Tuesday, August 25, 2009

The housing bubble and education

An interesting point made here by Mike Koczcal about the relationship of the housing bubble to parental decisions about education (hat tip to The Daily Dish):

Education There’s a lot of focus on the interest rate deduction that is embedded inside a mortgage. I think the most obvious embedded option inside a mortgage that isn’t discussed is the option to educate your children at the local school district. If sending 3 kids to a private high school at your old houses costs $5,000/year, and if the new house’s public high school is free and equally good then taking a $60,000 bath on the house is break-even. Completely rational.

The value of this option has increased, both with the returns to education but also with a general worry about the robustness of our educational meritocracy. The amount of money and energy that goes into securing access to high-end education has skyrocketed over the past decade, and part of that budget, though it isn’t treated as such, is in your house. And though we often think of educational inequality as a function of a Kozol-narrative of the poorest against the richest, this bidding may be most driven by inequality between the middle and the highest parts of the inequality curve. I’d really like to see some hard research into how much our desire to educate our children in the best way possible has driven subprime and the housing bubble.

There's undoubtedly a great deal of merit here; even within Worcester, even with school choice, there are people who choose their neighborhood based on the local school. How many people took out questionable morgages in order to get their kids into a better school?

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