Urban Indian Parents Finding It Difficult To Pay School Fees

By Author: BK Vijay
Total Articles: 78
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Every parent has the dream of seeing their children attaining great success in life, especially through academic and career accomplishments. This is also true for parents in India as they expect their children to have good schooling and have a good career. After all, which parent does not want his/her child to be successful.

However, the rising costs for school education in India are making things difficult for a lot of parents in India to afford school expenses. Many parents are having a difficult time paying the school fees for their children. This is causing much heartache, especially in urban India.

Despite rising tax collections, the state and central government of India offer either low quality schools or not enough good schools. A lot of parents these days are forced to put their children in corporate schools as they don’t have a choice in finding a service-minded school. This is all the more true in the newly urbanized areas of the growing cities in India.

Most corporate-owned and run schools function very much like business entities. Therefore, they tend to see the parents as customers and the ...
... educational services that they offer as a product. Corporate schools function just like any other business, trying to attract the attention of the parents and treat them as prospective customers. They employ consultants to guide them how to charge more fees based on understanding parents psyche.

Since these schools often have a higher capital to spend on developing the school infrastructure, they can have the best gyms, classroom infrastructure, swimming pools, and other facilities to offer. Such an aesthetic advantage naturally appeals to the parents and they often end up sending their children to these corporate schools.

If you search online also in India there is hardly any good literature on how to judge a school. All the essential attributes of a good school have been dismissed as ‘old fashioned’ and much of what is being emphasized today is aesthetics of the school building and dressing sense of the teachers.

However, it is important to note that corporate schools do not necessarily provide a better quality of education for their children. Now several corporate schools in India also offer the more expensive International Baccalaureate(IB) curriculum. Since this is more expensive and follows the international curriculum many parents are ready to pay higher fees for such school education.

Many parents believe that the IB program is better and encourage children to have an independent and inquiring mind. However, there is a dearth of skilled teachers in India who can implement such an instructional approach with the students. A curriculum is as good as the teachers who implement it. Since most of the teachers in India do not have the skill and efficiency to work with the International Baccalaureate curriculum. This system is somewhat alien to teachers who rarely traveled abroad to have any exposure to such a system. There is much peer pressure from other parents to opt for an International school. This increases the expenses of schooling for the parents -even for those with only one child.

It is also necessary to remember that parents also need to manage a host of other expenses apart from the main tuition fees. For instance, they need to provide for school transportation, books, uniforms, and other miscellaneous costs. Many times, the school charges a higher rate than what is available in the market.

This is why many urban Indian parents are not able to enjoy the fruits of their hard-earned money when they get children enrolled in corporate schools. The quality of school education they get for their children is not necessarily the best. As this high school fee is a recent phenomenon, there will be cascading affect on parents. Parents in future, may also find it difficult to save money for their children’s higher education due to excessive investments in school fees.

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