# **Section III. The Rise of Private Schooling**

Based on a school mapping exercise conducted in 1983, Jimenez and Tan (1985, 1987) noted a large increase in the number of private schools after denationalization, leading to substantial cost savings for the government in the provision of education. The authors noted (cautioning that the available data did not allow for an unambiguous statement) that despite the growth in private schools, educational institutions still did not service large proportions of the country’s population; particularly troublesome was the exclusion of girls in rural areas. Based on tuition and other fees in private schools, they argued that private schools were catering only to the rich and concluded that the private education sector would reach “full-capacity” at an enrollment of 2.1 million children.

Fifteen years after Jimenez and Tan’s (1987) assessment, there are _6.3 million_ children enrolled in more than 36,000 private institutions in Pakistan. From the 3,300 private schools in the four big provinces (Punjab, Sindh, NWFP and Balochistan) in 1983, there were 32,000 such schools in the same four provinces in 2000—an almost ten-fold increase in less than two decades. Enrollment in these private schools is mostly at the primary level, accounting for 75 percent of the total enrollment in private schools. As a share of total enrollment, 18 percent of children in the 5-10 age-groups, 9 percent of the 11-13 age-group and 4 percent of the 14-16 age-group was attending private schools. Since a large fraction of children of all age groups are not enrolled in any type of school, private school enrollments account for 35 percent of public enrollment across primary, middle and high schools.

The boom in private schools happened during the 1990s (Figure 1). The median year of formation for a private school that was functional in 2000 is 1996; 22 percent of schools in 2000 were formed in 1998 and 50 percent were less than 4 years old (formed on or after 1996).<sup>14</sup> While the majority of existing schools formed before 1990 were urban, since then there has been a qualitative shift with a steady increase in the rural/urban ratio till 1996, followed by a leveling

> 14 Interpreting these figures as the _growth-rate_ of private schools in recent years is problematic since data on the age of schools _currently_ existing does not yield information about school survival rate. If, over a 3- year span, 1000 schools were set up each year but 500 shut down a year later, a survey after three years would report 125 schools aged 3 years, 250 schools aged 2 years, 500 schools aged 1 year and 1000 schools established in the current year. The difference in these numbers is due to the school survival rate rather than the growth of schools. To some extent we can separate the joint effect of school formation and school survival rates through a simple exercise based on data from 1983: In 1983, there were 3300 private schools in the four provinces. In contrast, the current census indicates that by 2000 there were 1,764 private schools formed in 1983 or before in these provinces, suggesting that a bit over half the schools survived over the 17-year period i.e. an implied _annual_ survival rate of 96.4%. Discounting the numbers that Figure 2 is based on by the survival rate still yields substantial growth in private schools during the 90s.

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