Summary: School closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic will have lasting effects on millions of children in Pakistan, worsening the already critical pre-pandemic “learning crisis”. This project will investigate the ability of tutoring services to address this learning crisis and losses due to the pandemic and serve as an important complement to schooling. We propose a pilot to confirm our understanding of the role of tutoring during the pandemic by conducting a follow-up to a 2019 household and tutor survey that established the existence of a sizable market for group-based private tutoring. This analysis, combined with further fieldwork and small-scale experiments, will help refine the design and implementation of proposed interventions aimed at improving the accessibility and effectiveness of tutoring services. These interventions will be aimed at both tutoring access and tutoring quality; and will be rolled out and tested at scale in a full study.

An Ongoing Study: The Market for Private Tuition

Citation: Karim, Muhammad, Asim Khwaja, and Landin Smith. 2022. “The Market for Private Tuition in Pakistan“. Ongoing Study.

Asim Khwaja

Muhammad Karim

Landin Smith

Coming Soon

Our project is primarily motivated by two critical social issues in Pakistan. The first is the severe learning crisis among Pakistani children; nationally representative surveys consistently show that children in Pakistan perform below what is expected of their age and grade level. Though there is little direct evidence on the impact Covid has had on these outcomes, it has almost certainly made them worse. The second social issue our project addresses is the low labor force participation of women. We intend to simultaneously address both issues through fostering another educational market in Pakistan---the market for informal tutors. In Pakistan, tutors in this market are overwhelmingly young women with secondary-degrees, and we find in our previous surveys that as many as 10% of women with high-school degrees were offering tutoring services.

Previous studies have shown that there is a robust market for tutors in Pakistan: ASER reports going back to 2012 show that 30 to 40 percent of primary school students receive private tutoring, and that even the poorest students have access to private tutors. Furthermore, in a 2019 survey we conducted with 15,000 households and the 260 tutors that cater to them, we found that 75% of children who received tutoring did so in an informal (i.e. in-home) setting rather than a formalized after-school academy. This implies the existence of a large, informal market about which very little is known.

Our project will proceed in two stages. First, we will conduct follow-up surveys with 5,000 of the 15,000 households and all the tutors we surveyed in 2019. These surveys, along with more qualitative interviews with key stake-holders in the market (e.g. parents and tutors), will give us insight into both how the market functions and how it has changed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. We will use the knowledge gained in this first stage to design interventions aimed at increasing the accessibility and effectiveness of tutoring services.

Our proposed interventions to increase the accessibility and effectiveness of tutoring services include the following:

Increasing access to information on tutoring markets: Our previous survey shows that tutors often say they do not know where to find new students, and parents say they cannot find tutors. An information treatment may alleviate barriers constraining the growth of the tutoring market.
Providing vouchers to cover tutor fees: Tutoring fees are another access barrier highlighted by our previous survey. We propose providing partial or full financial support to parents to cover tutor fees; to investigate whether this can increase take-up of tutoring services.
Providing tutors with access to educational resources: Over half of the tutors in our previous survey sample said that access to educational resources would allow them to provide more effective instruction. This treatment will consist of enabling tutors to utilize a menu of educational resources developed by our implementing partner, the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan. We will interact this treatment with the two treatments aimed at increasing access to the tutoring market, since the treatment may have differential impact based on which students are being induced to receive these services. Moreover, enhancing tutoring quality in itself may also induce additional access, especially as perceived quality is a likely factor in deterring whether a parent/child utilizes tutoring.

Study Design and Research Questions

Study Resources

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