To send a child to a top-tier day school costs around $40,000 a year (or roughly $400,000 to $800,000 per year for a classroom of ten to twenty students). Boarding schools may charge more than $60,000. For affluent families in our megacompetitive culture, the tuition is often just a down payment. When the school day is done, the private tutors take over, sometimes charging as much as $500 per hour; it is not unheard of for parents to spend six figures a year, in addition to tuition, on a child’s tutoring.12 The tutoring these days goes well beyond the standard SAT test prep, and is sometimes
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