[nostrademons]

Baumol's Cost Disease. Basically anything that requires non-scalable human interactions is super expensive, because the cost of labor in the U.S. is super expensive. People don't realize it because when the Baby Boomers grew up, the U.S. effectively had a monopoly on capital, which meant that our "ordinary factory workers" could enjoy massively outsized productivity relative to the rest of the world. Now our ordinary factory workers are being undercut by ordinary factory workers abroad, since the rest of the world has rebuilt its capital stock, and so only professions that still enjoy global monopolies (eg. big tech) can afford service workers.

For comparison, a mid-range preschool in the Bay Area costs about $30K/year, vs. $14K/year in-state tuition for UC Berkeley. If students get about 24 hours of instruction/week, for two 13-week semesters, that works out to about $22/hour. A nanny is about $25-30/hour, a therapist is $100+/hour, plumbers are about $200/hour, a lawyer can be $750-1000/hour. Given 20-30 students in the classroom, costs are not all that different from lawyers.

Schools in Europe/Asia are government-subsidized, like the public school system in the U.S, so you don't see the true cost.