Almost every parent strives so that their children receive the best quality of education so that they can make the most of the life opportunities that they can find around them. Most parents in India want their children to have better lives than they did.
However, such dreams can be hard to achieve for many people in the coming years, given that the costs of school fees in India are now growing at an alarming rate.
India is a country where a lot of people are living below the poverty line or at best belong to the middle class with meagre incomes that are just sufficient to manage daily living costs. It is no wonder that parents from such families yearn to give the best life to their kids so that they can move up to a higher level in society. However, they often stumble when they find that the cost of schooling is increasing more than they initially anticipated.
Estimates suggest that parents working in professional careers in India have to spend anywhere between 15 to 50 lakhs from preschool stages to the 10th standard. Such costs not only include the tuition fees of their children but also books; school uniforms; transportation costs; school supplies such as pencils, pens, exercise books, and geometry boxes. There can also be other expenses related to career advancement as a child grows up. Statistics reveal that most people in India belonging to the middle-class bracket spend as much as 60% of their incomes to support their children’s educational goals. As the costs of schooling are now increasing steadily, it is safe to surmise that the minimum costs for managing a child’s education in India are going to increase from 15 lakh to 30 lakh by the year 2025.
The increasing costs of schooling in India have already got many parents worried about the future of their children. Just like the school education costs are on a steady rise, the costs for higher education are even higher than that of school education. The cost of fees even in merit admission for engineering and medical colleges in India has increased in the past decades and saving for such fees is rather difficult for middle-class families due to high school fees. There is little money left after paying for the school fees to save for the kid’s college education. Paying for school fees and college fees is not something new for professional families, but as parents and grandparents of today’s school children discuss the past – they are noticing that extreme rise in school fees that was not there in the previous decades.
Therefore, the only thing that middle-class parents can opt for is to go for an education loan which they must get cleared within a specific amount of time. However, this is something that many families are reluctant to do since clearing such large sums of loan amounts can be a rather difficult burden to put on their children at the start of their career. The parents are not feeling good about such situation, it make them feel they have failed their children.
Since schooling is crucial for the future growth of the country, it is necessary to have effective measures in place that can help families in India by making school fees affordable for their children. Many parents are not going for 2nd child because the costs of education is increasing rapidly and they feel incapable to support the education of more than one child.