Originally Posted by
98brg2d
Remain competitive with whom? Other private schools would experience the same drop in funding. Private schools don't compete with each other, or public schools on cost. They compete on philosophy, class size, activities, facilities, outcomes etc. it varies from school to school but my take on it is they don't compete on cost much at all. If they lost funding and couldn't maintain adequate enrollment without tuition decreases, then they would cut tuition and services/benefits. At some point, they would reduce services/benefits to the same level as any other public school. Nobody would pay extra for that.
Fundamentally, private schools have similar costs as public schools for basic education and facility costs, without any economies of scale. Some may be run more efficiently than public schools but you may never know that since it is masked by the tuition. Responsible schools provide yearly financial data and comparisons to public schools so you can see how they spend their money. I don't know if every private school does this, but mine does. Their biggest cost after payroll is rent of the school, which actually goes to the local school district, as they are the landlord (another benefit to the public system, almost like a reverse P3).
I think, almost by definition, private schools are run less efficiently than public, since they almost always strive for significantly smaller class sizes and more extracurricular activities.