SHADOW EDUCATION: THE NEW ARMS RACE IN EAST ASIA

Byju's, founded by Byju Raveendran in 2011, soared from a startup to a global EdTech giant. Valued at $22 billion initially, it sought to revolutionise education with its app and partnerships with global investors and celebrities. Although, neck deep in financial crises, Byju’s has nevertheless demonstrated the enormous potential of shadow education in East Asia.

Shadow Education, in other words, private tutoring has spread like a tumour in almost the entire East Asia. As per an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report, costs associated with "shadow education" are staggering. In Pakistan, expenditures on tutoring per child averaged the equivalent of $3.40 a month in 2011, a significant amount considering 60% of Pakistan's population reportedly lives on less than $2 per day. In Hong Kong, China, the business of providing private tutoring to secondary schools reached $255 million in 2011. In Japan, families spent a whopping $12 billion in 2010 on private tutoring.

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.

As per Economist data, from Pakistan to Indonesia, roughly 258m children get private tuition.

The Rise of the Shadow

But now private tutoring is on the rise in poorer parts of Asia. The scale is huge. An ADB study, undertaken in partnership with the Comparative Education Research Centre of the University of Hong Kong, brings into the spotlight the growing practice in Asia. Shadow education risks dominating the lives of young people and their families, maintaining and exacerbating social inequalities, diverting needed household income into an unregulated industry, and creating inefficiencies in education systems.

The East Asian tutoring market is booming, with India emerging as the largest and fastest-growing segment. As of 2024, a staggering 31% of rural Indian school children under 15 now receive private tutoring, a significant increase from 23% in 2010. In certain impoverished states, this figure is even higher, reaching three out of four children. This surge in demand has fueled a corresponding growth in the tutoring industry, with tax revenue from Indian tutoring centers more than doubling since 2019.

While India's dominance is undeniable, the tutoring market extends far beyond its borders. Excluding India, estimates suggest that 131 million children in east asia are currently enrolled in private tutoring programs.

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. The rapid expansion of secondary education across Asia has been accompanied by a paradoxical decline in government education spending. While the World Bank reports a significant increase in secondary school enrollment rates (24 points in South Asia and 16 points in the rest of Asia), government education expenditure as a percentage of GDP has stagnated or decreased in many parts of the region. This shortfall in public funding has led to a variety of negative consequences, including cuts to teacher salaries, reductions in textbook availability, and a decline in overall educational quality.

In countries like Cambodia, one of Asia's poorest nations, an estimated 82% of students rely on private tutoring.

The pressure to succeed in high-stakes examinations further drives the demand for private tutoring. In countries like the Republic of Korea, 90% of secondary school students participate in supplementary tutoring programs. Similar trends are emerging in South Asia and Central Asia, where tutoring rates are currently around 60% and steadily increasing. Another factor is the heightened social competition, driven by a growing middle class and a greater demand for a limited number of university places.

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. Typically in cities like Delhi, an average blue collar worker pays ? 2,800 ($33) a month to have his two children tutored, a 30% addition to the usual school fees. The entire education landscape is highly competitive.

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 (Economist).

Even so, research measuring the effectiveness of tutoring has produced mixed results. 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.?

The Costs and Solutions

The costs of private tutoring can be hefty. Studies show some children in private tutoring sleep less well. The stresses extend to parents’ wallets. People spend significant proportions of their incomes to enable tutoring for their children. In West Bengal nearly half of all education spending, public and private, goes on coaching.

One big side effect is that private tutoring seeks to erode public education. In India, Nepal and Cambodia, there are reports of college and school teachers withholding parts of the curriculum for their own paid tutoring after hours. 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”.

As per a paper by WEI Zhang and Mark Bray, shadow education has become increasingly prominent in many parts of the world. East Asian societies, have particularly high proportions of students receiving shadow. The phenomenon significantly expanded in former Soviet countries and Eastern Europe after the political transitions of the late 1980s and early 1990s; and many African countries have also seen a notable increase in shadow education. Participation in tutoring is also high in parts of Southern Europe, and is becoming significant in North and South. Although the extent of this system may not be as penetrative as in East Asia, however, the shadow is certainly spreading across the globe.

The global debate on private tutoring has been marked by a range of policy responses, from outright suppression to laissez-faire approaches. South Korea's decades-long attempt to ban private tutoring ultimately failed, with the government's efforts deemed unconstitutional in 2000. Similarly, China's recent crackdown has only driven the industry underground, suggesting that heavy-handed interventions may be ineffective.

On the other end Thailand's education ministry, has argued that private tutoring does not necessarily harm social welfare. Other countries are experimenting with more targeted interventions. In response to a series of student suicides, India's education ministry introduced regulations in 2024 prohibiting large coaching centers from enrolling students under the age of 16.

There is need for urgent regulation as the industry seems to be expanding like a serpent uncoiled, far removed from childrens’ health and social objectives.

(Disclaimer: Views expressed are the author’s own).