| Kippreport.com

School fees up by 18%. Inflation: 4%. It doesn’t add up.

April 1, 2010 5:16 by kippreport

What is behind the rising education costs in Dubai? Government figures suggest that school fees rose by more than 18 percent last year. But general inflation rose by just 4 percent. Something doesn’t add up.

Perhaps school administrators caught a headline in The Independent last year that read: “Fee-paying schools prove surprisingly recession-proof”. Did they believe they had a free reign on pricing, in the knowledge that most parents had little choice but to pay up?

Either way, they don’t have a free reign now. For Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) recently announced a freeze on school tuition fees in the coming school year. This in turn prompted an announcement by one of the UAE’s largest school operators, GEMS Education, that it may be forced to close several of its schools if not allowed to hike fees.

The threat applies only to Asian community schools, some of which charge fees of less than AED5,000 ($1,360) a year, according to The National. GEMS Education said that, while the average increase in tuition fees over the last six years was 27 per cent, the average increase in operating costs was 57 per cent, partly due to rising commercial rents.

But that’s just one segment of the education market. What about the schools which charge far more than that? And while schools across the entire market increased their fees by 18 percent, hospitals increased charges by just 5 percent. How can that be, when both schools and hospitals have to pay commercial rents?

In internet posts from passionate teachers, parents, and observers, there was much debate over whether rises in school fees meant a better quality of education. Accusations on the forums sometimes devolved into nasty personal attacks from both sides.
But parents should not be surprised about such rises in fees. For the Dubai education sector is a business that holds the reigns of social responsibility in one hand and money-making in the other. Separating the two is a headache, if not impossible; witness the healthcare debate in the US, where intelligent people on both sides of the political divide struggled with the concept of whether healthcare is a basic human right – especially when so much money stands to be made.

Some have suggested that ethics should temper profit motives of school administrators, urging them to continue to operate some schools at a loss, subsidized by the gains of more profitable schools.

But either way, operators like GEMS face losing their customers if the threatened school closures go ahead. According to local media, many parents are considering leaving Dubai if they cannot afford to send their children to school. And if that carries on, only the rich will be able to afford to send their children to school.

Tags: Dubai’s Knowledge and Human Development Authority, education costs, GEMS Education, KHDA, private schools, proprietary schools, school tuition, tuition increases