What’s Best for My Kids? An Empirical Assessment of Primary School Selection by Parents in Urban India

The purpose of the paper is to identify and prioritize a set of important attributes for school choice for millennial urban Indian parents. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to data collected from seventy-five millennial parents from the National Capital Region (NCR) of India to identify their prioritization of attributes for school choice. The study found that millennial Indian parents consider the quality and reputation of the schools as the most important attributes for primary school selection for their wards, followed by the overall infrastructure of the school. Further, contrary to the existing literature, tuition fee received a lower attribute ranking, while location was the least important attribute. The findings suggest that lack of policy directive in the education sector has resulted in parents valuing the quality of schools in terms of reputation, infrastructure, etc. as more important attributes while ignoring travel time or tuition fees. The findings are expected to contribute towards helping academicians and practitioners to understand parental decision-making, more so from the Indian or developing country perspective.