Education
Education is a pipeline with two visible ends. At the input, school-age children either find a seat at a high school or they age out as unschooled. Unschooled adults earn the minimum wage for the rest of their working lives, because the labor market keeps treating them as low-skill.
At the output, university admission is academic. Every year a child spends in school earns them a grade from 1 to 10, and a faculty reads the average over at least three years of schooling: an average that rounds to 9 or 10 gets in, which is about the top fifth of students. When more of them qualify than there are seats, the highest averages take the places. A newcomer who already holds a high-school diploma is judged the same way, on the transcript that diploma vouches for. Those who get in and finish enter the city’s pool of college-educated workers, the people who fill specialist jobs like engineer, doctor, lawyer, and teacher.
Left alone, a city’s children spread evenly across the grades: a tenth of them leave school with a 10, a tenth with a 1. Buildings that carry an education aura — the Metropolitan Library, the Planetarium, the City Museum — lift the whole ladder, city-wide rather than street by street. Each point moves one percent of students up a grade, so a single one turns that top tenth into an eleventh and shrinks the bottom to a ninth, and every point puts one percent more of the class over the admission bar.
A child who never got a school seat has no grades at all, and no grades means no diploma and no university. They enter the job market at eighteen instead. School places also protect against crime recruitment: an unenrolled teen aged thirteen to eighteen, without work and in a household short of cash, can enter the monthly recruitment pool. Missing school alone does not make a child an offender.
A school hires for the children it has, not for its classrooms: one teacher for every fifteen pupils enrolled or waiting for a seat, and never fewer than two. Each teacher opens fifteen seats, so a school grows its staff as the town’s children arrive, up to the classrooms it was built with. Every enrolled schoolchild also costs the city a fixed amount per month on top of the teacher salaries listed on this page. A university faculty works differently: it hires its full roster and bills its flat operating cost and professor payroll, with no per-student line, so an empty faculty is a budget hole. Too few schools and the next generation joins the unschooled cluster.
Your levers
- Construction. A high school opens 300 seats from day one; the medium school’s 900 wait for a town of 1,000 residents. Each university faculty opens a fixed number of seats.
- Staffing. Teachers and professors are hired from your pool of qualified adults, and teachers only as the pupils need them.
- Patience. Children who age past school age without a seat never go back. Under-building schools during a population boom locks in a low-skilled cohort for decades.
Parameters
University admission grade
9
The school-record average (grades 1-10, rounded) a student must reach to be admitted to university: a 9 or a 10, the top two grade bands and so about the top fifth of each cohort. Calibrated to selective academic-track systems rather than US open enrollment — Switzerland’s gymnasial maturity rate, the share of a cohort earning the academic-track certificate that grants university entry, was 22.6% in 2021.
Source: Swiss Federal Statistical Office — gymnasial maturity rate, 2021
High school student monthly costs
Itemized monthly cost of educating one public high-school student, excluding teacher salaries (billed separately per teacher). Each line is one expenditure function; the city is charged the sum per enrolled student each month. Total ≈ $679/student/month.
| Key | Value (money) |
|---|---|
| Learning materials | $110 |
| Infrastructure upkeep | $132 |
| Administration | $104 |
| Pupil support | $167 |
| Transportation | $56 |
| Food services | $51 |
| Enterprise and other | $59 |
Pupils per teacher
15
Pupils a school’s teacher teaches. A school hires one teacher for every 15 pupils it has or is asked to take, so a half-empty school pays for the teachers its pupils need rather than for every classroom, and each teacher it has opens 15 seats. The US public-school pupil/teacher ratio has stayed between 15 and 16 since the 2000s.
Basis: measured
Minimum teachers
2
Teachers a school keeps however few pupils it has: one teacher cannot run a school day alone, through a sick day or two classes at once.
Basis: calibration
Teacher monthly
$5,500
The monthly salary paid to each teacher. This amount is deducted from the city’s education budget.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Professor monthly
$10,000
The monthly salary paid to each university professor. Derived from NCES instruction expenditure per FTE ($14,049/yr) scaled to 500 students / 60 faculty.