The Ministry of Education has ordered that all schools are to publish the fees they charge on local government websites from September.

The move is part of a nationwide supervision campaign to ferret out schools with arbitrary fee structures, the ministry announced yesterday at a press conference in Beijing.

Detailed amounts and how fees are utilized must be listed explicitly, the ministry said. If local governments do not have websites or in places where people do not have ready access to computers, schools should publicize their fee structures by other means, on posters for example.

"Any school that fails to do so will be deemed as collecting fees on an arbitrary basis, and faces punishment," said Tian Shulan, an official with the Central Discipline Inspection Committee.

She said that the measure will give the public the opportunity to check school fees being charged online or otherwise before the autumn semester, and parents are encouraged to report schools that set fees too high to education authorities.

The ministry started inspections on arbitrary fee structures in 2003, and has so far handled more than 19,000 cases involving 1.7 billon yuan (US$210 million) in overcharged fees.

Ministry figures show that about 1.37 billion yuan (US$170 million) has been returned to parents. The balance has been confiscated by the central government.

Tian explained that not all the money has been returned to parents because tracing where the money came from has been very difficult. This is because some fees were collected privately.

Investigations show that there are four common reasons why some schools have arbitrary fee structures:

• Insufficient financial support from local governments forces poorer rural schools to overcharge for tuition to cover basic costs.
• Schools that might have enough to cover basic costs, might not have enough for further development. Funds collected in the form of excess fees are used to improve school buildings and facilities.
• Headmasters have been known to turn schools into enterprises, trying to earn as much money on the side as possible. For example, by conducting extracurricular or extramural classes that parents have to pay for.
• Corruption at the local level forces schools to transfer "fees" that have to be paid to local governments to students' parents.

Tian stressed that insufficient financial support from government is the main reason why schools overcharge for tuition. 

In addition to overpriced school fees, there is also the pre-enrolment fee that concerns the ministry. Also called a "sponsorship fee", parents readily pay this money to the elite and/or more popular schools if it guarantees a good education for their children. This practice has theoretically been banned.

"We find that trying to curb this practice is the most difficult part of our inspections. Many parents are willing to give the money and they often keep quiet about it," Tian said.

The ministry is now trying to reallocate education resources to solve the problem, such as introducing a rotation system for headmasters and teachers from major schools to the poorer ones.

Education Minister Zhou Ji revealed earlier this month that spending on education was expected to increase to a record four percent of gross domestic product (GDP) over the next five years. China's current expenditure on education stands at only 2.79 percent of GDP.

(China Daily March 22, 2006)