The school field trip is quietly disappearing

If you can remember a day from grade school, it may be when you took a field trip to a museum, the state capitol, a farm, or an aquarium. It’s doubtful you’ll mention a pop quiz. Those memories should tell you something about what a field trip is worth. But today, the trip is fading, and the reasons center around the bus. And it may be a bigger loss than you think, BusesForSale.com reports.

Every day we wake up, it seems like the average person has less money. When gas costs rise, it affects personal transportation budgets. And school districts have the same experience. When school budgets face challenges, field trips are among the first things cut, since they read as an extra rather than a requirement. 

The best hard numbers on this are older than you would like. Back in 2015, a survey by the School Superintendents Association found that 10% of districts eliminated field trips that year, after roughly a third had done so during the recession years. The group is careful to say the sample is not perfectly representative, so treat the figures as a lit match rather than a spotlight. 

The reason for fewer field trips may have to do with overall transportation trips, but there’s also an issue with drivers. As of 2024, the country was short of school bus drivers by about 12% compared with 2019, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The study also found that the median driver is earning 43% less than the median weekly wage for all workers. So, it’s a job with heavy responsibility, split hours, and pay that has slipped. You might be thinking that sounds like a job that people quit.

School districts need enough drivers to cover their morning and afternoon routes. But an industry survey of school transportation leaders in 2024 found that more than 90% reported a shortage, and a majority said it forced them to shorten or combine regular routes. One transportation official said a shortage of substitute drivers means "we now just combine routes or run one late" whenever a driver is pulled away for an activity. The daily route has to come first, and any activity goes without.

School arithmetic gets pretty clear when it comes to the costs of filling a bus availability gap. Charter buses for a day-long class trip run between $150 and $250 per hour, or $1,300 to $2,200 per bus. And the cost increases once you factor in mileage and driver minimums. Put a real bus-cost line next to a driver shortage next to a budget cut, and the school-paid field trip does not stand a chance. 

Cutting a school field trip would be an easy decision if it weren’t for the fact that it’s beneficial. The best study we have on field trips is a genuine experiment. In 2011, researchers led by Jay Greene ran a lottery for school tours of a new art museum in Arkansas and surveyed nearly 11,000 students afterward. 

The kids who won the trip showed measurable gains in critical thinking about art, more historical empathy, and more tolerance. And the effects were largest for the students who usually get the least. Rural kids and kids from high-poverty schools gained the most. Weeks later, most of them still remembered the substance of what they saw.

The same researchers flagged a troubling stat. Museum, culture, and educational field trips get squeezed, and the trips that survive tend to be the wrong ones. Schools "are increasingly choosing to take students on trips to reward them," they wrote, "rather than to provide cultural enrichment. Schools take students to amusement parks, sporting events, and movie theaters instead of to museums." So the trip that builds something gets cut, and the trip that is a party gets kept. That leaves children with families who can’t cover a museum without the one opportunity they were getting at school.

And that’s the real cost hidden behind transportation costs. For a wealthy family, their child has a better opportunity to get to the museum. In some ways, the school field trip was a nice-to-have for that kid. The child who doesn’t have a parent free on a Saturday or the money for the tickets loses out when the bus isn’t available.

The budget shortage driving much of this is not lifting quickly. Reporting late in 2025 found gaps still hanging over the school year despite some gains. None of this means that schools decided field trips do not matter. It’s just that a field trip, a bus, a driver and a bigger budget are becoming hard to find. Without those things, the field trip gets canceled one class and one spring, at a time.

This story was produced by BusesForSale and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.