Tuition Centers Are Proof Pakistani Schools Have Failed

This article will piss some people off.

If you’re a parent who’s convinced that your child’s Rs. 60,000/month private school is “worth it” despite also paying Rs.15,000 for tuition three nights a week then this isn’t for you.

If you’re an administrator who needs to believe “we’re different” or “our Cambridge curriculum justifies the fees” then stop reading now.

If you’re a teacher who thinks I’m attacking you personally (I’m not. I’m attacking the system that underpays you while tuition centers print money) you can leave too.

If you’re a politician shopping for easy education reforms that don’t threaten anyone’s rice bowl then there are plenty of consultants willing to sell you those fantasies.

But…

This Ain’t

That Article.

Here’s what this is:

A hard look at the numbers nobody wants you to see. Numbers that prove Pakistani schools (expensive private schools, underfunded public schools, all of them) have fundamentally failed at their one job: educating children.

The Number That Tells You Everything

62%.

That’s how many secondary students in Lahore take private tuition (Khan & Shaikh, 2013, using ASER 2010 data from Punjab).

Not remedial students.

Not struggling students.

All students.

In Karachi? 54%. In Peshawar? 34% (Aslam & Atherton, 2011).

And that’s just the data. Me & You both know it’s more than that.

And here’s the part that should make every parent in Pakistan furious:

Private school students take MORE tuition than government school students.

Read that again.

The kids whose parents are already paying Rs. 50,000… Rs. 80,000… even Rs. 100,000 per month for “premium education” are more likely to need paid tutoring than the kids in free government schools.

30% of private school students in Punjab take tuition versus 17% of public school students (Khan & Shaikh, 2013, Table A1).

Why?

Not because private schools are better at teaching.

Because private school parents can afford to pay twice.

You’re Paying For The Same Job. Twice.

Morning: School teaches (supposedly).

Evening: Tuition center teaches the same material (actually).

Next day: Repeat.

The average family in rural Pakistan spends Rs. 293/month on tuition (ASER 2010). That’s not much, right?

Until you realize the average Pakistani household earns Rs. 31,127/month and 29% of the population lives below the poverty line of Rs. 8,484/month (Pakistan Household Income & Expenditure Survey 2024–25; Express Tribune, 2026).

For families at or near the poverty line, that Rs. 293 represents 3–4% of total household income.

On education alone.

Before school fees.

Urban families have it worse.

Middle-class families in cities now spend 20–30% of household income on education making it the third biggest budget line item after rent and food.

Not on books.

Not on uniforms.

On paying someone else to do the job the school already failed to do.

I Know This Because I Tried To Fix It

I’m not writing this as an outsider throwing stones.

I taught for 4+ years.

My mother taught for 40+ years. She started with tutoring, then opened a school where we tried to do things differently. We ran that school for 7 years. The mission was simple: help students “disabled” by Pakistan’s education system learn basic literacy so they could survive.

Students who’d been failed by other schools.

Students who needed someone to actually teach them how to read and write.

Here’s what we found:

Students in Grade 5–8 who couldn’t read or write properly.

Not learning disabilities.

Not low IQ.

Educational malpractice.

Kids who’d spent 5, 6, 7 years in “schools” (some expensive private schools) and still had rudimentary literacy skills. Their writing looked like Grade 2. Their reading comprehension was kindergarten-level.

How do you teach Grade 8 curriculum to a child who can’t read the textbook?

You don’t.

You reteach Grade 1.

And the parents?

Obsessed with numbers, not the damage already done.

“Why did my child get 68% on the test?”

“Because your child can’t read, and we’re rebuilding from scratch.”

“But the other school gave them 85%.”

“The other school lied to you for 7 years. We’re not going to.”

They didn’t want to hear it.

They wanted the score.

Not the learning.

The score.

The children themselves?

Trained to cheat, not learn.

Trained to take shortcuts.

Trained to do the minimum for the grade.

Problem-solving? Paraphrasing? Critical thinking?

Barely developed past kindergarten level.

We tried to change that.

We lasted 7 years before reality set in: you can’t fix students faster than the system breaks them.

Then I Taught At A “Real” School

After running our own school, I took an administrative role at one of Lahore’s established private schools.

Rs. 10,000/month.

For a full-time administrative position.

(That’s below Pakistan’s legal minimum wage, by the way.)

The teachers? Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 25,000/month for exhausting full-time work handling overcrowded classes.

And these were the people supposedly delivering “premium education” to justify Rs. 60,000+ monthly fees.

The students?

Privileged. Entitled. Some downright disrespectful.

Gossip. Foul language. Zero work ethic.

And when you tried to hold them accountable?

“So what if I fail? I’ll just run the family business anyway.”

That’s a real quote.

From a Grade 10 student.

At a school charging more per month than most Pakistanis earn.

The parents?

Some came screaming and threatening if their child got a bad grade (earned fairly).

Others ignored every sign their child was struggling because acknowledging it might damage the family’s status.

But surely the teachers were good, right?

No.

Below-average teaching skills.

Rigid methods (one size fits all).

Failure to recognize that every child learns differently.

And can I blame them?

Most studied in the same broken system.

They can’t teach what they never learned themselves.

The administration?

Busy taking premium fees.

Hiding below-legal salaries from inspection.

Not investing a rupee back into infrastructure or teacher training.

Pocketing the difference.

After 7 years trying to fix students from inside our own school, and several more years watching the dysfunction from inside a “prestigious” institution, I left education entirely.

Moved to tech.

Because I finally accepted what I’d been avoiding:

You can’t reform a system where everyone involved has adapted to dysfunction.

The system isn’t broken.

It’s working exactly as designed.

To extract maximum money while delivering minimum education.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Pakistan has created a two-tier education system:

Tier One: What you pay the school for (the credential, the brand, the building).

Tier Two: What you pay the tuition center for (the actual education).

Tier One is mandatory if you want your child to have any future in Pakistan’s credential-obsessed job market.

Tier Two is mandatory if you want your child to actually learn anything.

And both tiers are completely failing the 25.1 million children aged 5–16 who aren’t in school at all (UNICEF Pakistan, 2024).

Because here’s the thing:

Even the children who ARE in school aren’t really being educated by the school.

They’re being warehoused from 8 AM to 2 PM.

Then educated from 6 PM to 8 PM.

By someone else.

For more money.

Part II: Who Profits When Schools Fail

Let’s Follow The Money

Here’s a question nobody in Pakistan’s education establishment wants to answer:

If tuition centers are proof that schools have failed… why does the failure keep getting worse?

Why aren’t schools adapting?

Why isn’t the government regulating the tuition industry?

Why are private school fees rising 15–20% annually while learning outcomes stay flat (or decline)?

The answer is simple.

Lots of people are getting rich off this failure.

And they have zero incentive to fix it.

The Tuition Industrial Complex

Start with the obvious winners:

Tuition center owners.

They’re running a business with:

• No overhead (rent a room, hire a teacher)
• No regulation (nobody checking quality)
• No taxes (pure cash business)
• Unlimited demand (because schools don’t work)

A tuition center can charge 50–100 students Rs. 5,000–15,000/month per subject. That’s Rs. 250,000 to Rs. 1.5 million in monthly revenue from one room and one teacher.

Operating costs? Maybe Rs. 100,000 if you’re paying the teacher well and have decent rent.

Margin? 60–85%.

Try finding those margins in any legitimate business.

Individual tutors.

Some are clearing Rs. 1 million per month (Express Tribune, 2014).

That’s more than most doctors.

More than most lawyers.

More than most engineers.

And here’s the beautiful part (for them):

The worse schools get, the more essential their services become.

But Here’s What Parents Don’t Realize

Most tuition is garbage too.

You think you’re paying for quality teaching?

You’re not.

You’re paying for the theater of education.

Most tuition centers use the exact same broken methods as the schools. Same rote memorization. Same teaching-to-the-test. Same undertrained instructors who themselves can’t read critically or think independently (because they learned in the same system).

I saw this firsthand:

Students coming to us from expensive tuition centers, still unable to read.

Parents confused: “But we’re paying Rs. 20,000/month for tuition!”

And I’d ask: “What’s your child learning?”

“They’re covering the syllabus.”

“Can they read the syllabus?”

Silence.

The tuition center like the school was focused on coverage, not comprehension.

On speed, not understanding.

On scores, not skills.

Yes, there are good tutors.

Passionate teachers who genuinely care and know how to reach struggling students.

But they’re rare.

Most tuition is just school 2.0: same problems, different building, higher price.

And parents keep paying because they don’t know what else to do.

Private school teachers.

Khan and Shaikh (2013) found that private school teachers are the primary suppliers of tuition especially to their own students.

Why?

Because they’re underpaid (Rs. 10,000–25,000/month for full-time work) relative to their qualifications and the school’s fees.

A teacher at a school charging Rs. 60,000/month per student might be taking home Rs. 25,000.

That same teacher, tutoring 20 students at Rs. 8,000/month after school?

Rs. 160,000.

Six times their salary.

For fewer hours.

No principal breathing down their neck.

No staff meetings.

No administrative BS.

You think that teacher has an incentive to make sure students learn everything during school hours?

The Incentive Death Spiral

Here’s how the system perpetuates itself:

1. Schools underperform (undertrained teachers, overcrowded classes, no accountability)
2. Parents pay for tuition to compensate
3. Students pass exams (thanks to tuition, not school)
4. Schools claim credit for the pass rate
5. Schools raise fees (because “results are good”)
6. Teachers remain underpaid (schools pocket the difference)
7. Teachers moonlight as tutors to make ends meet
8. Schools underperform more (teachers exhausted or strategically underteaching)
9. Parents pay for more tuition
10. Repeat.

At no point in this cycle does anyone have an incentive to fix the schools.

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Not the school owners (fees keep rising).

Not the teachers (tuition income is higher than salary).

Not the tuition centers (business is booming).

Not the universities (they get students either way).

Not the government (education spending is only 0.8% of GDP — Pakistan Economic Survey 2024–25 — and nobody’s rioting).

The only losers?

The students.

And the parents paying twice for the same service.

So Why Don’t Parents Just Revolt?

1. Sunk cost fallacy.

You’ve already paid Rs. 200,000 in school fees this year. The tuition is “only” another Rs. 60,000. At that point, what’s another Rs. 60,000?

2. Social signaling.

In Pakistan’s urban middle class, your child’s school is a statement about your family’s status.

Admitting the school failed means admitting you chose poorly.

Easier to just pay for tuition and pretend it’s “extra enrichment.”

3. Credential worship.

The job market demands credentials (O-Levels, A-Levels, degrees).

It doesn’t demand competence.

As long as your child gets the paper, does it matter if they learned anything?

(Yes. It matters. But that’s not how parents think.)

4. No alternatives.

What are you going to do — homeschool?

In a country where homeschooling is stigmatized and university admissions favor traditional credentials?

Good luck.

5. Learned helplessness.

After a generation of school failure + tuition dependency, parents don’t even question it anymore.

“That’s just how it is.”

“Everyone does it.”

That’s not acceptance.

That’s defeat.

The Reform Delusion

Every few years, some bureaucrat announces “reforms.”

New curriculum!

Teacher training!

Technology in classrooms!

Here’s what actually happens:

Nothing.

Or expensive pilot programs that work in 5 schools (with unlimited monitoring and funding) and disappear when the grant money runs out.

Why?

Because reforms assume the problem is “capacity” or “resources.”

It’s not.

The problem is incentives.

As long as:

• Schools get paid whether they teach or not
• Teachers make more from tuition than teaching
• Parents accept failure as normal
• Students pass exams regardless of learning

…the system will continue failing.

By design.

Part III: What We’re Doing To Our Children

Let’s Talk About Ayesha

She’s 14. Grade 9.

Attends one of Lahore’s “premier” private schools (Rs. 65,000/month).

Her schedule:

6:30 AM — Wake up
8:00 AM-2:00 PM — School
5:00 PM-7:00 PM — Tuition (Math and Physics, Rs. 12,000/month)
8:00 PM-10:00 PM — Homework
10:30 PM — Sleep

12 hours a day.

She’s been doing this since Grade 6.

At 14, she’s already burned out.

No time to read for pleasure.

No hobbies.

No time to think about what she wants to be.

She’s too busy memorizing facts for exams that will be obsolete before she graduates.

This is normal in Pakistan.

And it’s destroying an entire generation.

The Childhood Tax

We’ve taken childhood — the time when humans explore, play, fail, discover, and develop — and turned it into a credential factory.

No time for:

• Reading books they choose
• Learning skills they’re interested in
• Making mistakes in low-stakes environments
• Being bored (which is when creativity happens)
• Thinking

Especially thinking.

Because thinking isn’t on the exam.

What They’re Not Learning

While memorizing Chemistry formulas they’ll forget in six months, here’s what Pakistani students aren’t learning:

• How to think critically (not on the exam)
• How to solve novel problems (exam questions are predictable)
• How to communicate ideas clearly (essays graded on length, not argument)
• How to handle failure (failure means shame and more tuition)
• How to manage their time (every minute is scheduled)
• How to ask questions (questions slow down class)

You know what those are called?

Life skills.

The actual things employers want.

But Pakistani students don’t have them.

Because we spent 12 years teaching them to memorize and comply.

The Evidence Is In The Students

I taught students in Grade 8 who couldn’t write a coherent paragraph.

Couldn’t read a textbook and extract meaning.

Couldn’t solve a problem they hadn’t seen before.

These weren’t “slow” kids.

These were victims of educational malpractice.

Kids who’d spent 8 years in schools (some expensive) learning absolutely nothing.

And when parents brought them to us, expecting us to “fix” them in 6 months while still demanding good exam scores?

That’s when I realized the parents were part of the problem.

They didn’t want education.

They wanted credentials.

And the system was happy to sell those to them.

The Mental Health Crisis

Pakistan doesn’t track student mental health well.

But talk to any child psychologist in Lahore or Karachi:

• Anxiety disorders in teenagers: skyrocketing
• Depression diagnoses: climbing
• Sleep deprivation: endemic
• Suicide ideation (from exam pressure): rising

And everyone shrugs.

“That’s the pressure of studies.”

No.

That’s the pressure of a broken system grinding children into pulp for 12 years.

The Long-Term Damage

What happens to Ayesha at 25?

She’ll have:

• A degree (that required tuition to obtain)
• No marketable skills beyond her CV
• No portfolio
• No hobbies (never had time to develop them)
• Crushing debt or parental sacrifice

And she’ll enter a job market that doesn’t care about degrees from Pakistani universities.

Employers want thinkers. Problem-solvers. People who can learn on their own.

Pakistani graduates can’t do that.

They succeeded despite the system, not because of it.

The Intergenerational Trap

Parents who “succeeded” in this system think it works.

They don’t realize they succeeded because the job market was less competitive, credentials were rarer, and critical thinking wasn’t required.

Now?

The world has changed.

AI is eliminating rote jobs.

Global competition is fiercer.

And Pakistani students — trained to memorize, not think — are being left behind.

But parents keep feeding their kids into the same meat grinder.

Because they don’t know what else to do.

“What Can I Do? I’m Just One Parent.”

Everything.

Stop accepting the lie.

Your child’s school is failing. Say it.

To the principal. To other parents.

Stop paying for tuition without demanding accountability.

“Why are 62% of students here taking tuition?”

“Why am I paying Rs. 60,000/month if my child needs Rs. 15,000/month in tuition?”

Ask publicly. In parent meetings. On social media.

Stop optimizing for credentials. Start optimizing for learning.

Does your child understand what they’re studying?

Can they explain concepts in their own words?

If not, the tuition isn’t helping.

Consider alternatives:

• Homeschooling (legal, though stigmatized)
• Online learning (Khan Academy, often better than tuition)
• International online schools (cheaper than local school + tuition)

Most importantly: Give your child time to be a child.

Cut the tuition.

Cut the extra classes.

Let them be bored.

Let them discover what they’re interested in.

Because if you don’t, you’ll wake up in 10 years with a credentialed robot who doesn’t know who they are.

The Bill Comes Due

This system is creating a generation of:

• Anxious, depressed teenagers
• Unmotivated university students
• Incompetent graduates
• Unfulfilled adults

And we’re pretending it’s fine.

You have a choice.

Keep pretending.

Or look at the data:

• 62% of students in tuition (Khan & Shaikh, 2013)
• 25.1 million children not in school at all (UNICEF Pakistan, 2024)
• 20–30% of household income on education (Aslam, 2011)
• 0.8% of GDP on public education (Pakistan Economic Survey 2024–25)
• Zero regulation of tuition
• Zero accountability for schools

This isn’t a system.

It’s a meat grinder.

And we’re feeding our children into it.

The Question

Twenty years from now, when your child asks:

“Why did you make me spend my childhood in school and tuition centers?”

What will you say?

“Everyone was doing it”?

“We didn’t know better”?

Will those answers be good enough?

Will they be true?

Because now you know.

You know the schools have failed.

You know the tuition industry is profiting from that failure.

You know your child is spending 12 hours a day in a system that isn’t teaching them to think.

You know there are alternatives.

And you know the cost of doing nothing.

So what are you going to do?

Keep writing checks?

Keep hoping your child survives?

Or are you going to get angry?

Angry enough to demand accountability.

Angry enough to try something different.

Angry enough to break the cycle.

Your choice.

But make it soon.

Because your child doesn’t have time.

They’re already in the grinder.

And every day you wait is another day they’re learning that compliance matters more than curiosity.

That credentials matter more than competence.

That the system is broken, but you have to participate anyway.

Is that the lesson you want them to learn?