This week I'm moving two kids into two dorm rooms. My daughter's heading back for her sophomore year; my son's leaving for his first. Same week, same loaded-up car, and a house that's suddenly two people quieter.
I'm an emotional wreck, overcome by sentimentality. The polling? Less sentimental. Across the surveys Poll Vault caught this month, the most dominant emotion is anxiety. Anxiety over bills and student safety.
The Back-to-School Shopping Bag
Back-to-school spending is set to hit a record $43.3 billion, nearly 10% above last year. School-supply prices are up almost 8% in twelve months, and the jumps land hardest on the cheapest things in the cart: lunch boxes 27%, notebooks 23%, and index cards 22%. Deloitte and the NRF both point at tariffs and oil prices.
Parents are covering the gap with debt. Beyond Finance surveyed 2,000 parents and found 39% expect to take on new debt this season, 23% putting the bulk of supplies on a credit card. From there it gets darker: 15% have taken a personal or payday loan, 12% have pawned something, 8% have gambled to cover school costs. 15% are late on rent or the mortgage to do it.
They feel it as more than arithmetic. 70% say they feel trapped by pressure to match what other parents spend; 74% feel guilty when they can't buy everything on the list; 69% say falling short would make them feel like a failure as a parent. Of the parents who bought under that pressure — including name-brand laptops over $1,000 — 42% regret it.
The back-to-school aisle has become a place where a lot of parents go into debt.
What Parents Are Actually Afraid Of
SurveyMonkey asked 2,053 parents to name their top back-to-school concern. 38% said safety — gun violence, bullying — more than double academic progress at 16%. The culture-war material that dominates education coverage barely surfaced. AI in the classroom, the subject everyone is arguing about, came in at just 4%.
The one thing parents broadly agree on is phones. Change Research finds 80% of voters support banning or restricting cell phones in schools, including 84% of Democrats and 91% of Republicans — one of the strongest bipartisan majorities anywhere in K-12. Even voters under 35, who grew up with the phones, back the restriction at 68%.
Move-In Day Math
Sallie Mae puts the average cost of a year of college at $34,019, up 10% in just twelve months, with families paying 49% of it out of pocket. Unsurprisingly 66% of families support federal caps on student loans, and 53% want colleges to answer those caps by cutting tuition, not expanding aid.
A lot of colleges don't have the room to. Niche surveyed enrollment leaders and found only 61% expected to hit their fall 2026 targets — and just 50% at colleges under 2,000 students. Small schools are discounting tuition by a median of 63% to fill seats. So while college is getting more expensive, some of them are running closer to the edge than the price tag lets on.
Despite All This, Rising Optimism
After five years of "schools are broken," parents are getting more optimistic, not less. EdChoice finds public optimism about K-12's direction up to 37%, ten points higher than 2023 and climbing for the third straight year. Among parents it's 43%. Parent pessimism has fallen from a record 64% in 2024 to 56% — still a majority who say schools are on the wrong track, but the lowest that number has read in years.
The kids are ahead of the adults on this. In that same SurveyMonkey survey, 82% of parents say their child is at least somewhat excited to go back; 57% say their child is also stressed. Both are true in my house.
This week Poll Vault tracked 71 polls across ten topics — see them all →
Coming Soon: The Machine in the Classroom
AI barely appears above — just 4% of parents name it their top back-to-school worry. As an immediate concern it's small; as a values question it's enormous, and parents, teachers, and students have each decided the other two groups are the problem. More on this in a forthcoming edition.
What Else We Tracked This Week
- Support for state cellphone restrictions jumps to 48%, up from 36% in 2024 — EdChoice
- New York voters want school choice — and want graduation standards kept — Empire Center / Cygnal
- Iowa voters split evenly on state-funded private school tuition — Emerson College
- Florida voters back school choice and flexible K-12 models — Targoz
- North Carolina school safety rebounds toward pre-pandemic levels — NC Dept. of Public Instruction
- Most parents now weigh a school's AI approach when choosing schools — SurveyMonkey
Until next time,
Alex Lundry
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