Maxwell Adler of Bloomberg reports that LA’s elite Curtis School is seeking $24 million to build a new STEAM Center. Curtis School follows schools across the United States in growing to meet the desires of wealthy families seeking only the best for their kids. Locally, we’ve seen schools engage in this kind of major fund-raising through wealthy families internally and from both private placement and public market bonds.
I said,
“To bring in wealthy parents, schools want to provide whatever the amenity du jour is, whether it’s a climbing wall, a Maker’s Lab or an Arabic language program,” said Emily Glickman, founder of Abacus Guide Educational Consulting. “Long gone are the days of the spartan private school, where students took cold showers and toughed things out.”
To compete in today’s private school marketplace, just like at the college level, institutions feel they need to keep up with or exceed the Joneses.