Just the Facts: Catholic Education in the United States

The U.S.’s 16,288 Catholic schools and 167,000 teachers represent the largest non-government school system in the country, serving 2.6 million students, or about 5 percent of the nation’s K-12 population. But more than 3,000 Catholic grade schools and half of all Catholic high schools have closed since the 1960s, when the system’s share of students was 12.6 percent.

That’s because Catholic parents have become less likely to send their children to Catholic schools for their education, explains DePaul University economics professor William Sander in his new book, Catholic Schools: Private and Social Effects. While almost 60 percent of Catholic children born in the 1950s would spend at least one year in a Catholic school, only 20 percent of Catholic children of grade school age attended Catholic schools in 1991.