I want to walk through the chart you’re looking at, because charts like this can be powerful—or misleading—depending on how they’re read.
Each dot on the chart represents a New Jersey school district.
The horizontal axis (x-axis) shows total student enrollment—how big the district is.
The vertical axis (y-axis) shows how much money is spent per student during the 2024–2025 school year.
Most of the dots are black. One dot—Hoboken—is highlighted in bright red.
The dashed line running through the middle is a trend line. It shows the typical relationship between district size and per-pupil spending. In general, as districts get larger, spending per student tends to level off or even decrease slightly because large systems can spread costs across more students.
The shaded area around that line is a confidence band. Think of it as the “normal range.” Districts inside that band are spending roughly what we’d expect given their size. Districts far above or below it are doing something unusual.
This is where the story gets interesting.
Hoboken is a small-to-mid-sized district—about 3,600 students. Districts that size usually cluster near the middle of the chart. But Hoboken sits well above the confidence band, spending about $26,300 per student. That puts it higher than many districts that are two, three, or even ten times larger.
This isn’t a judgment. It’s a fact about position.
For comparison, look at places like Newark, Jersey City, or Elizabeth. These are massive districts with tens of thousands of students and very real, complex needs. Yet their per-pupil spending is lower than Hoboken’s, even though they serve far more students and face far greater challenges.
You’ll also notice another major outlier: Lakewood, which spends very high amounts per pupil as well—but for very different structural reasons. That’s why context matters.
What this chart does not do is explain why a district spends more or less. It doesn’t account for special education, poverty rates, language services, or local tax structures. That kind of analysis comes later.
What this chart does do is isolate scale. It asks a simple question first:
Given how big this district is, does its spending look typical—or unusual?
In Hoboken’s case, the answer is clear. Its spending is unusually high for a district of its size, even after accounting for normal variation.
That doesn’t mean the spending is right or wrong. But it does mean it deserves serious, transparent discussion—especially when resources are limited and every dollar represents choices about priorities.
Hoboken Is an Outlier No Matter Which Enrollment Band You Put It In
One of the most common ways people try to explain away uncomfortable data is by arguing about categories. In New Jersey, school districts are often discussed within NJDOE enrollment bands—for good reason. Size matters. Scale affects costs.
But here’s the key point that keeps getting lost:
Hoboken is a statistical outlier in per-pupil spending regardless of which enrollment band you place it in.
Let’s be precise.
Hoboken’s total enrollment (about 3,600 students) puts it right on the boundary between two NJDOE groupings:
the upper end of the K–12 / 1,801–3,500 band, or
the very bottom of the K–12 / 3,500+ band.
Reasonable people can debate which label fits better.
What is not debatable is what happens next.
When we plot total enrollment against 2024–25 per-pupil spending for New Jersey districts, we see a clear, predictable pattern: districts of similar size cluster within a relatively tight spending range. That’s what the trend line and confidence band show. This isn’t ideology—it’s descriptive statistics.
Hoboken sits well outside that range.
Compared to districts just below it in size (the top of the 1,801–3,500 band), Hoboken spends dramatically more per student.
Compared to districts just above it in size (the bottom of the 3,500+ band), Hoboken still spends far more per student.
Even many districts two to ten times larger, serving far higher-need populations, spend less per pupil.
So the “band” argument collapses under scrutiny.
If Hoboken were merely high within its peer group, it would sit near the top of a cluster.
Instead, it sits above the cluster entirely.
That’s what statisticians mean by an outlier: a case that does not behave like others in its neighborhood, even after accounting for the most obvious structural factor—size.
None of this answers why Hoboken spends what it does.
It does not claim waste, mismanagement, or bad faith.
It does not deny that needs exist.
But it does establish something essential:
Hoboken’s per-pupil spending cannot be explained away by enrollment size or band placement.
Once that point is accepted, the conversation has to move forward—away from technical deflection and toward transparent discussion of priorities, tradeoffs, and opportunity costs.
Methods note (interpretation of trend line and confidence bands).
The figure plots New Jersey school districts’ total student enrollment against 2024–2025 per-pupil spending and includes a fitted linear trend line summarizing the average relationship between district size and spending. The shaded band around the trend line represents ±1 standard deviation of the residuals from this fitted model and is intended as a descriptive reference range rather than a causal or inferential confidence interval. In practical terms, the band shows the degree of variation in per-pupil spending that is typical among districts of similar enrollment size. Districts falling substantially above or below this band are spending markedly more or less than would be expected given their enrollment alone. This approach does not control for other determinants of spending (e.g., student need, special education prevalence, or local revenue capacity) and is therefore not used to make normative claims about “appropriate” funding levels. Instead, it provides a transparent, first-pass benchmark that isolates scale effects and highlights districts whose spending patterns differ meaningfully from peer districts of comparable size.
