Private expenditure is an important component of education financing in some countries, including the United States, that is not considered in indicators of public investment. Private expenditure can make up 20 percent or more of total educational spending in such countries as Germany, Japan, Spain, and the United States. It becomes even more important at the higher education level, where it makes up more than 40 percent of the total educational expenditure in the United States and over 55 percent in Japan. Cross-country comparisons of financial statistics have often been criticized for the comparability problems in the data. However, the indicators in this section benefit from recent improvements in comparability, particularly in the public sector.
Teacher salaries Teacher salaries are the largest component of educational cost in any country.
While the indicators described previously highlight the extent of U.S. investment in education, its spending on teachers lags behind many industrialized nations. The comparatively low pay of U.S. teachers is not consistent with the high K-12 spending in the United States. Whereas the United States offers a year to year teacher training program, the other G-7 countries often require 5 or more years of training. While the United States has a similar amount of teaching staff as a percentage of the total labor force as do all of the G-7 countries for which data are available except Italy, this percentage was lower in the former West Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States than in all of the remaining countries, except for the Netherlands and Turkey. Additionally, the United States was the only country where nonteaching staff made up a greater percentage of the labor force than teaching staff.