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The story
As Japan’s tuition waiver for high schools expands, more and more families are putting private high schools down as their “first choice,” leaving public (prefectural) high schools increasingly unable to fill their enrollment quotas — a phenomenon known as “teiin-ware” (under-enrollment). A Yomiuri Shimbun report highlighted a case where even one of the prefecture’s top-tier prep schools failed to meet its quota in the general admissions round. On the 5ch discussion thread, opinions split between posters who suspect the waiver’s benefits are simply being absorbed by private schools hiking tuition and lining owners’ pockets, and posters debating whether public funds should be going to public schools or private ones in the first place.
Tuition waiver drives rise in “private school first choice,” as prefectural high schools see repeated under-enrollment… How can struggling public schools fight back? Even Nagata, one of the prefecture’s top prep schools, fell short of its quota in general admissions
Sun, 8/30, 11:10 AM JST
Yomiuri Shimbun Online
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Probably can, right?
If you pass the entrance exam. But yeah.
So even with the "free" tuition, they just tack that same amount right back onto the bill.
Wait, that's actually a thing that's happening?
Classic move with subsidies and tax breaks — just raise the price to swallow the benefit.
No way that's it.
38,000 yen is the cap on the waiver, so some schools simply raised tuition up to that exact line.
A lot of schools tacked the waiver amount right onto tuition.
Private school owners are living large off this.
Tuition's cheap, but upkeep must be expensive.
That's probably the whole point. Wipe out the low-tier public schools, and you can outsource dealing with problem kids entirely to the private sector.
There's no real reason to be subsidizing private schools.
Private school genuinely ends up costing a lot more on top of that.
Just figure private school runs about double the cost of public overall.
Probably because women are having fewer kids, so more families can afford it per child now.
Also, a lot of mediocre private schools that brand themselves as "prep schools" (自称進学校 — schools that claim college-prep status without the track record) sell parents on "no cram school needed," loading kids up with after-school and holiday supplementary classes instead.
Since the school forces kids to actually show up (they track attendance), it's easy and reassuring from a parent's point of view.
If anything it's the opposite.
What they should actually do is universally build out low-cost public high schools for everyone, and overhaul the high school and university entrance exam systems so cram school becomes unnecessary.
Do that, and it might actually help the birthrate. Free private-school tuition is counterproductive.
It was obvious from the start.
Tuition waivers should have applied to public schools only.
What's the point of public schools otherwise?
Seriously.
Makes you want to ask if whoever came up with this is an idiot.
Kids who genuinely want to go to university are probably better off at a private school with an affiliated university or solid designated-recommendation slots.
Even in Hyogo, in the northern part of the prefecture, if you want to go to university, a self-styled "prep school" is probably about the only option, right?
Wonder how it is out around Toyooka.
If their approach to education is that different, public schools should just adopt it too.
The logic is basically "if it's free, it's a good deal."
Some run cram-school-style programs right on campus and are genuinely attentive to students.
Also, some are affiliated with a university, so you skip university entrance exams entirely.
This is probably a compromise made to protect vested interests.
But public schools already get more tax money — is that just fine?
Public school staff are civil servants — the state funds them, to the tune of 20 trillion yen a year.
Private school owners are already raking in obscene profits.
Probably because there's a kickback in it somewhere.
Because the whole policy exists to fill private school corporations up to capacity and let them profit.
With the birthrate falling, plenty of these school corporations would normally be going bankrupt without the subsidy.
Think about it for a second — running national/public schools costs an insane amount of money, you know?
They pack hundreds to over a thousand students at cheap tuition into buildings sturdy enough to double as regional disaster shelters, and employ dozens of teachers.
And they're operating almost every single day.
If you can offload some of that onto private schools with just a subsidy and shrink the number of national/public schools, it ends up cheaper for both the national government and local municipalities — that's the actual reason they're doing this.
There are idiots out there yelling that money is being funneled to private schools, but it's exactly the opposite.
Right. So from the students' side, it's cheap to attend.
Though Japan does have the separate problem that per-person civil servant salaries are too high.
Public schools cost more in tax money, so isn't it natural to cap how many students they take?
Isn't the idea basically to let private schools absorb the kids who aren't great students but still want to go to high school?
And if a kid's family has no money but genuinely wants to study, they can just study hard [to earn a public school spot on merit].
The number of kids just keeps shrinking, so that won't happen.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The national high school tuition waiver doesn’t cover tuition above the monthly subsidy cap (cited in the thread as 38,000 yen), nor does it cover entrance fees, facility fees, or event fees. The thread cited examples of private high schools raising tuition to match that cap, with some arguing the waiver amount just flows straight into schools’ extra revenue. On the other hand, there’s a counterargument that running public high schools actually costs more than private ones once facility upkeep and teacher staffing are factored in, so it’s not simply a case of “favoring private schools.” This policy is also often framed as part of countering the declining birthrate, but the article doesn’t dig deeply into the concern that worsening under-enrollment at public high schools could accelerate school consolidations and narrow students’ options depending on their region.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread “Tuition waiver drives rise in “private school first choice,” as prefectural schools see repeated under-enrollment… How can struggling public schools fight back? Even one of the prefecture’s top prep schools fell short of quota in general admissions.”
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