It’s one thing to be rich in New York City these days. It’s quite another to be able to afford private school.
The city’s top independent schools now charge around $65,000 a year and, increasingly, offer partial financial aid to parents who are among the highest earners in the country — but still make many millions of dollars less than the richest families in their communities.
This divide between the haves and have-mores helps tell the story of a city turned so upside down by rising prices that even the very upper end of the middle class is feeling squeezed.
Private schools are seen by many families as a crucial ladder to top colleges and social connections. New York City private schools have turned out some of the most influential people in America, including Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken; Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive; and several generations of Rockefellers and Kennedys.
“When these kids graduate from college, they will go to their friends’ parents for jobs,” said Dana Haddad, a former admissions director who now consults with parents hoping to get their children into private schools. “You can’t put a price on that.”
But if you had to, the schools’ financial aid calculators might be a good place to start.
Léman Manhattan Preparatory School’s tuition chart shows that families making up to $600,000 might qualify for at least some help if they had two children enrolled. Families earning up to $800,000 might also get aid if they had three children enrolled. Léman, in the Financial District, charges $67,300 a year for most grades.
“One of the common misperceptions about financial aid at independent schools is that it is only for families who need the most significant amounts of aid,” said Paige Murphy, a school spokeswoman. She added that the school publishes its tuition chart “to provide families with transparency into the financial aid process, which has long been shrouded in mystery at most schools.”
The Dalton School, on the Upper East Side, notes on its website that families earning $400,000 with “a low to moderate level of personal assets” and two children enrolled might pay just over half of the school’s $64,300 tuition and receive the rest in aid. Representatives for Dalton did not reply to a request for comment.
The average household income of families who applied for tuition assistance at Chapin, where tuition is $65,300, was $229,400.
Xiomara Hall, the associate head of school of Chapin, a girls’ school on the Upper East Side, said that number “reflects the fact that New York is one of the most expensive cities in the country.” A family making that much money would be in the top 6 percent of earners citywide, according to data compiled by the Independent Budget Office.
Financial aid officers and experts emphasized that high-earning families receiving financial aid should not be seen as trying to game the system. It has become legitimately difficult for parents to pay full tuition, at least for more than one child, without earning close to a seven-figure household income — or turning to their own parents for help, which consultants said was an increasingly common practice.
The biggest reason private school is so expensive is a feature that attracts parents to them in the first place: lots of staff.
“People love that the schools are small, the teachers are really good, and that their children are going to be known when they come to this school,” said Mark Mitchell, the vice president of access and affordability at the National Association of Independent Schools. “But in order to achieve that, especially in a city like New York, it drives cost.”
Beyond the lower student-to-teacher ratios, the schools also hire additional instructors for niche extracurricular activities, like woodworking, ceramics and playwriting.
But private schools also have more discretionary expenses.
Saint Ann’s School, in Brooklyn Heights, recently launched a $30 million fund-raising drive to offset the cost of buying and renovating a building down the street. The all-boys Browning School, on the Upper East Side, is planning to spend about $50 million to move its upper school grades into a nearby building, according to a school spokeswoman.
Executive compensation at the schools has also ballooned in recent years.
Thomas Kelly, the head of school at Horace Mann in the Bronx, earned a salary of just under $1.6 million in 2023, more than double what he was paid in 2014. Mr. Kelly, who also teaches at the school, took home nearly $1.9 million total, according to the school’s most recent tax filings.
By contrast, the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, the nation’s largest school system with some 1,600 schools, makes $414,799 and is the highest-paid city employee.
The cost of sustaining an elite private school has become untenable, said Emily Glickman, a private school consultant.
The Manhattan Country School, on the Upper West Side, charges a maximum tuition of $57,000 on a sliding-scale model. The school is $2.9 million in debt, according to a lawsuit, and facing foreclosure. It is hoping to stay open by selling its building for nearly $40 million.
The school’s “longstanding, radical commitment to socioeconomic diversity creates financial challenges,” its board chair wrote in a recent email to parents.
Ms. Glickman said she believed schools might eventually charge as much as $100,000 a year. She recalled that private schools generally charged $20,000 when she started as a consultant in 1999, and it was headline news when schools neared a $40,000 tuition in 2012.
She added that she expected a “collapse” in the number of middle-class students attending private schools, and believed that “there will be fewer private schools that survive in today’s marketplace.”
Though the share of city children attending private and parochial schools has remained steady over the last decade, at about 18 percent, according to the Independent Budget Office, upper-income parents, in particular, have more high-quality public school choices than ever. There are the elementary schools so popular that they have wait lists for kindergarten, and a new crop of intentionally diverse charter schools in wealthy Brooklyn neighborhoods.
But, at least for now, many affluent parents are still opting for private school.
The Brearley School, an all-girls school on the Upper East Side, offered a look at how it might consider an aid application from a hypothetical family of four with nearly $300,000 in income and one child in private school.
First the school would review the family’s income, retirement accounts, taxes and medical expenses, debts and assets. It would then set aside a portion of the family’s discretionary income for necessities, all while considering New York’s especially high cost of living.
The school estimated that this family would have $48,000 of discretionary income, and it would ask that it contribute $17,000 of Brearley’s $64,100 annual tuition.
Jane Foley Fried, Brearley’s head of school, said it was seeing more and more families like this one. About 75 percent of parents receiving aid from the school make more than $100,000 a year, she added.
In August, the school announced a campaign to inform families earning $100,000 or less that if their daughters got into Brearley, they would pay no tuition. Ms. Foley Fried said the school wanted to make sure that lower-income families — for whom financial aid was originally created — still knew they had a chance.
“We needed to put a stake in the tent,” she said.
That’s the same message that Mr. Mitchell, of the National Association of Independent Schools, tells families who are worried about the cost of private school but are wondering if they should apply for aid.
When parents ask him what salary range would make them ineligible for aid, he tells them to take a look at their household income. If there are fewer than two commas in that number, he tells families, it’s worth asking for help.
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