Quality education is expensive to acquire anywhere in the world. However, schools and educational institutions do follow some professional ethics. Even if they consider education as a business, they do not go out and skin their customers in one go.
Come to Karachi, Pakistan, and you will find schools of all sorts – from Pinglish medium to religious-cum-english-medium to gcse-with-a-cloak-of-islam to all-out liberal schools. Majority of them have one common goal, to extort the parents as much as they can. These schools charge a plethora of fees including tuition fees, annual charges, sports charges, resource charges, library fees and what nots. However, there is no accountability and parents often face rude behavior if they want to know where and how their hard earned money is utilized.
Every year schools increase their monthly tuition fees in a range of 10-15%. However, this school in Karachi has apparently created a record (or maybe not) by increasing the tuition fee to 23% per month.
The tuition fee till July 2012 was Rs. 8,000 per month and the latest fee voucher shows the monthly fee is raised to Rs. 9,850 – which comes to an increase of 23% on monthly basis. Parents were told that the hike in tuition fee is actually 19% and rest of the increase is due to change of grades (from pre-primary to primary). Fee schedule of the school is not publicly available for parents, and others, to check how much the school is charging for each grade.
How can they justify this exorbitant raise? Where is the Education Department?
