I read the recent letter regarding tuition, as well as the many comments that followed it. I read them from a somewhat unique perspective: I am a yeshiva administrator, but I am also a parent who pays tuition for my own children.

I live on both sides of this conversation.

And while I understand the frustration expressed by the author and many of those who commented, I believe we are framing the conversation incorrectly.

The real question is not simply, “Why is tuition so high?”

The question we should be asking is: How and where is our money being spent?

And that question needs to be asked of everyone—parents, schools, and the community at large.

Parents Have a Responsibility

Let’s start with something that I believe has gotten lost in this conversation.

Parents have a responsibility to educate their children.

That responsibility does not disappear because tuition is expensive.

Housing is a necessity. Food is a necessity. Utilities are necessities. Medical expenses are necessities. And for a Jewish family, chinuch is a necessity as well.

That doesn’t mean families aren’t allowed to enjoy life. A husband and wife need time together. Families need recreation. Children deserve enjoyable experiences. People need a break.

But there is a difference between taking the family somewhere locally for a few hundred dollars and spending thousands on an exotic vacation. There is a difference between occasionally going out for dinner and regularly spending hundreds of dollars at high-end restaurants. There is a difference between clothing our children nicely and feeling obligated to purchase designer clothing because that has become the standard around us.

We cannot say that we simply “cannot afford tuition” without being willing to examine what afford means.

Look around our communities. High-end clothing stores thrive. Restaurants are packed. Luxury goods sell. Significant amounts of money are spent on travel and summer recreation.

Of course, appearances can be deceiving. Someone’s parents may have paid for a vacation. A luxury car may have been given to them. A family may have access to a summer home at little or no cost. We should never determine an individual family’s financial situation by looking through the window of their car or seeing where they spent the summer.

But on a communal level, the amount of discretionary spending taking place should at least force us to ask an uncomfortable question:

Do we have only an affordability problem, or do we also have a priorities problem?

If paying your fair share of your children’s education means you cannot take the vacation you want, drive the car you want, eat out as often as you want, or maintain the lifestyle of your neighbors, then yes, sometimes that is part of the sacrifice of raising and educating children.

That may be uncomfortable to say. But parental responsibility has to mean something.

Schools Don’t Get a Free Pass

Now let me turn that same scrutiny toward my own side of the desk.

If a school asks a parent seeking tuition assistance to open his books and demonstrate genuine financial need, then the school should be prepared to open its books as well.

Transparency cannot work in only one direction.

Every yeshiva should have real financial governance and an active board rather than being governed by the decisions of one individual. Its finances should be open to appropriate scrutiny. There should be established salary scales. Parents and donors should be able to understand where the institution’s money is going.

That does not mean every employee’s individual salary needs to become public information. Nor does it mean parents have a right to decide what an administrator does with his personal income.

If an administrator is being fairly compensated based on the size and complexity of the institution, his responsibilities, skill level and output, how he spends his legitimate earnings is his business.

Seeing an administrator drive a nice car proves nothing more than seeing a parent drive one does. Perhaps it was given to him. Perhaps his spouse earns a significant income. Perhaps he inherited money or has outside business interests.

We cannot demand that administrators refrain from judging parents based on appearances and then judge administrators based on those same appearances.

Administrators should certainly be sensitive to the communities they serve and should not flaunt wealth. But the legitimate question is not, “What car does the administrator drive?”

The legitimate question is, “Is this institution compensating its employees appropriately and using its resources responsibly?”

And on that question, schools should welcome scrutiny.

We Need to Talk About Efficiency

Parents also need to understand that operating a school is extraordinarily expensive.

When you look at a classroom of 25 children and multiply 25 by the tuition bill, it can appear that the school must be swimming in money.

It isn’t that simple.

A Jewish school effectively staffs two educational programs: Limudei Kodesh and general studies. Then there is the infrastructure required to support those classrooms.

Secretarial support. Parent communication. Payroll. HR. Government programs. Compliance. Insurance. Technology. Transportation. Security. Facilities. Maintenance. Utilities. Purchasing. Substitute coverage.

Parents expect to call the school and have someone answer. They expect dismissal changes to be handled correctly. They expect a clean, heated, air-conditioned and safe building. They expect teachers to have materials. They expect communication, events, trips and parent-teacher conferences.

All of that costs money.

But saying that schools have legitimate expenses cannot become an excuse for inefficiency.

Too many institutions are top-heavy. Too many people have poorly defined roles. Functions that need to be performed somehow become full-time positions even when the function itself isn’t a full-time job.

Schools need to ask hard questions.

Can positions be combined? Can smaller schools share back-office functions? Are we using technology effectively? Are contracts competitively bid, or are they being handed out based on relationships? Are we designing and maintaining buildings with long-term costs in mind, or focusing only on appearance?

A school may legitimately need ten different administrative functions. That does not necessarily mean it needs ten different administrators.

And the goal of becoming leaner should not be to squeeze our Rebbeim and teachers.

Quite the opposite.

Our Rebbeim and teachers are woefully underpaid. We should be tightening overhead so that more resources can reach the classroom. We should be exploring community-wide purchasing power so educators can receive meaningful benefits. Chinuch will always require dedication beyond the clock, but dedication cannot become an excuse for poor compensation or unlimited demands on educators.

“I Can’t Afford It” Needs to Mean Something

There are families who genuinely cannot afford tuition.

I have seen them as an administrator, and I have seen schools step up for them.

A family can earn what appears to be an excellent income and still have legitimate extraordinary expenses. Medical bills can be enormous. A child’s allergies or medical needs can make basic groceries cost multiples of what another family spends. A family with several children in different schools may simply not have enough discretionary income to meet every school’s full tuition demand.

That is why tuition cannot be determined by looking at a salary number on a piece of paper.

Administrators need to listen.

If a parent says, “Here is my situation,” someone needs to sit down with that parent and hear it.

And if multiple schools are educating children from the same family, each institution cannot pretend it has the first claim on the same limited pool of money. There needs to be cooperation.

There should be a standardized, confidential method of determining tuition assistance.

And I believe very strongly in a complete separation between finances and education.

A principal, Rebbe, teacher or other educational staff member should not need to know what a particular family pays. A child’s acceptance and educational experience should never depend on whether his parents pay full tuition, half tuition, or almost nothing.

If a family can genuinely demonstrate that it cannot afford tuition, no child should be sent away because his parents lack the money.

At that point, it becomes our problem as a community.

But even a family capable of contributing almost nothing should contribute something—even a nominal amount—not because it will balance a school’s budget, but because there is dignity and responsibility in being a participant in your child’s education.

There is a profound difference between “I cannot pay” and “I would rather spend the money somewhere else.”

Our system needs to be compassionate enough to recognize the first and responsible enough to confront the second.

This Cannot Be Only the School’s Problem

This is where I disagree most strongly with the underlying premise of much of the tuition discussion.

When a parent genuinely cannot afford the cost of educating a child, the missing money does not magically become solely the school’s responsibility.

Kol Yisrael areivim zeh bazeh.

Educating the next generation is a communal obligation.

Rabbanim need to be involved. Shuls need to be involved. Philanthropists need to be involved. Community members whose children are grown need to be involved.

Our elementary schools and high schools are not simply private businesses selling education to individual customers. They are the infrastructure through which the Jewish people continue.

If we want future generations who love Torah, who build Jewish homes, who eventually learn in our kollelim and support our communal institutions, then we need thriving schools that produce those generations.

In my view, educating our children must be among our very highest communal tzedakah priorities.

When communal funds help a genuinely struggling family with tuition, we aren’t merely helping the school. We may also be preventing that family from having to turn to another organization for groceries, rent, utilities or other necessities because tuition consumed money they needed to live.

We should ultimately be working toward a unified communal effort that assesses genuine family need, establishes reasonable standards for what it costs to educate a child, recognizes that some children—particularly those with special needs—cost more to educate, and distributes communal funding accordingly.

That will require schools, rabbanim and community leaders to cooperate in ways that historically have been difficult. But difficulty is not an excuse to avoid the conversation.

Independence Comes With a Price

There is another uncomfortable part of this conversation.

We cannot demand both highly customized schools and the lowest possible tuition.

If you buy a suit off the rack, it costs one price. If you want it custom-made exactly to your specifications, it costs considerably more.

Education is obviously not a suit, but the economics of scale still exist.

A 100-student school may require many of the same back-office functions as a 600-student school. The difference is that the smaller school divides those costs among 100 children instead of 600.

Our community has increasingly created schools for narrower groups, hashkafos and preferences. There may be legitimate reasons for some of those institutions. But we cannot ignore the financial consequences.

If parents want highly specialized niche institutions, they have to understand that specialization costs money.

If we genuinely want to reduce the per-child cost, we need to become more comfortable building larger community schools that can achieve economies of scale while still creating student-centered educational environments.

Every school has the right to maintain its educational independence—its curriculum, hashkafah and hiring decisions.

But there is a distinction between educational independence and financial accountability.

A founder has every right to operate an independent institution according to his vision.

But if an institution wants the broader community to subsidize it, the broader community has every right to insist upon basic standards of governance, transparency and financial responsibility.

You cannot demand communal money while declaring your finances nobody else’s business.

So Is There Really a “Tuition Crisis”?

I would frame the problem differently.

A quality Jewish education costs real money. We cannot simply declare that tuition should be dramatically lower without answering who will pay the teachers, insure the building, keep the lights on, maintain the facility and provide the services parents expect.

Government funding can help, and we should maximize every appropriate program available to our schools. But government will never reliably pay the entire cost of Jewish education, and government money comes with requirements of its own.

More importantly, additional funding does not fix an inefficient institution.

We cannot fund our way out of structural inefficiency.

What we have is a broader problem with how the cost of education is generated, allocated and spent.

Parents need to examine their priorities.

Schools need to examine their operations.

And the community needs to examine its priorities as well.

Parents cannot demand complete financial accountability from schools while refusing to honestly examine their own discretionary spending.

Schools cannot demand sacrifice from parents while refusing to demonstrate that every tuition and donor dollar is being used responsibly.

And our broader community cannot proclaim that chinuch is our highest priority while leaving individual families and individual schools to fight the battle largely on their own.

There is enough responsibility to go around.

Instead of asking only, “Why is tuition so high?”, perhaps it is time we all opened our books—literally and figuratively—and asked a harder question:

Are we, as parents, schools and a community, spending our money in a way that reflects what we say our priorities are?

If we are willing to answer that question honestly, we may discover that the solution isn’t simply demanding that someone else pay less or give more.

It may require all of us to change.

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