A new report from an Ontario think tank challenges the common perception that independent schooling is “reserved for the rich,” looking at how the schools set their tuition fees and what they cost.
What Ontario parents pay for independent schooling varies considerably. Among 20 responding schools, the total annual cost ranged from a low of $649 per family to a high of $26,050 per student, the report said.
The researchers also asked for an estimated total per-student cost of tuition fees plus other expenses that may include things such as uniforms, books, musical instruments, and extra-curricular activities. Of 18 schools that responded to this question, the median and mean total costs to parents, including tuition and all other fees, were $13,525 and $11,910 per student, respectively.
“These findings suggest that the costs to attend many of Ontario’s independent schools may not conform to the stereotype that independent schools are reserved for the rich,” the report said.
Contrary to popular belief, independent-school students are largely from middle-class families, whose average after-tax income is between 1.8 percent lower and 1.9 percent higher than that of district-school families, according to Cardus.
“Consequently, our hypothesis is that the tuition fees that are typically mentioned in public contexts are not representative of the sector as a whole,” the report said, adding that media reports about tuition in the independent school sector have focused on the “very small number of ‘elite’ schools,” which account for only about 4 percent of the sector in Ontario.
In addition, 14 out of 20 schools that responded to a question about whether they provide financial aid to families said they do so, the report found. Among them, 12 schools said that they reduced or supplemented tuition on a need basis, with a range of 3 percent to 65 percent of the school’s students receiving need-based aid. Three schools offered merit-based scholarships and one provided other means of financial aid. The report noted that some schools provided more than one type of financial assistance.
The report cited several reasons for the public to learn about the cost of attending independent schools in Ontario. One reason is that some parents who might be interested in enrolling their children may assume that the cost is too high without investigating further, meaning that their children could be missing out on such education.
Another reason is that greater transparency about what peer schools are charging can assist schools in setting their own tuition and can place downward pressure on costs across the sector as a whole, thus improving accessibility to the sector, the report said.
Cardus noted that the results of this study “cannot be considered statistically representative of the entire sector,” though through this report, they hope to reveal that schools employ various ways of setting tuition and that the cost to attend ranges widely.
