Decline in Catholic School Enrollment: a Sensible Explanation

March 31, 2012
Here at the beginning of this long essay, I am not going to go over the evils of contraception, except to dwell briefly on my fear that orthodox Catholic discussion of contraception seems to be deteriorating into turning it into the root of all evil.

I've read, for example, that contraception is the reason that housing values got so high. The theory is that DINKs (Double-Income, No Kid couples) bid up the prices. Actually, where I live, Catholic families with a few kids are also forcing the prices of housing northward by buying the most expensive places they can afford. I'm sure that no Catholic family is saying, "Well, everything we need is more convenient and better in Bethesda, but we'll pay less for a place in Bowie so rising prices don't ripple down to the people in SE DC."

Lately I've read that the decline in Catholic schools --enrollment down 52%, school closures at 23% in the early 2000s(1) --, has also been caused by contraception. All those Catholics going against the Church's teaching on birth control have had fewer kids and look where Catholic schools are now.

Also a prominent archbishop, in the face of many contentious Catholic-school shutterings, just declared that if only Catholics had pushed politicians for tuition tax credits and vouchers yesterday, we wouldn't be consolidating today.

Both the above explanations of school contraction assume that a) practicing Catholics qua practicing Catholics ipso facto value Catholic education and b) practicing Catholics who have kids automatically desire to send those kids to Catholic schools and only a lack of money is preventing them from enrolling their kids thence.

I think that neither a) nor b) are the case. I think that a lot of renewed, practicing, Rosary-praying, marching-for-life Catholics who have kids don't give a hang about Catholic education.

In order to justify my assertion, I'm going to explain the current dynamics in Catholic schooling using two fictional but paradigmatic families in two fictional but paradigmatic dioceses. My paradigms are based on years of observing family and friends and history as it unfolds in real dioceses.

The Preppies of Metropolis

My first archetypal Catholic family includes three children and is parented by Ryan and Bunny Preppy. The Preppies live in an affluent suburb of one of America's largest cities. Let's call it Metropolis.

Several parish elementary schools operate in Metropolis's wealthier suburbs. Greater Metropolis is currently served by six Catholic high schools. All of these are run by religious orders such as the Jesuits, the Christian Brothers, The Daughters of Charity.

The institutions with wooded campuses, the word "Preparatory" in their titles and tuitions upward of $25,000.00/year are considered to be the most prestigious. The schools of cinderblock with the word "High" in their titles and tuitions around $13,000/year are conceived as being better academically and safer than the area's public high schools.

A little "history." The Archdiocese of Metropolis had its own Catholic school system which, at its height in the 1950s, boasted several high schools scattered throughout the city. It was impossible to keep some of these institutions open after Catholic families like the Preppies' grandparents moved upward socially and out to the suburbs.

Remaining schools endured with salaried lay faculties who had replaced nuns. Naturally, these salaried lay teachers were interested in preserving their livelihoods even as enrollment continued to decline. They unionized and thus created an adversarial relationship with the archdiocese.

Cardinal X attempted to keep some inner-city institutions open for the benefit of disadvantaged youth and of unionized teachers. However these, too, became unsustainable and were closed with howls of "The church is abandoning the poor!" reverberating off their walls.

The liberal, politically correct faculties -- Many were not even Catholic -- who staffed these schools had no interest in building strong Catholic identities or in inculcating Catholic values. They did not bother to counter the culture and attitude of disadvantage that the students brought through the doors.

Indeed some teachers celebrated the dysfunction and didn't bat an eye when they heard filthy abusive language or saw fornication occurring in the halls. Kids are going to be like that, they assumed. The students matriculated little better off morally or intellectually than their public-school counterparts. They did not become the high-earning, loyal alumni whose generous donations keep alma maters afloat.

All the order-operated private schools in Metropolis make a few full scholarships available to disadvantaged youth.

Despite the statistics that show declining Catholic school enrollment nationwide, all six order-operated schools in The Metropolis Area are thriving, bursting at their brick and block corners with students. And guess what: the ones with the wooded campuses and $25,000.00/year tuitions happen to be the ones that are most in demand. They turn away hundreds of applicants every year.

That's because these schools are located where there are dense populations of Ryan and Bunny Preppies. I don't mean the fictional family name Preppy to be derogatory here. The Preppies attend Mass as a family every Sunday and are active in their parish and its school.

Ryan went to one of the order-operated prep schools in Metropolis and Bunny attended a comparable Catholic school in another city. Both have undergraduate and professional degrees from major universities. Although Ryan is a partner in a firm, Bunny has resumed working full time in her profession as the kids have gotten older.

In Metropolis both parents must work. The Preppies' don't live in the richest part of their suburb but still their modest, 2,000-square-foot house cost $700,000.00. Annual property taxes are over $12,000. Three Preppy kids attending Catholic schools simultaneously adds up to $50,000.00/year, a bill that will triple when they reach college. Driving the kids to all their activities - sports, music lessons, play practice -- necessitates new Toyotas every few years.

Say what people will about the orthodoxy of Catholic schools of recent decades, none of the surviving institutions in Metropolis have ever failed to deliver superior education even though, in the 1970s and '80s, 98% of their graduates left the church. The religion drop-out rate, however, is now declining as younger John Paul II Catholics are signing on to faculties and administrations and stressing the primacy of true faith.

Above are the main reasons that Ryan and Bunny Preppy wouldn't think of not sending their kids to Catholic elementary and secondary schools. They know that lay teachers of Religion in the JPII/BXVI Era are just as good, if not better, than the nuns of former years with whom Catholic schools are traditionally identified.

Family tradition is another reason that Ryan wants his sons to go to the prep school that he attended. A Preppy cousin is enrolled there now. The school was established in the mid 1800s and has a lot of charming customs and history.

Also many alumni have distinguished themselves in Law, Medicine, Politics, Literature, Drama. Who knows how many future senators or Fortune 500 CEOs are sweating through Trigonometry or First-year Latin today? Ryan wants his sons to make friendships and connections with such people. No one, including the disadvantaged kids on scholarship, whoever played on X Prep's football or basketball teams is ever hurting.

If the Preppies' kids don't get accepted at the $25,000/year school, they also apply to the $18,000/year school. They will settle for the $13,000/year school, if necessary. It's still better and safer than the local public high.

The Yeomans of FrederickLancasterburg

Our second archetypal Catholic family, which also includes three children, is that of Joe and Debbie Yeoman. The Yeomans live in a recently-built, farm-surrounded development a few miles outside a small American city which we will call FrederickLancasterburg.

The 10,000-square-mile Diocese of WinchesterReading and FrederickLancasterburg has only two each of Catholic elementary and high schools. While these and a few more that closed were once staffed by nuns, they nowadays employ only lay teachers. The remaining schools operate at half capacity, one reason being that home-schooling is very popular in the region. Some parents don't trust schools -- Catholic or otherwise -- or anything or anybody else for that matter.

The Yeoman Family lives comfortably. Their spacious house is the same size as The Preppies' on the north side of Metropolis only the Yeomans' cost half a million dollars less.

Joe is a tradesman who during the week sometimes has to travel to a big city where the work is. Debbie has a Nursing B.A. from the state university and works part time in a long-term-care facility. Like The Preppies, The Yeomans attend Mass every Sunday and are active in their parish. Their boys are altar servers.

Debbie loves watching Mother Angelica reruns on EWTN. Sometimes she goes to pray the Rosary and listen to the reports of a parishioner who visits Medjugorge, Fatima and other Marian apparition sites. Every January, Mrs. Yeoman and the kids travel with a parish group to The National Right-To-Life March in Washington, DC.

The Yeoman kids do sports. Joe's hobby is hunting. Debbie makes crafts, but much of the family's leisure time is passed watching TV, reality shows, anything that's broadcast in prime time. There are few books in The Yeoman Household although Debbie confesses to reading a "trashy" romance now and then.

When it comes to education, The Yeomans have more limited expectations of it than The Preppies. For this family from outside a small American city, schooling is something that people endure to get good-paying jobs. They chafe at having to take "boring" History or English classes as diploma requirements.

"Religion" is something that people learn in the home and church, not in a classroom, unless it's a CCD class. Besides, Debbie's father, who went to Catholic elementary and secondary schools in the old days when they were run by sisters, says that the 2000s versions are not "Catholic" schools if there aren't nuns teaching in them.

Things such as tradition and distinguished alumni are meaningless in FrederickLancasterburg. The Catholic schools are flat-roofed brick structures with aluminum-framed windows that were built ca. 1960. The most tradition is a decades-old sports rivalry between The Saints at one school and The Monarchs at the other. Famous folk from the area are most likely to be pro ballplayers and Grammy-Award-winning pop singers.

If Debbie worked longer hours, she and Joe could afford the $1,200-$8,000/year/kid Catholic-school tuition. However both Catholic parish schools and one of the Catholic high schools are fifty miles from where the Yeomans live. The closer Catholic high school is on the other side of FrederickLancasterburg. The township area public high school is only three miles away from their house and has buses.

As for the safety of their kids at the public school, The Yeomans have no fear. Most of their neighbors and other families in their parish send their children to it. Non-Catholic students come from families who share the same values -- those of hard work, good-will, responsible behavior, self reliance. So strong and confident is Christianity in the region, some of the students in the school participate in an on-campus prayer group and Bible study.

The Yeomans hope that all three of their kids will go to college. However it will not be a Catholic college but the state university which emphasizes career training and which has a great football team that everybody to the horizon roots for.

Catholics such as the Yeomans are in many respects the backbone of the church. They are certainly far more numerous in it than are The Preppies. They are good, kind people, but they are primarily people of action and of sacramentals. That is why, to them, a Catholic school, even if it has dedicated, lay Religion teachers, is not a Catholic school unless there are women wearing black habits and rosaries running it.

One of the great things about the Renewal is that many Catholics are reading more, learning more, gaining wisdom, developing their God-given talents. However not all the faithful, not most of the faithful being touched by the spirit moving this side of the Second Millennium, are growing in such a manner.

For people who agonize over the decline of Catholic schools and hope for informed, faithful citizens, the following is probably a maddening thought. It sometimes is for me. A typical Catholic is still pretty much what he or she would be socially -- be it scholar and gentleman, shy hick, or uncouth trailer trash -- if he or she had other or no Catholic faith at all.

Those of us who observe, reflect, set the tones should not commit the error of Vatican II "reformers" who expected everybody to be a theologian, a thinker approaching the faith like a Ph.D. That unrealistic assumption of how the average Catholic lives out his faith is why the church has lost so many blue-collar whites and hispanics.

Families such as the Yeomans may pray more, be more involved in their parish, be better citizens. None of this should be discounted. God knows how many small-city, less-educated folks will be saved from the curse of methamphetamine because of their rediscovered simple Catholic faith.

However these small-city, less-educated folk are not going have much use for Catholic schools. This means that they're not going to have any use for Catholic colleges and universities either. This further means that at this time only idiots and megalomaniacs would think of starting new colleges and universities.

It is not contraception, it is not malevolent, church-closing infiltrators, it is also not a lack of government favors that are causing the decline of Catholic schools. It is the free market operating on them as it operated on blacksmiths in the early 1900s. Some day in the future there will be a sufficient number of nuns and new John Boscos and de La Salles to bring Catholic education back, even among the poor. That day is not today nor is it even tomorrow, but it will be in God's good time.

Yes, There is Good News

For now Catholic education seems to be retreating to affluent suburbs. That, in fact, is the good news in all of this.

You read stuff about "elites" who are hostile to the church and its values. Those elites are losing ground as kings of the elite hill, That's not only because they are not reproducing -- They believe in contraception, of course -- it's because they are becoming more and more stupid. Idiocracy (a funny-as-Hell movie) is now.

Yet the traditionally-minded Catholics in those affluent suburbs are having larger-than-average families and sending their kids to Catholic schools. These schools will prepare those already-advantaged kids to join and perhaps even dominate the elites of the future.

This means that there will be more pro-life, pro-family lawyers, judges, lawmakers. It means that there may even be half-decent MBA's with an ounce of brains and a sense of justice and social responsibility. It's good for science, the arts, literature, all creative endeavor. It means that civilization will go on.

Don't discount The Yeomans and don't discount The Preppies.

(1) Figures are from NCEA Catholic School Data United States Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools
2011-2012: The Annual Statistical Report on Schools, Enrollment and Staffing