BENGALURU: With the new academic year just around the corner, parents are facing the brunt of increased fees which has seen a hike in double digits since the Covid-19 pandemic.
It’s not just the school costs but also other annual educational expenses that have seen a steep increase. A survey conducted by Local Circles revealed that in Tier-1 and 2 cities, the annual all-inclusive fees of premier private schools range between Rs one lakh and Rs 4 lakh and fees in good private schools in Tier-3 and 4 cities range between Rs 50,000 and Rs 2 lakh.
The study noted that 50% of parents complained of a 30% or more fee hike in the last two years. The survey received over 27,000 responses from parents from 312 districts across the country, including Karnataka. In all, 66% of respondents were men while 34% were women. While 45% of respondents were from Tier-1 cities and 24% from Tier-2 cities, 31% were from Tier-3, 4 and rural districts.
Meanwhile, private school associations in the state have defended the fee hike and also proposed to regulate the increase at 10-15% year-on-year given the expenses. The Karnataka High Court in 2023 had quashed the government’s plea on regulating school fees for private schools that had left parents in the state helpless.
Shashi Kumar D, convener, Karnataka Private School Managements’ Teaching and Non-Teaching Staff Co-ordination Committee (KPMTCC), said though the survey says that there has been a fee increase of 30%, it might not be true for all private schools. “Most schools have only hiked the fees by a nominal rate of 10-15%. During 2020-2022, schools did not hike the fees and hence now it might have been 15-20% in some schools,” he explained.
Kumar added that any private aided schools have the liberty to fix a reasonable fee and the government can keep an eye on it or regulate it, but “the government has no authority to fix the fees”. The survey’s question on whether state governments have been effective in capping or limiting excessive fee increases by schools revealed that only 23% of parents felt happy with the action taken. “If household earnings are growing under 10% a year, school fees just simply cannot continue to grow at 15-25% a year,” concluded the survey report.