This conversation is taking a very disturbing tack. Everyone here, except puppydogs and laguy, is carefully skirting around the elephant in the room – yeshiva tuition is a financial backbreaker for most families and can and will contribute to a severe financial crisis for frum Jews. YES, we all know yeshiva education is a necessity, But over the last 10-20 years, yeshiva tuition costs have skyrocketed alongside general COLA increases, even in markets outside NY/NJ. Economics works on the basic principle of scarce resources: using a resource (money) to pay for X will mean less resource to pay for Y. Tuition eats up more and more of our families’ incomes (POST-tax, mind you) so that there’s increasingly less and less available for retirement savings, savings for bigger ticket items (weddings, brisim, etc, even if modest they do cost some $$$), or savings we can put away for our children. There’s less and less available for everyday expenses as well, forcing families into tighter and tighter budgets as our COL rises, and our property taxes rise across the country to fund, in large part, an education system we don’t ever use. This creates not only financial problems, but mental and shalom bayis problems as well.
Laguy is right. I’m as sick as he is watching schools, heck, our coummunity, expect hardworking, dual-earning parents to pony up 65%-75% of their AFTER-TAX pay to pay for tuition. I challenge anyone here to tell me how an average family living anywhere can get by in today’s world on 25%-35% of their take home pay after tuition is taken into account. Don’t tell me “I put my kids through it, you can too” – housing costs ALONE (let alone other cost of living areas) have increased exponentially, making the current generation’s experience somewhat more harrowing than previous generations’. And don’t tell me to sell my car, get rid of my cell phone, etc. That’d be like digging yourself out of a hole with a teaspoon, not to mention that what many consider “luxuries” are today quasi necessities (I’m thinking car and cell phone here, at least for suburban dwellers).
How are our families going to save for their retirement or their children? Who’ll take care of the current generation when they can no longer work and have little to no savings because they’ve “invested” it in tuition?? Their kids? Who will happen to be struggling with their own, exponentially greater tuition problems??
I’m sick of people just assuming “yeah, it’s hard, but hey, we have to do it.” I’m sick and tired of all the hot air being wasted with discussions and gatherings and diatribes and etc etc etc while we all watch our tuition bills creep up and up and up and up and eat away an ever increasing portion of our finances, making our lives one step closer to financial insolvency.
I’m really tired of seeing the ignorance of basic economics that seems to be prevalent in these discussions.
EDITED