NYC Private High School Can Cost More Than the Ivy League

"And you gave me a scholarship, didn't you?"

Tuition at the famed Bronx prep school Riverdale -- once home to the likes of Chevy Chase and Carly Simon -- totals $40,450 for the coming school year, making it the first of New York City's important people-makers to charge more than $40,000 annually for the rearing of teenagers. A year at Trinity comes to $38,180, while the Hewitt School will run parents $38,000, and Fieldston comes in with the basement bargain deal of $37,825 for a year's worth of learning. Overall, private high school tuition in the city is up 79 percent over the past 10 years, the Wall Street Journal reports, making Harvard and Princeton look like Big Lots.

And no one's really going to be helping out!

What's more, around 60 percent of Princeton and Harvard students receive need-based financial aid. At Princeton, the average grant is more than $38,000.

By contrast, on average, New York City independent schools offered financial aid to 19.9 percent of students in 2010-11, according to the National Association of Independent Schools. The median grant was $21,350.

"To be honest with you, I haven't heard a backlash about this," said the Parents League of New York's director of school advisory services, using the "Everything is expensive in NYC" line.

Just for some perspective, according to 2009 census numbers, the per capita income over a 12-month period was $30,634 and the median household income was $54,554.

Perks of this particular brand of education, as reported by the Journal, include classes in Mandarin, semesters in Maine or on "a 300-acre farm in Vermon," books and often (but not always!) lunch.

[WSJ]