It's Over Before Age 5...Freud Was Right

Despite being wrong about Pi Day since I thought yesterday was the 13th and it was, in fact, Pi Day (the 14th), I'm not sure I would even read anything I wrote myself with regard to numbers. However, if a woman in New York and several unnamed studies are to be believed, spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars on an education beginning at age two will recoup substantially more than that for your child. Face it, if your child isn't on the fast track by age two, he or she is doomed to a life of, probably, public servitude. Here''s the story:
I'm withholding the woman's name because it is humiliating enough for her to know that her daughter Lucia has lost what little chance she had to ever be a success. And for the kind of money that was being invested, I'd be seriously "p'ed o" as well. Seems Mom enrolled her daughter in a New York preschool at age two that guaranteed her daughter the opportunity to excel on the city's E.R.B. test that is given to four-year-olds as they jockey for position to be enrolled in the dog-eat-dog-and-I'm-wearing-MIlkbone-underwear world of entrance into the elite kindergartens of the Big Apple. It also appears that Mom was forking out $19,000 per year for the right to have her daughter educated to a degree not even Disney could have foreseen. But, according to the mother, "The school proved not to be a school at all, but just a big playroom." In fact, she freed her daughter earlier in the year when Mom discovered that her daughter had been "dumped in" with two-year-old students who were talking about shapes and colors. EEK! (of course, for 19k, the colors would have to be the 64-crayon box, not the crappy 8-crayon box).
Citing the aforementioned unnamed studies, Mom noted that preschool education was critical to a child's success in life, especially in terms of getting into an Ivy League school or achieving a guaranteed higher income later in life.
At the risk of making an egregious error (after all, I didn't even GO to preschool), I will attempt the math.
Two years at $19k for preschool= $38,000.
Private elementary school: 9 years @25k=$225,000
Four years of private high school (without tutors) @$30k=$120,000.
Five years at an Ivy League college @$60k/yr= $300,000
Total (if my math is anywhere close to right) $683,000.00
Outrageous, you say? Not really. Having matriculated through the system , emerging clutching a Princeton diploma, a grad will make that much up in seven years, providing Mom and Dad paid for everything and the middle-class idea of having a student loans or (gasp!) Pell Grants hasn't blemished the experience.
Payscale.com has done an extremely interesting analysis of the NCAA 68-team basketball tournament: it has calculated a winner based on how much a graduate of each of the teams can be expected to earn right out of college. Not surprisingly, with that kind of calculation, Princeton will win it all, since its grads stand to make $102,000. for the first year after graduation. Though NOT Ivy League, Duke will be the runner-up (sorry, Coach K.) since its graduates will earn a paltry $99,000 per year. Georgetown would finish third if such a level existed by providing a diploma worth $94,000 per year.
If you want to pick an athletic dark horse, go ahead: a graduate of Alabama State University stands to pocket a cool $37,800. per year with diploma in hand.
You can see the list and marvel at what money can buy at payscale.com.
Emporia State was not mentioned...maybe that's why I'm still broke after 40 years.
Feel free to weep openly with me at this time.