While most Americans think per-pupil spending in public schools is lower than it really is, many new immigrants think Catholic school tuition is higher than it really is. So said an official at Chicago's Big Shoulders Fund on Friday at a session Fordham sponsored with the Heartland Institute to highlight our recent Catholic schools study.
Big Shoulders has been doing the Lord's work for over twenty years, raising upwards of $150 million to keep inner-city Catholic schools open (or at least stem the tide of closures). A few years ago its leaders wondered why more immigrant families from Mexico weren't enrolling their children in Chicago's Catholic schools. The answer? These families assumed that parochial schools in the U.S. were the bastions of the elite, since that is the case in Mexico, which (like most countries) doesn't have a broad-based system of Catholic education. When Big Shoulders asked the immigrants how much they thought it cost to attend a Catholic school, they guessed way high.
To be sure, we need to find ways to make Catholic schools more affordable for working class and low-income families. But the Church could do a lot of good just by making families aware of how affordable the schools already are.
