The Indian Educational Risk Shift: Household Educational Expenditure in the Era of Education for All

• In Event: Public-Private Dynamics in Education: A South Asia Exchange

Proposal

Many low- and middle-income countries have witnessed a substantial shift towards private provision of private and secondary education. This shift can take the form of exit to private service providers, increasing segregation of children within government schools, or greater out of pocket expenditures on public education or private tuition. Comparative and international education scholarship has often analyzed these forms of exit as distinct empirical phenomena, but this paper argues that we should analyze them jointly as they are all forms of shifting risk from the state to individual households. I first outline the nature of risk-shifting in each form of exit and build a theory of educational risk-shifting. Using the case of India, I leverage a number of household consumer expenditure and demographic surveys to show that different economic and political dynamics underlie each of these forms of risk-shifting, with geographic and temporal variation in where each of these forms of exit occur across the country. I end by providing scope conditions through which these empirical phenomena could port to other contexts.

Author

• Emmerich Davies, Harvard Graduate School of Education