The new academic year has only just begun, yet it has already been five days of disorder in schools, with their operations far from settled. Education Minister P.Naranbayar’s so-called “mess of dough” has fallen onto the shoulders of teachers and administrators, leaving them to scrape it clean with immense difficulty. The minister boasted, “This academic year, only a handful of students in five schools will study in three shifts. Out of the 36 schools that were supposed to operate this way, we leased 27 additional buildings, reducing the number to just five,” presenting it as a triumph. But reality has proven otherwise.

In public schools, class sizes have ballooned to around 70 students per classroom—bringing back memories of the era when 40 to 50 students in one class was the norm, and an exhausting burden for teachers. To make matters worse, a shortage of teaching staff has forced some teachers to take on two full classes, working relentlessly from dawn until dusk without a moment’s rest. Meanwhile, officials and ministers sit comfortably behind their desks, speaking lofty words while scratching their heads, far removed from the daily struggles in the classroom.

For decades, the elimination of the “three-shift system” has been used as a populist tool by successive ministers of education and government leaders, as though that alone was the only measure of reform in the education sector. One is reminded of the old saying: “If you plan to milk a cow, first prepare the pail.” But for our leaders, such wisdom seems meaningless. To reduce schools to two shifts, they have crammed 50 to 60 students into one classroom or transferred children to other overcrowded schools. This year, the situation has gone from bad to worse.

Better to reveal the truth than hiding

In Ulaanbaatar, it used to be common for classes to hold 45 to 55 students, but even that has now become a dream of the past. Teachers, when calling the roll, now find the list stretching on: “70, 71...” and so on. It is a deeply disheartening sight. Desperate teachers remark: “With the younger kids it’s manageable—being smaller, 60 of them can still squeeze in shoulder to shoulder. But with middle and high school students, it’s unbearable. How can you possibly fit large teenagers into such cramped rooms? In those hot, stuffy classrooms, with the air heavy with sweat and dampness, three children at a desk, learning becomes a cruel joke—for both us and them.”

According to the National Statistics Office, having 60 to 70 students in one room exceeds the official classroom capacity standards by 50 to 60 percent. If regulations were strictly followed, schools in the capital city would not merely need three shifts, but four to six. Some school administrators have admitted: “Dragging on like this, pretending everything is fine, is pointless. Better to face reality honestly—‘better to reveal the bad truth than conceal it poorly’—and openly return to a three-shift system.”

Forecasts suggest that by 2030, the number of students enrolling in schools in Ulaanbaatar City will increase by 70 percent compared to 2008. This makes expanding school capacity an urgent necessity. Just this year, 139 new school and kindergarten buildings are under construction in the capital, with 15 already in operation. Authorities say another 20 will be completed before the year ends. In total, 328 education projects and initiatives are currently being implemented nationwide, with a combined budget of 1.8 trillion MNT, according to Minister P.Naranbayar.

This school year, approximately 830,000 children are enrolled in schools. And yet, despite the many new schools and kindergartens being opened year after year—despite the addition of 14,000 new student seats in Ulaanbaatar—the three-shift system still persists. Last year, official data showed that 56 classes operated in a third shift. Now the burden has grown heavier still, and classroom overcrowding has reached a breaking point.

The message is crystal clear: Ulaanbaatar is collapsing under the weight of its own rapid growth. The fact that the city cannot provide adequate classrooms for its children is but one visible sign of a much larger problem—just as it is drowning in traffic, pollution, and unchecked urban expansion.

Classes filled with only 4-10 students in rural areas

While classrooms in Ulaanbaatar overflow with 60 to 70 children crammed together, the opposite reality is unfolding in rural areas: schools with near-empty rooms and classrooms holding fewer than 20 pupils are becoming increasingly common. In fact, many rural schools operate with classes of only four to 10 students, and some do not even have upper-grade levels at all. Education experts describe this as a symptom of the sector’s unequal distribution of resources and students.

According to the 2023–2024 statistical yearbook of the education sector, there were 11 schools with fewer than 100 students in province centers, eight in soum centers, and 33 in bag centers. But by the 2024–2025 academic year, those numbers had risen to 16 in province centers and 29 in soum centers. In bag schools, enrollment has fallen so sharply that across the entire country only 4,281 children now attend classes there.

Nationwide, a total of 22,815 classes are operating this year. On average, public schools have nine to 10 more students per class than private schools. In rural areas, the largest class size is just 28 students per room—still well below the overcrowding of the capital city. Yet according to official statistics, the average class size in Ulaanbaatar schools last year was already 33.2, which is 5.1 students more than the rural average. These are, of course, only averages. The reality—as everyone knows—is that in the city some classrooms far exceed even these figures, with numbers climbing to 60 or 70 students.

Every year, between 750,000 and 830,000 children attend schools nationwide, and more than half of them are concentrated in the capital city. Rural areas, by contrast, have more schools than students to fill them—leading to smaller class sizes but underutilized infrastructure. Studies have repeatedly shown that this imbalance in distribution has persisted for the past 10 to 20 years without meaningful change.

For the 2024–2025 academic year, the breakdown of public schools nationwide shows 52 schools in bag-level centers, 337 in soums, 150 in provinces, and 163 in the capital. These numbers reveal a striking imbalance: rural areas have an oversupply of schools relative to its declining student population, while Ulaanbaatar—with nearly two million residents—remains chronically undersupplied. Even with new schools being built, it will remain impossible in the short term to bring class sizes in the capital down to official standards.

These statistics demonstrate that the problem is not a lack of resources alone, but rather poor planning and mismanagement. With careful policy, equitable distribution, and forward-looking strategy, Mongolia could better balance access to education between rural and urban areas. Yet ministers, local officials, and members of parliament often ignore this reality. Instead, they build schools and kindergartens in their electoral districts to appear as though they are fulfilling promises, without proper research, projections, or planning. As a result, many schools fail to meet class-size standards.

This is especially apparent in rural soums and bags, where few students remain in higher grades—most families relocate their older children to towns and cities for better opportunities. But for the officials, these half-empty rural schools are of little consequence. They continue to erect new, unused school buildings in the countryside, as though it were a political game.

Schools may have ‘no room’ left for students in 2030

Local audit agencies periodically review schools’ performance, assessing class sizes, teacher qualifications, and budget efficiency. For example, a performance audit conducted in Darkhan-Uul Province revealed that some schools were failing to fully utilize their capacity. Many classes operated with as few as four to 10 students, and in some cases, schools had no high school students at all—directly violating the model regulation for general education schools, which requires that class organization adhere to specific enrollment standards.

The audit found that in several schools—including School No. 1, School No. 6, School No. 11, and School No. 12—upper-grade classes were either non-existent or drastically underfilled. Such situations are far from isolated; in fact, many bag-level schools in rural areas face the same issue of low enrollment and empty classrooms.

This stands in stark contrast to the official policy. A joint order issued in 2007 by the ministers of Education and Science, Social Welfare, Labor, and Finance (Order No. 307/91/237) stipulates that primary school classes should have 30 to 35 pupils, and middle and high school classes 32 to 35. Yet last academic year alone, 231 schools nationwide exceeded these standards. In Ulaanbaatar, for instance, School No. 23 had an average class size of 52.4 students, School No. 18 had 49.1, and School No. 1 had 48.4.

Today, however, the reality is even starker: some schools in the capital now pack 70 to 80 students into a single classroom—an overcrowding problem so visible that it can no longer be hidden from public scrutiny.

For the Ministry of Education, it seems irrelevant whether a rural school has just four students in a class or a city school has forty or more. The familiar refrain of “lack of infrastructure in the countryside” continues to echo across all levels of government. But this excuse no longer holds water. Instead, what is urgently needed is a deliberate policy to decentralize, to slow the relentless migration to Ulaanbaatar, and to support rural settlement with well-managed planning.

Otherwise, by 2030, Mongolia may face the grim reality of having “no containers” left to hold its students—overcrowded schools in the capital with no space, and deserted, empty school buildings across the countryside. In Ulaanbaatar, available land for new schools and kindergartens is already scarce, while in rural areas, the country is littered with abandoned educational facilities standing idle.

Unless Mongolia redistributes its educational institutions more equitably and takes decisive steps to bring class sizes back under control—before they spiral to 100 students per room—the country risks a full-blown collapse in the accessibility and quality of education.