With back-to-school sales-tax holidays starting as early as this weekend, the personal-finance website WalletHub Thursday released its 2021 Back-to-School Report.
Among its findings were that 54 percent of parents said they didn’t get their money’s worth from their local schools during the pandemic. WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez said it “makes sense that parents feel like they got a bad deal, given that most schools – both public and private – were online-only for at least a significant portion of the year while taxes and tuition weren’t discounted.”
Fifty-six percent of parents think their child’s future earning potential has been hurt by the pandemic. Gonzalez said this “is most likely an overreaction. Kids are resilient, and most young people probably learned a lot more last year than we think. It’s easy to overreact when you’re a parent and it’s your child’s future at stake, but everyone was pretty much in the same boat last year. It’s fair to say that the earning potential of the country’s young people is just as high as it was before.”
Sixty-seven percent of parents with school-age children said COVID-19 has changed the way they plan to spend money on education with one in four parents saying they will spend more on back-to-school shopping this year as compared to 2020. However, one in 20 parents say they will not do any back-to-school shopping at all this year.
Fifty-seven percent of parents think schools should fully reopen for in-person learning.
Forty-one percent of parents say he job market is their #1 concern for their kids after graduation, followed by debt. WalletHub analyst Jill Gonzalez said this shows that parents are concerned that their children “are too often leaving school overleveraged and underprepared for a competitive employment landscape.”
Seventy-nine percent of parents think all school districts should get the same amount of funding per student. About 60 percent of parents think their children’s education is worth going into debt for. About forty percent of parents say the pandemic has changed the way they save for their children’s college education.