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The story
On November 2, Kyodo News reported on an NGO survey showing that private high school enrollment fees (non-tuition costs such as admission fees and facility charges) have roughly doubled compared to fiscal 2025. The backdrop is that while tuition-free policies for private high schools have been expanding, “free” applies strictly to tuition itself — admission fees, facility maintenance charges, and other enrollment fees remain outside the scope of the subsidy. On 5ch, the thread was split between posters pointing out that since students can only apply to one public high school, some families are forced into private schools if their child fails the entrance exam, and others arguing that instead of free tuition, the government should expand capacity and facilities at public schools.
Private High Schools: Enrollment Fee Burden Doubles Compared to FY2025, NGO Survey Finds
Mon, Nov 2, 5:37 AM JST
Kyodo News
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Honestly, it's just a price hike riding on the subsidy.
Since you can basically only apply to one public high school,
kids who fail
have no choice but to go private — even middle-class-or-lower families.
This subsidy is a lifeline for those families.
Oh, really?
I didn't know you couldn't apply to multiple public schools.
I figured 'if you can't afford private, just go public' — so that's not how it works, huh.
It might vary by prefecture,
but normally
you can only apply to the one public school your teacher signs off on.
Kids who fail have no choice but to go private,
and middle-class-or-lower families have long struggled with the high tuition — but teachers and education officials kept ignoring it the whole time.
That's why parents started demanding free private high school tuition.
If you actually want to fix the birthrate, that's the best way to do it.
Only give non-repayable scholarships through university to the genuinely talented ones.
If junior-high grads ended up earning more than university grads, wouldn't more people just start working right after junior high?
I'm all for it!
Elementary and middle schools should bring in grade retention/failing too.
Graduation exams as well —
fail the graduation exam and you repeat the year,
staying in school one more year.
And bring in grade-skipping too —
let talented kids skip ahead
so graduating university at 18 becomes possible.
Then, building on that,
if the legal minimum marriage age were changed from '18 and up'
to a window of '18 to under 30,'
that would solve the birthrate problem.
The burden on parents just keeps growing.
Some people think everything's free, when it's actually just tuition lol
The real problem is there are way too many public schools that need their buildings rebuilt,
and there's no money to rebuild them.
even with free tuition,
the first year at a private school runs close to 1 million yen,
while the prefectural public school was around 300,000 yen.
I think private schools only really beat public ones at the elementary level,
with integrated junior-high-to-high-school private prep schools a close second.
Going private starting only from high school
is pretty pointless.
My high school friend's kids:
(daughter) public elementary → private girls' school for junior high → public prep high school
(son) public the whole way, but landed a popular high school with great facilities
Quote from the dad: 'Private school costs a ridiculous amount of money.'
Kids who fail the exam or just aren't strong students go to private school as their only application.
Rich kids ride the private 'escalator' track starting from kindergarten.
Public school facilities are terrible.
Fix the public school facilities before subsidizing private schools.
In my area,
families with smart kids
send them to private school starting from elementary.
In my area, smart kids aim for private junior high entrance exams,
and a lot of them give up partway through and switch to the public high school exam track instead.
The private junior high exam rate is around 20%.
That's the whole point —
since you can only apply to one public high school,
kids who fail have no choice but to go private.
If your family's poor, apply to a public school you'll actually get into.
There are public high schools with a 1:1 competition ratio, you know.
As long as you don't aim too high,
I think you can get into the school you want.
The problem is kids with a hensachi (academic ranking score) of 50 going after a school ranked at 60 —
that's what produces kids like this.
If your score is 50, just pick a school ranked 50 or below.
That's exactly why that kind of attitude
made public junior highs and public school teachers so disliked.
Isn't it weird that even though public school is an option, people send their kids to private school for their own reasons
and then expect Japanese taxpayers to foot the bill for it?
That's because you can only apply to one public high school —
if you fail, you have no choice but to go private.
We're going in circles here, but there are agricultural high schools with a 1:1 competition ratio.
If you don't have money, go that route.
Even if you fail, you could take a year off and reapply to your preferred public school the next year.
There are actually people who did that and got into the highest-ranked school around.
All they'd need to do is scrap the consumption tax and raise wages for Japanese employees at small and mid-sized companies ❗❗❗❗❗
They should just ramp up public investment and fix up infrastructure across Japan ❗❗❗❗❗
The country gets twisted because people keep voting for economically clueless idiot politicians who only see short-term money 😠😠😠😠😠
But the actual cost, even excluding tuition, is still high.
Is this stupid or what?
If that happens, those other costs will probably end up getting subsidized with public funds too.
They want to cut the number of public employees.
A lot of the school buildings are old too, and they'd rather just tear them down and sell the land than rebuild.
Private schools have more competition, so they push kids hard on academics or sports to build up their track record.
Even without this system,
unappealing schools would get weeded out
and decline anyway.
That's just what a shrinking-population society looks like.
Parents are genuinely happy about free high school tuition, and happy about free school lunches too.
That's really all there is to it.
The backstory is that once Tokyo made private high school free,
parents in Saitama, Kanagawa, Chiba, and elsewhere got jealous, which is what led to it going nationwide.
Families with three kids, for instance, are thrilled about it.
That very attitude from the public school side is what made it disliked.
And there we go, back in circles again.
Forget 'disliked' — if you don't have the money, you have no choice but to send them there.
Can't even cover about 1 million yen a year in tuition? What kind of job do you even have?
Background and Key Points of the Debate
Free tuition for private high schools, first introduced by Osaka Prefecture and others, has spread nationwide in recent years alongside a broader push to expand high school tuition subsidies and scrap income caps on eligibility. However, the subsidy applies strictly to “tuition” and does not cover “school enrollment fees” such as admission fees, facility maintenance charges, and teaching material costs. The “doubled burden” shown in this NGO survey is believed to reflect the fact that these non-tuition costs have been ballooning. What split the thread was a difference in understanding of the public high school entrance exam system. Many pointed out that in many areas, public high schools reportedly allow only a single, exclusive application (though this varies by municipality), meaning a certain number of families end up having no choice but to send a child who failed the exam to a private school. Others countered that the free-tuition policy is actually causing public schools to fall short of enrollment capacity and leaving facilities to deteriorate, deepening reliance on private schools instead — and views on the policy split sharply depending on which side people took.
*This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary from the 5ch (News Flash+) thread “[Free High School Tuition] Private High School Enrollment Fee Burden Doubles Compared to FY2025, NGO Survey.”
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