WASHINGTON — It is August, and the Census Bureau is counting things again. This time it was items associated with school, which is just around the corner for children across the country.
Ever wondered, for example, how much people spend on back-to-school clothes? About $7 billion, according to figures released Friday by the bureau, judging from sales at family clothing stores in August 2010, the last back-to-school shopping month for which it has data. That is about the size of the Los Angeles city budget. It represents a small increase from 2009.
The bureau estimated that 55 million students would be enrolled in pre-kindergarten through high school this fall, and that 11 percent would be in private schools. That total is up by about 16 percent from 20 years ago.
The American school population is diverse. In October 2009, members of minority groups made up 43 percent of pre-kindergarten through high school students, while 23 percent had at least one parent born abroad.
The number of students enrolled in colleges and universities this fall will be about 19 million, the bureau said, up by more than a third from 20 years ago. Fifty-six percent of college students are women.
In a grimly familiar statistic, the average annual price of college — $15,876 for in-state students at public universities, and $40,633 for private institutions — was more than double the cost from 1990.
But degrees mean higher earnings. The average annual pay for a worker with a bachelor’s degree was $58,613 in 2008, nearly double the $31,283 earned by workers with a high school diploma only, the bureau said.
As for teachers, the total number in 2009 was seven million. Teachers in California were paid the most, earning an average of $65,800 in the school year ending in 2008. The lowest average salary went to teachers in South Dakota, at $36,700.
The pay scale for other school workers looked like this: Bus drivers earned an average of $16 an hour, janitors earned an average of $14 and cafeteria workers made $11.