WatchOK so our Movoto blog discussed public schooling, and in particular, how living near an awesome school district could add value to your property. Our theory is that saving money by not having to enroll your kids in private school carries a lot of weight.
http://www.movoto.com/blog/opinions/top-notch-public-schools-add-1-million-of-property-value/
Thoughts, experiences, opinions?
Nick at Movoto
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Madison, WI
Yeah, lol, I sold my 3 bedroom + home because the school district kept spending more, borrowing more, etc. just like the governments. I'm moving into a zero bedroom, kitchen, bath, living room, and garage rental. Could not afford the wife, eventual house upgrade, the rock on her finger, the minivan, credit cards consumerism lifestyle, or kids.
Seems everyone else can, so more power to them.
I would think the awesome school price would already be figured in, unless you owned the house before the awesome school just happened to appear.
Same town I lived in you could find a shit-hole apartment to live in just as well as a more expensive property.
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Sunnyvale, CA
everything says
Most breeders seem to choose the size and sort (like a 3/2 ranch and non-physical attributes like schools) of house they want.
Then they settle on location (with hours in traffic for the working spouse(s)) and/or career paths (both parents must work to pay for the house and eventually retire) to accommodate.
Most other people need to either do like they do (even when not spawning,since good schools often go with other amenities the money brings like fine dining) or pick a location and settle on the home.
I've done the later and never regretted not having more bedrooms or square footage. Less may even be better if it came with a nice workshop - house guests don't impose as much where they'd have no choice but sleeping on the floor.
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Fremont, CA
I disagree. Private schools can be expensive but far superior to a public education. Publics schools will bury you with their yearly bond measures and additional parcel taxes. At least when you pay for a private school you know if the money is spent on your children. I did not go that route but now I know better now.
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'good schools' is a code word for 'no blacks or hispanics available to be bussed in to the school'.
In the 3 cities you listed in your article, whites and asians are over 90% of the population. Where you find 'smart people', you will always find a majority white/east asian population and very few blacks/mestizo hispanics.
Since the FHA makes it illegal for citizens to practice freedom of association, expensive all white enclaves are created under the guise of an economic disparity when in reality it is an intelligence disparity.
If it costs 1 million dollars more to live in a neighborhood/school district with few blacks and hispanics then I believe the cost of diversity far exceeds its benefits.
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Corning, NY
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Public education is a joke. Standards are set low so that everyone can pass.
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Mountain View, CA
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I think that the analysis has good intentions, but that it is somewhat flawed. The $33k/year private schools like Harker are attended mostly by people to whom cost is no object and they probably already live in Palo Alto or Cupertino.
Anecdotal evidence:
I am a product of the Parochial school system, and it cost nothing anywhere near $33k/year. That got me into the college of my choice where I got a mechanical engineering degree and I have been working at a F500 top-5 company ever since. So, you certainly don't have to be born into a million-dollar neighborhood to make your way into the middle/upper-middle class working world. I mowed neighbors' lawns to pay for my own BMX bike as a kid, worked part time as a cashier and ski repair tech in high school and earned my Eagle Scout rank. You also clearly don't need to pull a perfect SAT score or have a 4.0 GPA or be a varsity athlete either (got a 1240/1600 on the SAT which I took once with no prep courses, finished HS with a 3.4GPA, no sports at all...I am totally unremarkable by those metrics). My parents rode my ass to do the best I could while still learning to LIVE, rather than training me to compete to no end with every other kid.
Granted this was 20 years ago, but parochial 1-8th grade cost like $1500-3000/year (1991-1998), and high school was $6-7k/year. Today, I believe that the same school's 1-8th grade tuition is like $6k/year (1998-2002), and the high school somehow managed to push it up to $16k. I am also not religious, despite being raised Catholic, so it isn't like the schools brainwash the kids or anything. I started out in public school in the Cambrian district, but my parents saw the difference between that and the parochial school my cousins went to and deemed it worth the cost. THey had originally looked at Cupertino/Saratoga/Palo Alto back in the late 1970's when they bought their first house, but couldn't justify the costs of those places and moved to the Cambrian area of San Jose. I did go to private college which was around $30k/year (2002-2007) if one lived on campus. My parents were able to help me with ~50% of that for which I am eternally grateful, with the rest being covered by scholarships and loans. Honestly I could have received the same education at a state school for a lot less cost had I been a little more organized back then. I chose the private school because I sucked at self-organization at the time, so the individual faculty counselors were a big deal for me, and the mandatory year of engineering internship proved to be invaluable.
So clearly you don't NEED a $33k/year school to live comfortably. If your goal is to be well-connected and get into high finance or politics or something, then sure, Harker may be your best bet. If you just want to be happy and comfortable, there's no need for it, or the $1M+ neighborhoods with "the good schools."
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Totally agree with your points. Thanks for sharing!
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Mountain View, CA
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Oh, and one more fun anecdotal story...
My fiancee used to work with a girl that attended Harker and grew up in Los Altos. She (Harker girl) was a sales account manager at a medium sized Taiwanese PC hardware company in north San Jose, which certainly isn't bad, but definitely isn't the road to riches. She quit to go work at Dropbox as a sales account manager and was laid off about 6 months later. I believe that this girl got her degree at UC Berkeley, although I forget what the degree was in. She and her parents, "did everything right," but so far isn't living the glamorous life some people assume automatically comes with names like Harker and UCB. She is only 27 though, so she has plenty of time to turn it all around, and for her sake I hope that things do turn around.
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There is really no "right" way anymore. We living in a rent-seeking casino. Sometimes, I laugh at those who still thinks that sending their kids to a "good" (high API school filled with Asians) school is a sure way for the kids to succeed.
In a random world, one can succeed only by engaging in high-gamma/anti-fragile/heads-I-win-tails-you-lose type activities. You may as well train your kids to be a poker player early on.
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Corning, NY
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Peter P says
Sad, isn't it?
The people who actually "do the work" are little more than pawns in some rich man's game.
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Peter P says
I both agree and disagree. Certainly, there is no guaranteed cookie-cutter road to success. Everyone would do it, and it would not work, which is sort of a funny paradox. I don't think that there ever has been a guaranteed road to riches, really. Competition has been a part of life for every species since forever, and it has always been a part of human existence. Statistically, there is always a chance that following the herd can still get you to the top of the pack, but it has always been that your chances are a bit better if you are willing to take risks (conversely, if you take the risks and fail, the consequences are also more severe).
Now, being that we humans have been endowed with consciousness and the ability to think ahead, there is a lot to be said for personally-defining success. Most people seem to define it in financial terms. That seems like a sad mistake. Obviously money plays a big part in American life, but generally one's own happiness is completely within their own control. "It's all in your head." You can choose to see everyone around you as being happier than you because they have things that you don't have, and then working hard to earn money to buy the happiness that you assume they have. Lots of people do that, and our entire economy is predicated on people thinking precisely this way. "I need more money or else I will never be happy." It is no accident that so many people are plagued with this unhealthy mentality; it is spoon-fed to us from birth. Competition, envy and fear of irrational future outcomes keeps the wheels of our economy spinning. It is unhealthy, sad and probably unsustainable since it has pushed many people to the far limit of debt accumulation.
All is not lost, though. Happiness really is a simple matter of changing your mentality and not giving a rat's ass what anyone else is doing, and giving up the misguided assumption that anyone else gives you and your lifestyle a second's thought. For one, very few other people care what your financial situation is. Second, any person that thinks less of you for not having $XXX to your name, for renting or for parenting by the seat of your pants rather than from some book written by "experts" is not the type of person that has an opinion worth worrying about. Notice I said that this mentality shift is SIMPLE. It is not EASY though, which is often the case with simple actions. If you have been wallowing in unhappiness and busting your ass to buy your way out of it, it is very hard to let go and acknowledge that you have wasted a lot of time on a hopeless endeavor. If you can let go of your attachment to these notions and cut your losses, you can increase your personal happiness on-the-spot and look forward to tomorrow more than ever.
What I am describing is TRUE freedom; Freedom of mind and lifestyle. If you subject yourself to manufactured economic dogmas and let yourself be another sad cog in the machine, you are destroying everything that the forebears of America fought to build and protect. You are free to seek your own destiny, but you have to be willing to stand on your own feet to enjoy the freedom that comes from doing so. All too many people in the SF Bay Area are living in fear irrational future suffering, and are buying into a lifetime of debt to try to allay these fears. Putting your kid into a "top" school district really is a noble effort, but it strikes me as being poorly thought-out. I went to college with, and work with a multitude of people that come from all sorts of places that Cupertino and Palo Alto would snub their collective noses at. Across the board, happiness and personal success are products of the individuals' mentalities and personalities, not the API of the schools they attended or the name of the school printed on their diplomas.
Repeat after me:
- Happiness is derived from freedom.
- Money does not buy freedom; it buys options.
- Options do not guarantee freedom.
- Freedom comes from knowing which options to pick.
- Knowing which options to pick requires independent thought.
- Independent though requires one to identify and dispose of irrational fears.
EDIT:
Wow, this is a long post lol. You never realize it until you see it posted!
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bmwman91 says
That's the best summary of American existence I have seen to date. Well put!
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Los Angeles, CA
'Good Schools' is for sure racial profiling code word.
Also I good rule for buying RE in a big citiy is that if a typical white lady wont feel safe going for a walk around the block at night - then dont buy there (white/asian women set RE prices at some level - it must be a 'safe nest').
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Awesome BMWman! Happiness and independent thought!
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Corning, NY
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What drives humanity:
1) Greed
2) Fear
3) Envy (which is Greed + Fear)
"And I saw that all labor and achievement spring from man's envy of his neighbor. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind." -- Ecclesiastes 4:4
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San Jose, CA
It makes much more since to rent in a good school district. Take Cupertino for example: The average 3bed/2bath cost a little over $1 million. Which would put your mortgage payment over 6k a month with an 3.5% down FHA loan. 3bed/2bath rentals are roughly half of that, around 3k/month. If you are a family but can not afford to private school it would make a lot of since to rent in a place like this.
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wthrfrk80 says
So true. Pretty soon we will be getting teachers from China to teach math to our students. :)
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NickJohnson12 says
So why didnt SF SouthBay RE prices skyrocket during the 70s and 80s... why wait until the post 1999 ? Its was the same schools system and same unionized teachers ?
So today, you use great schools to justify million dollar schools which if you compare to private schools are still overpaying several times over.
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Well.. API wasn't started until 1999.
Pre-API pretty much everybody assumed their school district was above-average since there was no exact ranking system.
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If the schools don't discriminate by applying tests for admission, your kids will be mixed in with idiots, mediocrities and the usual herd of census curve grotesques. The question parents need to ask is are there any exam-entry junior and senior high schools in the district to put the kids into an environment in which storm-trooper intellect is the norm and 1500+ SATs are considered average and, most importantly, where it's OK to be smart and uncool to be fucking stupid.
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APOCALYPSEFUCK is Shostakovich says
Don't forget hand-to-hand combat skills!
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this is why we have a Charter School system in Arizona. works great.
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wthrfrk80 says
A school without bayonet drills is a sheep farm.
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PockyClipsNow says
Another rule: it is a good neighborhood for me if I look like the "riff-raff". :)
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zesta says
did we produce idiots before 1999 ? back in the 70s 80s 90s... so API is rather worthless... we certainly didnt need the GIN!
anyway.. i think BACAH has a better explanation on API
http://realestate.patrick.net/forum/comments.php?a=257&submit=Search
The "API-ism" is outsourcing parenting responsibilities to a standardized test score that was intended for the state to identify where to focus and shift its resources. It (API) was never intended for Realtor®s and Quants to Gin Up people on where to over pay for housing nor for Tiger Mom to Keep Her Face in the Pecking Order of her Social Circle. It was never intended for those things; but inside the minds of certain groups, that's what the API has become.
Welcome to what has become of SIlicon Valley."
Jun 14, 2012 2:22 PM in Cupertino Shmoopertino
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I didn't comment on the validity of API scores. I merely stated that they were introduced in 1999. I agree with BACAH that they weren't intended for people to overpay for housing, but that's what has happened.
Pre-API people just assumed their school district was fine and above-average. Now that there's a number and ranking,many people are clamoring to get into a top school, inflating home prices in those areas.
If one believes API is useless or has another metric for determining which school is best I guess they can save some money by going against API scores.
That doesn't change the fact that districts with high API scores adds some value to properties in that district.
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All scores tend to become meaningless over time because they can be gamed around.
It is just important to have a school relatively free of drugs and unreasonable bullies. (Some teasing may not be a bad thing.)
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I'll just call Tom Cruise. He knows everything.
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Peter P says
Definitely! I think that the "pressure cooker" schools you find in high-API areas like Cupertino can be detrimental to kids' development, just in different ways.
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San Jose, CA
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bmwman91 says
She could always follow the example of the women in my family and marry rich....
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bmwman91 says
I love those high-API schools. It is like real-life comedy! I want to laugh out loud every time I overhear parents discussing API scores. Why would parents want to do that to their kids? Do they want to reduce everything in life to a number? What about 42?
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Peter P says
Because that's what America is all about.
If you're not the best of the best, you're a loser and deserve to die hungry and naked in the gutter. It's in the Bible.
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San Jose, CA
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wthrfrk80 says
Winner take all! Its the central law of nature
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Corning, NY
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New renter says
And Calvinism. Which is the basis of American religion, whether cousciously or unconsciously. Gotta prove I'm part of the "elect" by having more money than you do.
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San Jose, CA
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wthrfrk80 says
Yes but WWJD?
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New renter says
That's irrelevant to a Calvinist.
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San Jose, CA
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wthrfrk80 says
Why? Are they not Christians?
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wthrfrk80 says
Going to a good school will not make them the best of the best. They may become the best of the mediocre, but that is aiming too low.
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I just heard one of the weirder rationalizations this morning for why someone bought a residence in The Fortress, with Fortress Prices (Fortress Property Tax, etc.): because it was hopeless to "get into" one of the Challenger Preschools near the "outside Fortress Walls" neighborhood where they lived before.
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B.A.C.A.H. says
So they bought fortress house so their kid could go to a slightly better preschool?
Preschool? Really?
There must be more to that story.