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Show EDUCATION COST NOT EXCESSIVE. The increasing expenditures for education, the bugbear of taxpayers tax-payers and the dread of educators, are not what they seem to be at all, but are really decreasing proportionately. This apparently paradoxical conclusion is reached by Mabel Newcomer of the Educational Finance Inquiry Commission, in a study of financial statistics of public education in the United States, in the New York Sun. She declares that education, in spite of its rapidly mounting expenditures, is actually receiving a noticeably smaller proportion of the total government outlay than formerly. The percentage of total governmental expenditures devoted to education decreased from 1 7.6 per cent in 1 9 1 0 to 1 1.8 per cent in 1920, or about one-third, Miss Newcomer states. The percentage of national governmental expenditures devoted to education decreased de-creased from 1.3 per cent to 1 per cent, or about one-fourth. In the same period the percentage of state governmental expenditures devoted to education decreased one-fifth. Only in the case of local governmental expenditures did the percentage for education increase, in-crease, and then only one-ninth, according to her figures. The cost of highways, Miss Newcomer observes, is increasing at a far greater rate than, the cost of education. And the outlay for both education and highways, although increasing rapidly in absolute amounts, together comprised only 19.8 per cent of the total government govern-ment budget in 1920, as against 8.6 per cent in 1910 and 31.6 per cent in 1 9 1 5. Of total state governmental expenditures, she continues, the percentage for education in 1920 had decreased to four-fifths of what it had been in 1910, while the percentage for highways in 1920 had increased to five times what it was in 1 9 1 0. Of total local governmental gov-ernmental expenditures, the percentage for educatiori increased about one-ninth from 1910 to 1920, while the percentage for highways high-ways increased only about one-thirtieth. |