Education spending: Just the updated facts

Providing a good education for each of its citizens is one of the most important jobs of state government. So it should come as no surprise that we spend a significant amount of money, about 5 to 6 percent of the state’s gross state product, on public education. But with all the talk about skyrocketing school costs in recent years, it has surprised many that education costs as a percentage of the Vermont economy actually have not changed much over the past two decades. Health care costs, on the other hand, have skyrocketed and now equal nearly 20 percent of the state’s economy.

This is some of the information that we uncovered last year and published in “Vermont Education Spending: The Facts” in October 2010. More people read this report than any we’ve written. So we decided to update it this month with the new data that has become available in the past year. While the new data don’t change the conclusions, the updated version of this popular two-page report is still a quick, illuminating read.