Wealthy Spend Plenty On Their Kids' Education

Is it a bad thing when the wealthy spend money on their kids’ education?  To some it is, at least when doing so widens the nation’s “wealth gap”:

Wealthier parents have been stepping up education spending so aggressively that they’re widening the nation’s wealth gap. When the Great Recession struck in late 2007 and squeezed most family budgets, the top 10 percent of earners — with incomes averaging $253,146 — went in a different direction: They doubled down on their kids’ futures.

Their average education spending per child jumped 35 percent to $5,210 a year during the recession compared with the two preceding years — and they sustained that faster pace through the recovery. For the remaining 90 percent of households, such spending averaged around a flat $1,000, according to research by Emory University sociologist Sabino Kornrich…

The patterns suggest that the wealth gap could widen in coming years, analysts say.

“If you’re at the bottom and the top keeps pulling away, you’re just further behind,” said Melissa Kearney, a senior economics fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Why should people compare their situations to that of the wealthy?  Isn’t it enough that people’s own lots improve?  Or should we “level the playing field” by making sure no one improves?

The class-warfare fighters must be pretty grim people if they’d denigrate giving a child an educational opportunity for no other reason than that some other child somewhere else wouldn’t have that same opportunity.

Shameful.

Cross posted from http://www.joannejacobs.com/2014/10/wealthy-spend-plenty-on-their-kids-education/