Private tutoring is booming across poorer parts of Asia

The moral of the story is clear in “12th Fail”, a recent Bollywood hit about a poor farm boy, Manoj, bent on passing India’s ruthless police exam. Persevere and be richly rewarded, it suggests. Yet for a film about education and meritocracy, the portrayal of Indian schools is dismal: teacher-abetted cheating is rife at Manoj’s local school. Where he ultimately finds success, and love, is not at school, but at a jam-packed tutoring centre in Delhi.

Private tutoring is well known as an East Asian phenomenon. Apart from in China, most students in East Asia get it: 72% in Hong Kong; 79% at South Korea’s hagwons; 52% of lower-secondary schoolers, Japan’s main test-crammers, in the country’s juku. In China, where 38% of students (and 45% in cities) took private tutoring before a 2021 clampdown, many centres have simply gone underground. These businesses, whatever their flaws, exist alongside education systems that are highly effective and well-funded.

The hard way

But now private tutoring is on the rise in poorer parts of Asia. The scale is huge. Although the data are scattered and shoddy, we have tried to estimate tutoring’s prevalence in South and South-East Asia, excluding Singapore, where the education system more closely resembles those in East Asia. From Pakistan to Indonesia, we reckon that roughly 258m children get private tuition.

The biggest market is in India. Fully 31% of rural Indian schoolchildren under 15 now get private tutoring, up from 23% in 2010; in some poorer states, three in four do (see chart). Tax revenue from Indian tutoring centres has more than doubled since 2019. But even removing India from the mix still leaves a tutoring tally of 131m children, by our estimate.

The first reason for the growth is gaps left by formal education systems. In poorer parts of Asia, the state often struggles to provide good schools. In this century, as primary education has neared universality, the share of children enrolled in secondary school rose by 24 points in South Asia and by 16 percentage points in the rest of Asia, according to the World Bank. Yet over the same period, government education spending as a share of GDP has stagnated or fallen across much of the region.

In many places this has led to cuts to teachers’ salaries and textbooks. In Cambodia, one of Asia’s poorest countries, an estimated 82% of students take private tutoring, mostly from their own low-paid teachers seeking a salary top-up. Schools end up less equipped to deliver results, and the worst fall apart. Yet many Asian systems sort children through high-stakes exams. So parents turn to tutors.

A second factor is heightened social competition, driven by a growing middle class and a greater demand for a limited number of university places. Urbanisation also plays a role: children in cities are likelier to get private tutoring than rural ones, thanks to the greater supply of tutors and better internet access. In India, where cities have added 200m residents in 20 years, many newly urbanised parents think that buying their children tutoring will help them get a professional-class job. In Delhi, Mohammad Shahzad, a supervisor at a generator manufacturer, pays 2,800 rupees ($33) a month to have his two daughters tutored, a 30% addition to the usual school fees. His daughters’ teachers are competent, but Mr Shahzad feels that tutoring, despite its expense, is worth it. “It’s like having one meal: you survive, but with two or three, you’re healthier,” he says.

The final factor is an arms-race dynamic. Private tutoring is an anxiety industry: if your neighbour’s children get private tutoring and yours don’t, they risk falling behind. This holds whether tutoring demand originates from the pressures of a rigorous schooling system or the desire to flee a failing one. The availability of online tutoring, supercharged by the pandemic, has made it easier to get in on that arms race.

Even so, research measuring the effectiveness of tutoring has produced mixed results, says Mark Bray, an expert on Asian private tutoring. Partly this is because of its enormous diversity. One study in rural India found that students who had private tuition got higher reading and maths scores than those who did not, on a par with an extra year of school. But other research, in Sri Lanka and China, finds little or no effect on results.

Another brick in the wall

The costs of private tutoring can be large. Studies show some children in private tutoring sleep less well. The stresses extend to parents’ wallets. Umesh Sharma, a chauffeur in Delhi, spends 1,200 rupees a month to have his two sons tutored: 4% of the city’s average monthly income and about as much as their school fees. In other parts of India, it is worse. In West Bengal nearly half of all education spending, public and private, goes on coaching.

One big worry is that in some places private tutoring is eroding public education. In Nepal and Cambodia, schoolteachers withhold parts of the curriculum for their own paid tutoring after school. The incentive is clear: in Cambodia, low-paid teachers who offered tutoring doubled their salaries. In Bihar, India’s poorest state, a recent survey by JJSS, an NGO, found that dozens of dilapidated government schools had almost entirely outsourced their educational functions to private centres. Government schools have been reduced to “merely providing a midday meal and arranging examinations”.

What to do? South Korea spent four decades trying and failing to suppress private tutoring, before such efforts were ruled unconstitutional in 2000. Similarly interventionist approaches, like China’s rash crackdown, succeed only in driving tutoring underground. Some governments are relaxed: the education ministry in Thailand says that “the state must begin with an assumption that private tutoring does not reduce social welfare.” Others are experimenting. In response to a recent string of suicides, this year India’s education ministry introduced rules banning bigger coaching centres from enrolling students aged younger than 16. Private tuition is here to stay. But it could be managed more effectively. ■