China’s education reforms were meant to lower costs. So why is schooling more expensive?

China’s changes to rules on schoolwork and private tutoring, intended to narrow gaps between haves and have-nots, appear to have had opposite effect

Parents still seek extra edge in hyper-competitive educational environment, pushing costs up and deepening chasm further

Reading Time:5 minutes

Even after education reforms intended to lower costs and narrow gaps in outcomes, the divide between rich and poor appears to be growing. Illustration: Lau Ka-kuen

Mandy Zuoin ShanghaiandHe Huifengin Guangdong

Published: 6:30am, 6 Dec 2023Updated: 9:32am, 7 Dec 2023

This is the first in a two-part series on how the changing state of education in China is having far-reaching economic implications. The second part is available here.

For Tan Biao, mother of a 15-year-old boy from a rural area in southern China’s Guangdong province, finding a suitable after-school tutor has been a challenge verging on the impossible.

As in the past, doing so is expensive. But now, money is not the only factor – extensive connections are required to find any service, much less one of quality, as most collapsed overnight after a sweeping ban on after-school tutoring took effect in 2021. Those which survived are mostly operating underground.

“We don’t have any channel for them, nor are their prices affordable,” Tan said. She earns an irregular income at a foreign trade company in Guangzhou and rarely sees her children, who stayed in their hometown of Renhua county in the province’s far north.

Children from advantaged families are still able to find services

Huang Bin, Nanjing University

In the more than two years since Beijing shook up the education system with its “double reduction” policy – placing strict limitations on the volume and difficulty of homework as well as the scope and scale of private or after-school tutoring – parents and researchers have detected a widening gap in learning outcomes among students from different backgrounds.

Like Tan, many ordinary parents can no longer find tutoring resources since the crackdown, as learning centres disappeared and the threshold for market entry was raised, said Huang Bin, a professor at Nanjing University’s Institute of Education.

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