Kirk Semple has a fun and interesting article in the New York Times on how affluent foreign-born parents are choosing to send their children to public schools at a far higher rate than comparably affluent native-born parents in New York city.

In New York, the affluent typically send their children to private schools. But not the foreign-born affluent. In a remarkable divergence, a large majority of wealthy foreign-born New Yorkers are sending their children to public schools, according to an analysis of census data.
There are roughly 15,500 households in the city with school-age children where the total income is at least $150,000 and both parents were born abroad. Of those, about 10,500, or 68 percent, use only the public schools, the data show.
That is nearly double the rate of American-born parents in the city in the same income bracket.
The census data include both immigrants and those temporarily stationed in the city for work. The disparity is even sharper for foreign-born parents with household incomes of $200,000 or more. About 61 percent send their children only to public schools, compared with 28 percent of native-born couples in the same income bracket.

So what could be going on here? Semple offers some suggestions:

In the United States over all, there is almost no difference between the two groups, apparently because wealthy people outside of urban areas are much more likely to show allegiance to the public schools. Nationally, 73 percent of native-born couples and 76 percent of foreign-born couples send their children only to public school, according to the data, which was analyzed by Andrew A. Beveridge and Susan Weber-Stoger, demographers at Queens College.
In interviews, affluent foreign-born New Yorkers said that like all conscientious parents, they weighed various criteria in choosing schools, including quality, cost and location. But many said they were also swayed by the greater ethnic and economic diversity of the public schools. Some said that as immigrants, they had learned to navigate different cultures — a skill they wanted to imbue in their children.
“When they go to public school, they’re in a whole new world, a whole world of different people and different values, which is what the world is like,” said Lyn Bollen, who grew up in Birmingham, England, and attended — and taught at — state-run schools. “Shielding them from that is doing them a disservice.”

This makes intuitive sense. People who decide to uproot themselves from the native country are more likely to be comfortable with ethnic and economic diversity, particularly those who choose to settle in New York city as opposed to, say, an affluent suburb, where (as Beveridge and Weber-Stoger observe) affluent parents are far less likely to send their children to private schools. One obvious reason for the dominance of public schools outside of big, diverse cities is that the price of real estate serves the same exclusionary function as high tuition. That is, parents who send their children to public schools in affluent districts can reasonably assume that most of the pupils will come from broadly similar backgrounds (e.g., intact families led by college-educated parents, etc.), thus limiting the downside risk involved in exposing your children to the children of strangers.

The parents that Semple interviews don’t seem indifferent to downside risk. They’ve clustered in neighborhoods with high-quality local public schools, or they’ve sought out bilingual programs that presumably select for certain kinds of engaged parents.

The deeper issue could be, however, that affluent Americans are unusual in the attention they devote to the co-production of human capital, as Gary and Valerie Ramey have argued:

While less-educated mothers increased their childcare time by over four hours a week, college-educated mothers increased their childcare time by over nine hours per week. Fathers showed the same patterns, but with smaller magnitudes. Why would highly educated parents increase the amount of time they allocate to childcare at the same time that their own market returns have skyrocketed? After finding no empirical support for standard explanations, such as selection or income effects, we offer a new explanation. We argue that increased competition for college admissions may be an important source of these trends. We provide empirical support for our explanation with a comparison of trends between the U.S. and Canada, across ethnic groups in the U.S., and across states in the U.S.

This makes intuitive sense in the context of Semple’s article. In most of northern Europe, higher education is not as hierarchical as it is in the United States, e.g., students who pass the Abitur are qualified for admission to all German universities, though there has been a tentative move towards greater selectivity in a small handful of programs within larger universities. So if you are a German living in New York city who assumes that her children will attend German universities, you are considerably less likely to worry about whether gaining admission to elite school X or Y will give them a marginally better chance of being admitted to Yale or Swarthmore. Those German parents who do want their children to attend elite U.S. universities will presumably have a different attitude, and a concomitantly greater desire to send their children to prestigious private schools.

Daniel Sacks and Betsey Stevenson offer a number alternative hypotheses to explain the rise in childcare time among the college-educated, e.g., affluent American parents might simply enjoy active parenting:

Whereas a traditional view of marriage emphasizes the gains from specialization in the production of children and household goods (Becker 1981), hedonic marriages generate “marital surplus” in the form of complementarities in consumption: spouses enjoy spending time with each other. To the extent that spouses enjoy spending time in childcare with each other, the rise in hedonic marriage can explain a substantial fraction of the relative rise in childcare time. Since college admissions offices do not observe how many parents engage in these activities with their children, it is unlikely that college competition is driving the increase in joint parenting time. These results are only suggestive, however, because it is not known how time spent in childcare with one’s spouse has trended over time.

Or there could be some kind of tipping dynamic:

The difficulty in explaining the rise in childcare time is that it happened so suddenly, whereas the possible driving forces, such as competition for college, the rise of hedonic marriage, and the increasing importance of cognitive and noncognitive skills, have all changed gradually (Hoxby 2009, Cunha and Heckman 2008). The sudden rise in childcare time suggests a tipping dynamic. This might arise because the value of childcare time depends on what other children are doing. If every child can play in the park, then no parent need closely watch her own child, because of safety in numbers. 7 But if other children are with their parents, then no parent can unilaterally send her child to the park unattended. As parents grow increasingly vigilant, the equilibrium level of childcare could shift rapidly upward. If tipping dynamics are important, then any of the possible driving forces could be important in explaining the growth in childcare time.

This last possibility is an interesting one. Are Americans parents simply more “vigilant,” i.e., paranoid, than non-American parents? One hesitates to make generalizations, but there is certainly anecdotal evidence to suggest that American parents are indeed more concerned about the risks posed by crime, drugs, and unsavory characters than their European counterparts. This, in turn, would lead us to suspect that affluent parents who choose to live in New York city would be particularly keen on insulating their children from danger, real and perceived, than cosmopolitan European or Asian parents, who tend to take a somewhat more relaxed attitude.

We can argue over whether native-born Americans or Europeans have the better attitude. But this discussion points to a much wider set of issues regarding intergenerational economic mobility. As we’ve discussed — and as Scott Winship has discussed — in this space, a big part of the intergenerational mobility story is that the children of affluent parents tend to “stick” to the upper-middle-class. For relative mobility to increase, more children of the upper-middle-class will have to move down the class ladder from their parents. It seems, however, that affluent American parents are keen to provide their children with every human capital advantage. Here is how Sacks and Stevenson put it:

Investment-based explanations, in contrast, suggest that the increase in childcare is generating valuable returns for the next generation. Parents may be increasingly eager to invest in their children because of perceived increases in labor market returns to cognitive and noncognitive skills. Although socially beneficial, childcare-as-investment also means that college-educated parents’ children, advantaged to begin with, will enjoy even greater levels of human capital than their peers, and thus the rising gap in childcare hours by education may portend widening inequality. [Emphasis added]

Foreign-born parents in New York city might offer a microcosm of why northern European societies have somewhat higher levels of relative mobility: part of it less stickiness at the bottom, but part of it is also less stickiness at the top as parents worry less about their children earning somewhat less (in relative terms) than themselves, perhaps because of more generous social protections, etc.