Jane Austen said, “If you can afford tuition insurance, you don’t need it. If you need tuition insurance, you can’t afford it.”
But insurers still make money targeting Rich Worrywart Parents who usually fail to read the fine print of how much tuition they will actually get back if their child drops out of school for the most likely reasons (not much).
We at Richard E Rich Academy claim we don’t get any percentage or kickback on the tuition insurance we push on parents. No Lobster Thermidor lunches with the insurance company salesman at Ye Olde Towne Inn, no bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape delivered at Christmas, and certainly no golf weekend in Bermuda at an adorable little beachside cottage painted with pink stripes.
Those days on the beach are all in the past. Insurers no longer need to convince private schools to include their brochures in their enrollment packages or plug their services on their blogs gratis.
The real beneficiary of tuition insurance is Richard E Rich itself.
With parents insured, we are relieved of much of the heavy work of debt-collecting from families who think we should refund tuition for kids who get mercury poisoning in our contaminated labs or contemplate suicide after sharing a 5-person dorm room with a psychopath whose father is on the Board of Trustees. While it is a bit of a scam, tuition insurance does sometimes pay.
The tuition insurance brochure in the welcome packet also serves as a warning that, in general, we are not going to give your money back even if your child drops out of school because the soccer coach made them play on a broken leg and now they are crippled.
We benefit from the guilt trip/moral superiority over uninsured parents when we send debt collectors after them because they failed to buy insurance. Even if their child’s dropout would never have been covered by the skimpy insurance, it makes for a good argument.
More important, in terms of our larger Strategic Plan for Private School Domination, the existence of tuition insurance bolsters the idea that high tuitions are a valuable good akin to an appreciating asset like a house.
We want parents to believe they are buying something worthwhile for their $67,000 prep school tuition, and by asking them to protect that tuition, we massage the fantasy that pays for the Polo Pool and the AC in the Koch Cousins Gym.
Never mind that children are, in fact, a declining asset. With the collapse of upward mobility, your child will be unlikely to earn even as much as you, let alone more. In all probability, you will be paying for your children’s children’s tuition to Richard Rich as their generation shoulders the expense of spiraling healthcare and climate costs in a declining empire.
That said, it is important for families to understand what tuition insurance does not cover, and it encompasses a lot of the most common reasons for the very high but closely guarded dropout rate at Richard E Rich Academy.
- You will not be reimbursed when Johnnie wants to leave school and move into a TikTok Hype House to make videos about your sock drawer.
- You will not be reimbursed when Kylee joins an Emo band touring North Korea and blocks you on all social media.
- No tuition refund when your youngster joins a protest about the lack of Gluten Free options in the cafeteria, accidentally torches a bakery delivery truck and ends up in the hospital with third-degree burns.
- Forget getting your money back when Gen Z Jenni starts to feel like a performing seal jumping through plastic hoops for her parents in a sad waterpark of empty dreams. You will have to pay for the therapy that talks her through the crushing pressure you have put on her and the relentless focus on appearances and achievement that has made her too sad to return to school with the other trained animals. That is on you. Bark!
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