Private school tuition in the greater Seattle area is climbing steadily towards $50,000 a year, and the city’s most prestigious independent institutions are becoming increasingly difficult to access for anyone outside the top tier of the income ladder.
Lakeside School, one of the region’s most storied independent institutions, charges $49,350 for the 2025-26 school year for students in grades 5 through 12. Eastside Preparatory School in Kirkland sits at $46,600 for the same age range. Both schools are highly selective, with Lakeside typically receiving seven to eight applications for every available space, and both have built their reputations on small class sizes, specialist faculty, and a pedagogy centred on inquiry-led, independent learning. Those are not inexpensive propositions, and the cost falls squarely on families. The Bush School in Seattle and The Overlake School in Redmond round out the region’s most expensive institutions, with tuition figures that have risen steadily over the past decade. Across Seattle’s broader private school landscape, the average tuition now stands at $21,199 for elementary schools and $24,212 for high schools, already well above national benchmarks, but those averages obscure how dramatically costs diverge at the premium end of the market.
Seattle is not simply a city with expensive private schools. It is a city that has made private schooling a mainstream choice in a way that few American cities have. Census data released in 2024 showed that private school enrolment for Seattle’s K-12 students hit an all-time high, estimated at 19,400 students, representing one quarter of the city’s total 77,200 K-12 students. Among the 50 cities with the largest K-12 enrolment nationally, Seattle ranked second for the share of children in private schools, behind only San Francisco. Nationally, 12.8 per cent of K-12 students attend private school. In Seattle, the figure is roughly double that. That growth has not occurred in isolation. Seattle Public Schools has seen its enrolment decline from 52,381 students in 2020-21 to 49,240 in 2024-25, a loss of more than 3,000 children over four years. As public school enrolment falls and private school numbers climb, the question of who benefits from the city’s educational infrastructure becomes harder to ignore.
John Burbank, executive director of the Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute, has been direct about what that pattern means. “One area which is often left out is the percent of Seattle kids sent to private K-12 schools by their parents, and the income and racial segregation which this enables,” Burbank wrote. “I do not think that sending kids to private school is a benign act, as many Seattle parents like to believe.”
These schools are acutely aware of the optics, and many have invested meaningfully in financial aid. For the 2025-26 school year, Lakeside awarded $10 million in need-based tuition assistance to 30 per cent of its student body, and will award an additional $600,000 for non-tuition costs such as food, books, transport, and school trips. The average tuition paid by a financial aid recipient is $11,722, a significant reduction from the headline rate, though still a sum beyond the reach of most Seattle families. In the 2024-25 school year, Lakeside students self-identified their primary race and ethnicity as follows: 32 per cent Asian American, 28 per cent European American, 19 per cent multiracial, 11 per cent African American, and 4 per cent Latino or Hispanic American. The school maintains affinity groups, diversity programmes, and an active equity office. The language of inclusion is embedded throughout its institutional identity.
And yet the structural reality is stubborn. More than three-quarters of the student body at some of Seattle’s major independent schools pay full tuition. Families must first know these schools exist, believe admission is within reach for their child, navigate a selective and resource-intensive application process, and in many cases still cover substantial costs even after aid is awarded. The broader context makes the tuition figures more striking still. The median household income in Washington state is approximately $95,000. A single year at Lakeside consumes more than half of what a typical Washington family earns across twelve months. As one analyst writing on Seattle’s private school landscape noted, tuition for one child at Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences is equivalent to three-quarters of the median household income in Lincoln County, a predominantly rural county in eastern Washington. The contrast captures something important: what is a routine cost of living decision for a household earning $300,000 a year is, for the majority of Washington families, simply not a category of expenditure that exists.
The rise of high-cost private schooling in Seattle does not occur in a vacuum. It interacts with and arguably shapes the public school system it sits alongside. When affluent families withdraw from the public system, they take with them not just their children but their political attention, their advocacy, and the social capital that tends to follow concentrated wealth. What remains in the public system is a more economically and, in many cases, racially concentrated student body. One reader, responding to a Seattle Times investigation into private school enrolment patterns, noted that in gentrifying South Seattle neighbourhoods, public high schools have seen dramatic demographic shifts. Rainier Beach High School, he observed, is only three per cent white, yet the surrounding neighbourhood has grown significantly whiter with gentrification. The implication is not subtle: the children of new, wealthier residents in these neighbourhoods are not, in significant numbers, attending the local public schools.
The institutions themselves frame the conversation differently. Lakeside’s stated mission is to develop creative minds, healthy bodies, and ethical spirits in intellectually capable young people, with a commitment to diversity and community at the centre of its educational model. Eastside Prep describes its pedagogy as built on inquiry, experience, and the cultivation of self-directed learners, students who construct their own knowledge rather than receive it passively. These are genuine and, by most accounts, effective educational philosophies. The schools produce strong outcomes: Lakeside’s alumni include Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, former Washington Governor Booth Gardner, and Greenpeace USA executive director Annie Leonard. The network effects of a Lakeside or Eastside Prep education extend well beyond the classroom.
But outcomes for those who attend tell only part of the story. The more important question, and the one these schools are least equipped to answer, is what happens to the children who never get the chance to apply. As tuition continues its upward march, Seattle’s most prestigious independent schools risk becoming less a ladder of opportunity and more a mirror of the city’s deepening economic divide. The question is not whether these schools offer a quality education. Most clearly do. The question is who gets to find out.
