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Metrics that matter
• Per-student expenditure adjusted for purchasing-power parity (PPP) – the most comparable yard-stick across countries.
• Spending as a share of gross domestic product (GDP).
• Public vs. private funding mix.
• Education levels examined: primary, secondary (K-12) and tertiary (higher education).
(Figures cited are the most recent available from OECD Education at a Glance 2023, UNESCO, and U.S. National Center for Education Statistics. All amounts are in 2020-20 21 U.S. dollars, PPP-adjusted, unless noted.)
Per-student spending in primary and secondary education
United States: ≈ $17 100 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student.
OECD average: ≈ $11 400.
Ranking: 5th highest among the 38 OECD members; only Luxembourg (~$24 000), Switzerland (~$20 300), Norway (~$18 500) and Austria (~$17 300) spend more.
Major peers for comparison:
– Germany: ~$12 000
– Canada: ~$13 200
– United Kingdom: ~$11 600
– France: ~$11 300
– Japan: ~$10 800
– Korea: ~$10 200
Per-student spending in tertiary (college/university) education
United States: ≈ $35 100 per FTE student – by far the highest in the OECD.
OECD average: ≈ $17 600.
Next-closest spenders: United Kingdom (~$25 800), Canada (~$23 300) and Sweden (~$22 400).
Roughly 41 % of U.S. tertiary spending comes from private sources (mainly tuition), compared with 22 % across the OECD.
Spending as a share of GDP (all education levels combined, 2019)
• Total (public + private): U.S. 6.1 % of GDP vs. OECD average 5.1 %.
• Public only: U.S. 4.4 % vs. OECD 4.4 % (exactly average).
• Private only: U.S. 1.7 % vs. OECD 0.8 % – the highest reliance on private dollars in the industrialized world.
Variation inside the United States
• Education is largely a state and local responsibility: about 8 % of K-12 money is federal.
• 2021 state-level per-pupil outlays ranged from ≈ $25 k in New York and the District of Columbia to ≈ $9 k in Utah and Idaho— wider disparities than those seen between many sovereign nations.
• District-level variation (due to property taxes and state formulas) is larger still.
Trend lines
• Real U.S. K-12 spending per pupil grew ~28 % between 2000 and 2020; the OECD average rose ~20 %.
• Tertiary spending grew even faster in the United States, driven by climbing tuition, room-and-board costs and research budgets.
Spending vs. outcomes
• Despite above-average spending, U.S. 15-year-olds scored at the OECD mean in reading and science and below the mean in math on PISA 2022.
• Higher-spending peers (e.g., Norway, Switzerland) do only modestly better; lower-spending systems (e.g., Estonia, Poland) often outperform the United States.
• Research attributes the gap to factors such as poverty concentration, inequitable resource distribution, larger administrative overhead, and a higher share of special-education and transportation costs rather than purely instructional spending.
Key takeaways
• On any spending metric except “public share only,” the United States is near the top of the international league tables—and is number one in college outlays.
• The country’s spending pattern is distinctive: heavy reliance on local property taxes for K-12 and on private tuition for higher education.
• Intra-national disparities are wider than inter-national ones, complicating simple “U.S. vs. them” narratives.
• High expenditure has not translated into commensurately high standardized test performance, suggesting that how money is allocated may matter as much as how much is spent.