The system of education delivery has undergone a drastic change in the past two decades. One of the most crucial shifts appears in the form of unprecedented growth in the extent and size of private tuition industry (Bray 1999, Bray & Lykins 2012). The literature on tutoring services identifies various ways in which the industry functions in different education systems. These studies show differential nature of demand and supply of tuition classes in education market (Bray, Zhan, Lykins, Kwo 2014, Dawson 2010). Research in this field also indicates various ways in which these organizations relate to the formal education system (Kim & Park 2010, Bray & Kwok 2003, Nath 2008, Dawson 2010, Choi & Park 2016, Bray & Kwo 2013). Relatively less work, however, examines the organization of these institutions of education delivery. That is, how tuition industry as a parallel institution is constituted. 

In the Indian context, a recent scholarship establishes the pervasiveness of tuition industry in the everyday experience of schooling (Sen 2009). However, none of these works investigate how exactly these institutions work and what implications do they have on the formal education system. These issues warrant further studying and critical examination. This paper attempts to understand the organization of private tutoring—its institutional arrangements and everyday education practices—along with highlighting the processes through which these new forms of academic organizations alter the landscape of education delivery services in contemporary India.

Theoretically, the paper is located in the broader scholarship of new institutional analysis of education organizations as it attempts to unravel the mysterious—imminent yet obscure—presence of tuition industry in urban India. Jane Aurini’s work has been remarkable in conceptualizing the privatized education businesses in existing scholarship. In her study about Edu-businesses and their functioning in Canada, Aurini (2006) problematizes the fundamental logics of education organization enshrined in the new-institutionalist perspective. Refuting the logic of isomorphism in the current literature, Aurini argues that privatized education businesses gain legitimacy through “engaging in strategic isomorphism and by responding to new pressures in the technical environment” (83, emphasis added). Applying the new institutional perspective of education system and its organization, I use “myth-making” and “logic of confidence” as two analytical categories to understand the functioning of private tuition industry in India.

This paper is organized into two main sections. The first section focuses on the processes of “myth-making.” This section is further divided into two subsections: 1) the description of the “institutional script” of “academic constellation”— curriculum, scheduling of services, and specialization and diversification of services according to Board of affiliation, Educational level, Academic subject (BEA); 2) an analysis of “market-driven elements” of private tuition businesses—these are a combination of pedagogical (individual oriented learning environment), staffing related (or teachers’ recruitment process and criteria), and cost (fee system) associated factors. These two features of private tutoring—schooling scripts and market generated demands—create a “myth” of forming a more efficacious form of academic learning and training for excelling in the appraisal system through incorporating the hybrid character in its institutional arrangement. The second section of the paper is about the “logic of confidence” in which I present the case of private tuitions in India and how they build their project of legitimacy through strategic isomorphism.  

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