Opinion: Top Private Schools Should Charge Wealthy Parents More

A former private-school board member argues in The New York Times that elite academies should set means-based tuition and charge higher fees for the wealthiest families to close a growing gap between income and costs.

Even as tuition at top institutions reaches $50,000 a year, “expenses have so far outstripped revenues that no amount of cost-cutting at such schools, healthy as that may be, can come close to solving the problem,” writes R. Scott Asen, a private investor who served for 10 years on the trustees’ development committee at the Groton School, in Massachusetts.

While many parents struggle to cover tuition, “a meaningful subset … has the resources to pay substantially more and, in a good number of cases, the ‘full’ cost of the product they are buying (that is, the actual cost of operation on a per-student basis),” Mr. Asen says.

He contends these wealthier families are “effectively being subsidized” by donors. He proposes that schools seek financial disclosure from prospective parents and ask the wealthiest families to supplement tuition with a gift to match the actual per-student cost of school operations.