Should school fees be aligned with parent’s income

With growing competition between schools, there is fierce contest between school to attract the best talented teachers in the education segment today. Also, the schools are striving to provide the maximum offerings to the students to outdo other schools thereby attracting more parents. In order to survive this competition, schools are increasing fees more often than ever before. And as such, a school that has more to offer, has actually gone out of affordability for a poor or even average earning family.
This brings us to the question that ‘Should school fees be aligned with parent’s income’.

Could schools charge fees from parents in proportion of their income? In other words, could schools charge less fees from parents earning below average and more fees from parents who earn more than average salary. Such an arrangement is likely to allow students from below average economic background (ones below poverty line already have an provision) to hold equal opportunity as against ones with an affluent background. This sounds interesting but lets see how this can be achieved:

1) Schools (in coordination with an authority) can define an average fees for parents with an average salary. For instance, fees of 1.25 lacs in a year for a family earning 15 lacs per annum.
2) Schools can then agree on a percent reduction or enhancement of fees below and above average levels, basis of how much fees they want to collect overall for admissions. For instance, a 10% reduction or enhancement for every 2.5 lacs per annum salary less/more than average.
3) To ensure the schools achieve the goal of total fees collected per admission process, schools or an authority may come up with some kind of quota for different salary structure.

Challenges:
Now this idea may be very difficult to implement with added complexity of fee hike every year. Plus the parents may also have a salary hike or even job retrenchment in some cases. Hence, some would feel that this idea needs a handsome amount of investment in IT aspects to maintain this throughout.

Also, this requires a regulatory authority to check that the school is not misusing this process to enhance the fees by selecting only higher salary band parents.

What are your thoughts? Or do you have a better suggestion to allow equal opportunity to children irrespective of their financial status?

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Last Updated on October 30, 2019 by Go4Reviews