Numbers Paint Picture of California Schools
Buried in the year-end avalanche of reports on education, there are nuggets of helpful information about what’s going on in schools and colleges nationwide, as well as in the work force. Here are some statistical gems I mined from a recent batch of reports by federal agencies and other sources.
For example, let’s compare California to the other 49 states and the District of Columbia.
California has the second-highest number of classroom teachers (217,228) right behind Texas, which has 219,298.
But we still have the second-highest student-teacher ratio: 22.8 students per teacher. The national average is 17.2 to 1, and Utah’s is highest, at 25 to 1.
The average California teacher makes $39,598 annually, the nation’s third-highest teacher salary. The national average is $32,977; Connecticut teachers make the most ($43,808).
Given those rankings, you may be surprised to learn that California drops to 32nd in the amount of government money typically spent per pupil. Although the national average is $4,960 per student and the District of Columbia is No. 1 at $8,904, our spending is just $4,391.
Our state’s dropout rate is comparably decent: We’re 10th. Louisiana has the highest state dropout rate, and Vermont has the lowest.
As public libraries go, Los Angeles has reason to be proud. L.A. has 62 public libraries--more than any other city--and offers almost 6 million bound volumes for your reading pleasure. Only Boston’s system has more volumes, but remember, they’ve had a head start on us of a couple of centuries.
Now for the latest numbers in higher education.
First, the bad news, as provided by the Peterson’s Guides “Annual Survey of Undergraduate Institutions.”
As of this school year, the average cost of tuition, required fees, and on-campus room and board at a four-year private college is $13,422.
The nation’s three most expensive private colleges: Sarah Lawrence College ($24,380), Brandeis University ($24,227), and Barnard College ($24,162).
The same basics at a four-year public campus cost an average of $5,929 for residents, and $9,528 for non-residents.
If you absolutely must always be seen with the “beautiful people,” then try Denison University in Ohio; it has the best-looking students, according to a recent 28,000-student survey by “The Student Access Guide to the Best Colleges.”
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Duke University has the happiest students, according to the survey, and Caltech offers the best academic program.
A last tidbit about college life in modern America: Smoking is up (to 11.3% from 8.9% in 1897), and beer drinking is down (to 57.3% from 75.2% in 1981). That’s according to a yearly survey by UCLA and the American Council on Education.
As far as making the transition from school to the working world, the Bureau of Labor Statistics prompts some ideas for career choices.
According to the bureau, the nation’s fastest-growing occupations, projected from 1990 to 2005, are (in this order) home health aides, paralegals, systems analysts and computer scientists, personal and home care aides, physical therapists, and medical assistants.
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That jibes perfectly with the fact that there’s a record number of college students majoring in health care fields.
Now for some miscellaneous education-related data from around the country:
The federal government spent $34,122,202,000 on education in fiscal year 1992. (And I still can’t get a decent chalkboard!)
John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” was the book most frequently challenged by censors last school year. They condemned a few others in large numbers too, including “The Color Purple,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Catcher in the Rye” (my all-time favorite book).
Americans won four of the five most recent Nobel Prizes awarded in academic fields worldwide: literature (Derek Walcott), economic science (Gary Becker), physics or medicine (Edmond Fisher and Edwin Krebs), and chemistry (Rudolph Marcus).
And, finally, the word that determined the current National Spelling Bee champion was lyceum.
