school to school and across grades, and may be up for high school even in places it is down for kindergarten. Applications for the 10 to 15 seats at Trevor Day School in Manhattan increased by 100, to about 250, said Pam Clarke, head of the school.

Frank C. Leana, a private consultant in New York for admissions to high school, college and graduate school, said he has seen a “slight” increase in demand for private high school from the families he advises.

“The economy has put inordinate emphasis on the necessity of an education’s leading to job prospects after college, and rightly or wrongly, people equate a private school education with a stronger likelihood of that,” Leana said in an e-mail.

Changing Districts

A public-school education is free to city residents and funded by taxpayer dollars. Because the Education Department is still taking applications, Zarin-Rosenfeld said he couldn’t give any enrollment projection for the next academic year.

Cate’s daughter didn’t take the exam for private school. Cate and her husband, a cable-TV news producer, moved from an Upper West Side Manhattan apartment where they had resided for more than a decade to a smaller rental about 25 blocks south “to be in a better school district.”

By not paying tuition at a private school, Cate and her husband can afford activities for their daughter that would have put a strain on their budget.

“After school, she can go take swim classes at the Y and Spanish and ballet at this place or karate or cooking, and we’ll have the money to do that,” Cate said.

Public Kindergarten

Another parent, Marcy Drogin, plans to send her son to public kindergarten near her Upper West Side apartment in September. While he could have stayed through eighth grade at the private Rodeph Sholom School, his mother said she can’t afford so many years of nonpublic education. The Rodeph Sholom kindergarten costs $32,230 next year, according to the school’s Web Site.

“The economic crisis has affected so many families, making it difficult, if not impossible, to send their children to private school,” said Drogin, 44, a film producer who has worked with the actor and producer Michael Douglas.

Revenue at her company, Maximum Films & Management, has declined 30 percent in a year because clients have less money to spend, Drogin said. Her savings dropped 50 percent in two years, she said.

PS 87, a school on Manhattan’s West 78th Street, where Drogin wants to enroll her son, is expecting applicants to outnumber the available seats, Zarin-Rosenfeld said. The Education Department is proposing to open a new school — at a location and time still to be determined — that would accommodate Upper West Side students, Zarin-Rosenfeld said.

50 Schools

New York’s public schools fall under the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, also founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

The 50 private schools that go beyond kindergarten in Manhattan each still attract hundreds of applicants vying for a few dozen spots for kindergarten, said George Davison, head of the private Grace Church School, a Lower Manhattan institution founded in 1894.

Private schools began notifying parents of kindergarten decisions on Feb. 19. Families must decide on acceptances by March 2. Of the families that consider independent schools, about 50 percent to 75 percent apply to kindergarten because it is the main entry point at most schools, said Cynthia Bing, head of a committee at the Parents League, a 97-year-old nonprofit organization in Manhattan, that advises parents whose children are applying to prekindergarten programs through high school.

Dropping Plans

In the last two years, more parents have dropped plans to send children to private schools for the first time or to keep the kids there, said Robin Aronow, the owner of School Search NYC, a consultant to New York families applying to schools.

“The biggest difference I’m seeing is that I’m having more people talk about public schools, people who were hoping to go to private school,” Aronow said in an interview. “They can’t afford the tuition anymore.”

Kindergarten applications, usually made when children are 4 years old, fell for the first time in 15 years at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side, Elisabeth Krents, director of admission for K through 12, said in an interview.

Tuition at Dalton — which counts Anderson Cooper, the Cable News Network anchor, among its alumni — is rising 3.5 percent to $35,300 for the 2010-11 school year, Krents said. While the school declined to provide the number of applications, she called the change “an insignificant decrease.”

“This was expected at some point,” Krents said. “You can’t keep increasing at the rate we were increasing. There can’t be that many 4-year-olds.”

Cutting Jobs

While the under-5 population in the borough of Manhattan ballooned 27 percent from 2000 to 2005, it increased only 1.8 percent during the following three years, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Manhattan includes the city’s commercial and financial center, where Wall Street companies, such as Citigroup Inc. cut jobs in the financial crisis and recession.

A total of 67,500 private-sector jobs were lost in New York City last year, including 20,400 in the finance and insurance industries, according to the New York State Labor Department.

“The decline in kindergarten applications reflects both a decline in the demographics and the current economy, which has families of younger children not starting the independent-school route while the economy is down,” Clarke said.

More Aid

More of those who do apply for Trevor want financial aid. This year, 43 percent of applicants to Trevor requested assistance, up from 35 percent to 38 percent in previous years, Clarke said. The school increased its aid budget by $200,000, to $3.2 million, Clarke said.

Applications for Trevor’s kindergarten, which costs $33,000 next year, declined 11 percent to 571 from the record 644 last year and returned to the level of 2005, Clarke said. Trevor interviewed about 400 applicants for about 30 to 35 open seats, as it has done for the last decade, Clarke said.

The ranks of applicants to independent schools — a category that excludes public and parochial institutions –have declined throughout the U.S., by about 1 percent to 9 percent, depending on the region and size of school, said Peter Aitken, president of Benchmark Research, a Boston consultant to more than 100 independent schools.

The private schools still have more applicants than they can accept. Grace Church School received three fewer applications for kindergarten and pre-kindergarten after “consistent increases” over five years, Davison said.

‘Over the Top’

“We’ve seen the flood levels drop slightly, but it’s still over the top,” Davison said in an interview. “It is not growing exponentially anymore, at least for now.”

At St. Hilda’s & St. Hugh’s, a six-decade-old Episcopal school near Columbia University, total applications for admission to pre-kindergarten through grade 8 declined about 5 percent to 10 percent, the first decrease in a decade, said Megan Delaney, a spokeswoman.

The number of students who took the New York City private school admissions test climbed for six years in a row, rising 36 percent during that period, before declining 1.8 percent last year, according to data from the nonprofit Educational Records Bureau, based in Manhattan.

The biggest annual surge in the six-year period was 12 percent two years ago. The latest exams took place from last April through Feb. 25; the period a year earlier contained one extra day.

Competition Surged

In New York, competition for spots in private kindergarten soared as families chose not to move to the suburbs and often elected to have three or four children instead of fewer, said Amanda Uhry, a private consultant who said she charges each client $18,500 for help getting a child into school.

As applications rose, the number of spots to “the most sought-after schools” stayed the same, she said. Schools became as exclusive as top colleges, and parents came to believe that the path to an Ivy League school can begin at age 2, she said. The Ivy League, a group of eight universities in the northeastern U.S., includes Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

“New York defines the concept of where you start is where you finish, from preschool on,” Uhry said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Janet Frankston Lorin in New York jlorin@bloomberg.net.

©2010 BLOOMBERG L.P. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.