Private School Enrollment

What private school enrollment tells us about San Francisco and its public schools

Try to answer these two questions based on your knowledge about San Francisco’s evolution over the last two decades:

1. From 2000 to 2022, enrollment in public schools for the K-8 grades fell 13%. What happened to private school K-8 enrollment over the same period?

   1. Up more than 15%;

   2. Up 0-15%;

   3. Down 0-15%;

   4. Down more than 15%

2. From 2000 to 2022, enrollment in public high schools fell 9%. What happened to enrollment in private high schools over the same period?

   1. Up more than 15%;

   2. Up 0-15%;

   3. Down 0-15%;

   4. Down more than 15%

The questions are phrased carefully but there’s no trick. “Public” means SFUSD plus the local charter schools because I don’t want you to get distracted by the growth of charter schools in the city. “Public” means free; “private” means the parents pay tuition. I wrote “K-8 grades” to encompass all students in those grades including not just those in K-8 schools but also those in K-5 elementary schools and middle schools serving grades 6-8. The high school numbers exclude the Five Keys charter schools which primarily serve adults. Don’t scroll down until you’ve guessed the answers.

That I phrased it as two questions rather than one is a hint that the answers are different. Private school K-8 enrollment was down 19% (answer D) while private high school enrollment was up 20% (answer A). Figure 1 below shows the proportional change in enrollment over time for each school type. Please let me know if you got the answers correct. Nobody has yet.

Figure 1: Enrollment growth in San Francisco schools since 1999-2000

K-8 Enrollment

The usual reason why people get the first question wrong is that they forget about religious schools, even though religious school enrollment is more than half of all private school enrollment. Figure 1 shows K-8 enrollment by school type.

Figure 1: K-8 private school enrollment in San Francisco, by type of school

Enrollment in Catholic schools has declined 45% and a number of schools have closed since the turn of the century, including: St. Emydius, St. Anthony Immaculate, St. Paul of the Shipwreck, St. Elizabeth, St. Charles Borromeo, Corpus Christi, and Star of the Sea. Just this week, St. Thomas the Apostle school in Outer Richmond announced it was going to close. It has only 100 students this year, down more than 50% in a year. St. Brigid in Polk Gulch, with only 112 students, also looks to be in trouble.

Other religious schools have also suffered. Cornerstone Academy had over 1100 students twenty years ago, making it the largest school in the city. Now it has under 400 split across two sites. West Portal Lutheran is down 44% over twenty years.

Much of this enrollment decline can be attributed to the decline in religious observance in the city but I suspect that competition from SFUSD has played a factor. SFUSD has invested heavily (I’d argue too heavily) in class size reduction at the elementary school level. At the K-3 level, the maximum class size in SFUSD schools is 22 and the median student is in a class of 20. The Catholic schools often can’t match that. However, in the middle school grades, SFUSD’s class size balloons and Catholic school enrollment increases by 25-30%.

Catholic schools are typically less than half the price of non-religious schools. They historically formed the middle tier of a three-tier education market in the city. As that middle tier declines, the city will be left with more of a two tier education market. It’s hard to see that as a good thing.

Non-religious K-8 Schools

When people think that private school enrollment is increasing, these are the schools they are thinking of. Enrollment at non-religious K-8 schools is up 53%, with most of that increase happening in the 2010s.

Education is a real estate business, particularly in San Francisco. These schools could not have grown if they didn’t have enough appropriate school space to house their students. San Francisco Friends occupies a building that used to be owned by Levi’s. That is a rarity. Many of the new schools (e.g. Alta Vista, La Scuola, Millennium, Stratford School) occupy buildings that were formerly religious schools. Some former religious schools have been reincarnated multiple times. The Most Holy Redeemer school in the Castro closed in the 1990s. Since then, the building at 117 Diamond St has housed Live Oak school (before it moved to its current site on Potrero Hill), San Francisco Friends (before it moved to its current site on Valencia St), Marin Prep, Spanish Infusion School (since closed) and its current tenant, German International School of Silicon Valley. Indeed, because it is so difficult to find suitable school buildings, non-religious schools can only grow as fast as religious schools decline.

High Schools

Figure 3 is the historical enrollment chart for high schools. Non-religious high schools are up by 63% and Catholic high schools are up by 6%.

Figure 3: Enrollment in private high schools in San Francisco since 1999-2000

Education is a real estate business for high school too. Due to the lack of suitable space, only two new schools reached more than 100 students: Bay, in the Presidio, and Jewish Community, on Ellis St. The existing schools all expanded a little bit but none by more than 170 students. They are constrained by space, not demand.

Why has enrollment at Catholic high schools actually risen while enrollment in K-8 schools fell so sharply? If the decline in religious observance is to blame for the K-8 enrollment drop, shouldn’t the high schools have been affected too? I suspect it’s some combination of:

• There’s more demand for private high schools in general, whether because parents believe the high school years are more critical or because the public high schools are not believed to be as good.

• There is not enough supply of spaces at non-religious high schools.

• There may be a limit, even in San Francisco, to the number of families able to pay $50,000 per child per year for one of the non-religious high schools.

• The Catholic high school product is better, relative to its competition, than the Catholic elementary school product. SFUSD’s high school class sizes are much bigger than those at the Catholic high schools, something that is not true at the elementary level. The Catholic high schools also offer more sports opportunities (e.g. a freshman and a JV team in a sport where the SFUSD school might only have a varsity team), more college application guidance etc.

Whatever the reason or reasons, it is true that more students are enrolled in private schools in the higher grades. In grades K-5, an average of 1655 students per grade are in private school. This rises to 1966 in grades 6-8 and 2039 in grades 9-12.

Note that private schools enroll students from outside the city, and it’s probably true that more high schoolers commute into the city for high school than for earlier grades, so this does not prove that more San Franciscans go private in high school. It could be that all the extra students come from outside the city. It also means that if you use the public and private enrollment numbers to calculate the percentage of students attending private school, the numbers you get are upper bounds.

This is also why I’ve refrained from adding the public and private school numbers together to estimate.

Impact of the Pandemic

If we narrow the focus to the last few years, we can see the impact of the pandemic. Yet again, the story is different at the K-8 and high school levels.

K-8

In 2020-21, K-8 grade enrollment in SFUSD fell 2.2% compared to 6.1% for private schools. All schools were still closed at the start of the 2020-21 school year so the greater decline in private school enrollment could be attributed to greater mobility: perhaps people able to afford private school were more inclined to move out of the city during the pandemic.

Most private schools opened soon after it was possible in November 2020 but SFUSD schools stayed shut until the end of the school year. In particular, they were still shut in March 2021 when decisions had to be made about enrollment for the 2021-22 school year. Possibly as a result, SFUSD K-8 enrollment fell by 6.3% but private school K-8 enrollment rose 1%.

Schools were open throughout the 2021-22 school year although every school had to deal with covid outbreaks at some point. For 2022-23, K-8 private school enrollment is down 1.9%, with all of the decline happening at Catholic schools. SFUSD enrollment as a whole is also down 1.9% but I haven’t seen any breakdown by grade.

High Schools

Enrollment in private high schools was completely unaffected by the pandemic. It rose 1.7% in 2020-21, a further 1.7% in 2021-22, and 0.9% in 2022-23. In SFUSD, high school enrollment fell by 1.4% in 2020-21 and a further 1.8% in 2021-22. As mentioned above, overall SFUSD enrollment is down 1.9% this year but it’s unclear whether the change in high school enrollment is higher or lower than that.

One theory for why private high school enrollment was unaffected is that there is a lot of pent-up demand. As schools add space (Riordan was the biggest gainer this year, exceeding 1000 pupils for the first time), it gets filled. If some families moved out of the city after the pandemic hit, there were more than enough other families willing to take their place.

An alternative, and not mutually exclusive, theory is that parents regard high school as a more consequential period in a child’s education and were less inclined to move out of the city and remain more willing to pay.