Dr. Tariq Rahman

Educational Expenditure and Inequality

I was very keen to find out approximately how much money goes into the education of different kinds of students in Pakistan. This seems simple. Find out the total number of students of a given institution. Then find out the budget of that year. Now divide the budget by the number of students and you get expenditure per students per year.

Unfortunately, the exercise is far from simple. First, institutions hold on to information as if their life depended on it. They do not give you either the budget or the number of students. Even if they do begrudgingly tell you the number of students, the budget remains a mystery. The richer the institution the more it guards its budget. Indeed, the gifts and grants by visiting dignitaries---all in the good old Mughal style---are generally swept under the carpet. Or, which is the same thing, hidden away in the cupboard where all the old skeletons are kept.

The madrassa think you are from the CIA or the FBI (gone are the days when they thought you were from the ISI) and give you the impression that their institutions run only on prayers. The budget is never mentioned though some old madrassa publications still print it as they used to in the pre-Nine Eleven period. Anyway, these being the difficulties, I got the budgets and the number of students of all kinds of institutions---madrassa, cadet college, government Urdu-medium schools, government colleges, and public universities with great difficulty. I could not get anything out of the private institutions. They are more secretive than the KGB and the CIA put together and budgets are among the unmentionables with them as, indeed, is anything to do with money or profit. No! they work out of the goodness of their heart and that is it. Not wild horses will draw out anything but that out of them.

Let us take these different institutions one by one. First, then, the Public institutions.

Box-1
DIFFERENCES IN COSTS IN MAJOR TYPES OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES (in Pakistani rupees)
Institution	Average cost per student per year	Payer (s)	Cost to the state
Urdu-medium Schools	2264.5 (only tuition)	State	2264.5
Public Colleges (provincial)	9,572	State + parents (parents pay Rs. 1,591 per year on the average).	7,981
Public Colleges (federal)	21,281	Parents pay Rs 2,525 for B.A on the average.	18,756

The government schools are meant for students from working and lower-middle class back grounds. In my survey of over 1000 students of all kinds of educational institutions from December 2002 to June 2003, I found that most students of the working classes had incomes of Rs. 5000 per month per family. Lower middle class incomes were between Rs. 5001 to Rs. 10,000 per month. The government schools are mostly Urdu-medium ones though in the interior of Sindh they are Sindhi-medium institutions.

These schools generally have teachers who are there because they do not find any other gobs. They do have degrees---though matriculation and certificates are employed---and they even have intermediate teaching diplomas but they are hardly competent to teach well. There are, of course, a few exceptions but, as always, they are too few to make a qualitative difference.

The schools have large, open grounds but the furniture is Spartan, the rooms are coloured a depressing blue and the books are badly printed and full of propaganda. Teachers are often believers in ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ because of which children get brutally beater at times.

The government colleges are a great improvement on the schools but they too do not have the most competent people on the faculty. College between do not have to publish nor take examinations to get promoted. This makes them oblivious to the latest developments in their subject. The students are mostly from the middle-class. Upper class students used to come to the colleges but now they go increasingly to private institutions. The expenditure from the public funds is far more than on government colleges but, as we can see, far from adequate.

The federal government schools and colleges are far richer than the ordinary ones because the government spends much more money on them. In short, the state spends more money on public institutions in cantonments and federal areas---elitist areas both---than on ordinary public institutions.

Let us now look at the cadet colleges. I have given the average of five cadet colleges below. These are elitist institutions where the tuition fees is high. They were established by the government, generally with the encouragement of the army, and their board of governors have a strong presence of senior military officers, bureaucrats and high state functionaries like governors of provinces. However, they do not follow the state’s policy of using Urdu as medium of instruction nor do they cater for the poor because their tuition fees is only for the rich. Some schools do give concessions to the lower paid employees of the state, generally the armed forces, but these are not available for everybody. Although these schools are run like private institutions, the state spends more money on them than it does on ordinary educational institutions. The figures are as follows:

Box-2
DIFFERENCES IN COSTS IN MAJOR TYPES OF PRIVATE ENGLISH MEDIUM SCHOOLS (in Pakistani rupees)
Institution	Average cost per student per year	Payer (s)	Cost to the state
Elitist English medium schools	96,000---for ‘A’ level & 36,000 for other levels (only tuition)	Parents	None reported except subsidized land in some cantonments.
Cadet colleges/public schools	90,061 (tuition and all facilities).	Parents + state (average of 6 cadet colleges + 1 public school	14,171 (average of 5 cadet colleges only)

Let us now look at the Madrassa. As far as I could discover, they are run on money from charity (Zakat = alms; Khairat = philanthropy; atiat = grants; hadiyat = gifts). The expenditure given below is an food, lodging, notebooks, books, teachers and all other expenditure:

Box-3
EXPENDITURE ON MADRASSA STUDENTS (in Pakistani rupees)
Institution	Average cost per student per year	Payer (s)	Cost to the state
Madrassas	5,714 (includes board and lodging)	Philanthropists + religious organizations	None reported except subsidies on computers, books etc in some madrassas

As for the universities, the figures are only an average and somewhat inexact. However, if they are compared to good universities abroad, they tell us that we are spending far too less a sum on higher education than other countries.

As for the private universities, they do not release their budgets and the tuition fees varies between Rs. 5,000 to Rs. 50,000 per month. My rough and tentative estimate is a fees of Rs. 10,000 per month on the average. This amount is out of the reach of most of the people of Pakistan but parents risk their old age and sell off property to educate their children in these institutions.

Box-4
DIFFERENCES IN COSTS IN THE UNIVERSITIES OF PAKISTAN (in Pakistani rupees)
Institution	Average cost per student per year	Payer (s)	Cost to the state
Public universities	68,000	Parents + state (parents pay an average of Rs. 13,000 per year)	55,000
Private universities	1,20,000	Parents	None reported

These figures make it quite clear that the state actually spends out of public funds more on the education of the elite than of the masses. Moreover, the maulanas are running an economical welfare-state policy of their own which the state should have been running. This inequality in the field of education is potentially dangerous. A highly divided society, conscious of injustice and state-maintained inequality, can descend into a class-war which will take on the undertones of a religious uprising. Do we want this? I hope not!