Just days before the start of the new academic year, Monte Rosa School found itself literally out in the cold. A commercial dispute with Naran Trade LLC has left the private school without desks, books, heating or even windows, and has thrown the education of 600 children into disarray. Private schools have sprung up like mushrooms after rain in recent years, but many are now finding it a struggle to keep their doors open, let alone stay ahead of the legal disputes nipping at their heels. Monte Rosa’s case has become the starkest example yet.
According to parents, Naran Trade moved in just before September 1, smashing windows, removing teachers from the premises and clearing out classrooms of desks, chairs and children’s belongings. Notebooks, textbooks and clothing were confiscated along with the furniture. Electricity, water and heating to the building were also cut, leaving the school unable to function in any capacity. Parents have cried foul, arguing that a company has no business taking matters into its own hands without a court order, whatever the underlying dispute may be. Several have taken their grievances to the media, hoping public pressure will succeed where private negotiations have failed. They have also appealed to the Ministry of Education to step in and ensure their children are not left out in the cold when classes are due to resume, calling on officials to secure alternative learning arrangements while the legal dispute between the school and the company runs its course. For now, though, 600 students remain caught in the crossfire of a business dispute they had no part in, their education held hostage to a conflict playing out far above their heads.
Unchecked greed breeds monsters
Monte Rosa School had been operating for years under a lease inside an educational complex owned by Naran Trade LLC, one of a string of arrangements that have quietly propped up Ulaanbaatar’s expanding private school sector. According to the company, that lease expired on June 15, and rent for the past academic year went unpaid. Naran Trade took the matter to court rather than negotiating directly, and under the resulting ruling, the school’s bank account was frozen, a decision that should, in principle, have settled the dispute through proper channels.
Instead, it seems to have opened the door to something far murkier. Rather than waiting for the courts to see the matter through, Naran Trade allegedly registered under a new company name, quietly opened a separate account, and began collecting tuition directly from parents, all while giving every impression that the school would carry on as usual. Parents paid in good faith, unaware that the ground beneath their children’s classrooms was already shifting. The school’s principal, who had originally signed on for a 15-year lease on the building, said Monte Rosa had gone to considerable lengths to keep up its end of the bargain, even selling off a smaller building of its own, and had paid out a total of 2 billion MNT in rent over the life of the agreement. That is not the profile of a fly-by-night operation cutting corners, it is the profile of a school that had sunk real money, and real trust, into staying put.
Adults picked this fight, but it is the children who are footing the bill, and that much is beyond dispute. The harder question is where the blame actually lies. If Monte Rosa’s own leadership let the rent lapse and was slow to collect tuition from parents on time, that director owes families a proper accounting, no question. Mismanagement is mismanagement, whoever is responsible for it. But sloppy bookkeeping on one side of a lease is no licence for vigilantism on the other. Stripping a school bare overnight, smashing windows, hauling out furniture, cutting the power and water, all without so much as a court order authorizing eviction, is not the conduct of a company enforcing its rights. It is the conduct of a thief in the night, one that has effectively held roughly 600 children’s education, and quite literally their school records and personal documents, hostage to a commercial grudge.
Nor does the responsibility begin and end with the two companies slugging it out in court. The Ministry of Education is the body that granted Monte Rosa permission to operate in the first place, and it did so, evidently, without any real assurance that the school had secure, unencumbered premises to teach in. That is not a minor administrative oversight, it is the kind of gap that, sooner or later, was always going to leave someone’s children out in the cold. Rather than reckoning with that failure, the Minister of Education and relevant department officials have, by all accounts, largely shrugged the matter off, offering little more than a resigned “we don’t have a school for them,” as though the problem belonged to someone else entirely. When pressed on why hundreds of children had suddenly been left with nowhere to study, Head of the Ulaanbaatar Department of Education A.Amartuvshin gave an answer just as sweeping and just as unsatisfying that students have the right to study at public schools within their own district. True enough, perhaps, on paper. But it is cold comfort to parents who had hoped for something far more concrete, some guarantee, however modest, that their children would have somewhere to sit and learn while the court took its time reaching a final decision. Instead, parents and guardians say they have been left thoroughly in the dark, chasing answers from officials who seem more interested in passing the buck than picking up the pieces.
And Monte Rosa, frustratingly, is not an isolated case, if anything, it looks like a symptom of a much wider rot. The so-called Australian Smart School of Ulaanbaatar, which markets itself heavily on an English-language, technology-focused curriculum billed as an authentic slice of Australian education, has come under fire online after a journalist’s Facebook post about the school went viral, alleging that the institution was all polish on the outside and quietly falling apart underneath. He had enrolled his daughter there back in 2023, he wrote, and every year since had been fed the same promises of improvement, promises that, year after year, simply failed to materialise. Pupils are meant to choose two extracurricular clubs or sections from a list of 22, he explained, but in practice are only able to attend during the first semester before the offerings quietly dry up. The marketing claim that lessons would be conducted entirely in English, he added, turned out to be equally hollow: beyond the core curriculum, English instruction amounts to a mere 20 minutes a week, often tacked onto music class almost as an afterthought, while on at least some occasions a chemistry teacher has been drafted in to cover English lessons in a pinch. Lunches, he wrote, were poor enough to make children ill, and the teachers who joined the school in its early, more promising days have since, one by one, all handed in their notice. “There are no standards,” he wrote, a blunt verdict that resonated widely.
The post struck a nerve and drew a wave of public criticism, with many commenters agreeing that scam-like private schools of this kind are becoming more common, and doing real, lasting harm to children caught in the middle. Rather than engage with the substance of the complaints or take a hard look in the mirror, the school’s response was to threaten legal action against individuals for damaging its reputation, an oddly defensive set of priorities for an institution that might instead have used the moment to fix what parents say is genuinely broken. Commenters were quick to point out, too, that Monte Rosa and the Australian Smart School are far from an isolated pair, with suspicion swirling around a handful of other grandly named institutions, among them Tsonjin Cyber, Amjilt Cyber and Tselmeg Digital, schools that sound impressive on a signboard but whose substance, parents increasingly whisper, may not match the branding.
These cases point to something bigger than any single landlord dispute or disgruntled Facebook post. They point to a private education sector where a number of operators appear to treat schooling less as a public trust and more as a straightforward business play: expand into bigger, flashier premises to draw in more enrolments, take on rent commitments the books cannot always support, and worry about the consequences later. When the finances inevitably catch up, as they did with Monte Rosa, it is never the operators who bear the true cost. It is the children, shuffled out of classrooms with their notebooks still on their desks, who are left to pay for adults’ miscalculations. Sorting out which schools are built to last and which are merely chasing numbers on a spreadsheet is no longer a problem regulators can afford to leave for parents and the courts to untangle on their own.
180 state-owned and 170 private schools in UB
Step back from any single school’s troubles, and a much larger imbalance comes into focus. Nationwide, 900 general education schools operated in the last academic year: 717 state-owned and 183 private. By international benchmarks, the ratio of public to private schools tends to sit somewhere around 90 to 10. In Mongolia, that ratio is roughly twice as skewed, the education equivalent, as the saying goes, of counting a hundred goats among what should have been 60.
Even Minister of Education L.Enkh-Amgalan has acknowledged as much. With more than 700 state schools nationwide, he noted, the private sector ought to number closer to 80 schools. Instead, Ulaanbaatar alone is home to 180 state schools and 170 private ones, a near one-to-one split that is even more lopsided in Khan-Uul District. Private schools, he argued, need proper regulation, since many advertise admissions standards and international programmes they never actually deliver in the classroom.
Fair words, as far as they go. But it is worth asking how far the minister is really prepared to take them, given that he was returned to the same post for a second term not long after making that very statement. If the government is serious about bringing order to the sector, surely the moment to act is at the starting line, by setting a genuinely high bar for opening a school in the first place, rather than scrambling to regulate after the fact. It has long been obvious that letting private schools open without their own classrooms or gymnasiums was asking for trouble. However, because the law allows schools to operate on leased premises, those without a building of their own have effectively been left to fend for themselves on the open rental market, at the mercy of landlords and lease terms rather than any real oversight. And when rents rise, so, inevitably, does tuition, adding yet another line item to the already considerable burden shouldered by parents who choose to send their children private.
Which raises the obvious question, why do parents keep choosing it? Private school tuition in Mongolia now ranges from roughly 7 million MNT to more than 100 million MNT a year, and it is worth asking plainly whether spending over a billion MNT to put a child through a general education amounts to a genuine necessity or simply a luxury few families can truly afford. And costs keep climbing. Deutsche Schule’s decision to raise tuition by 50 to 56 percent this year has left many parents reeling. First-grade tuition at Logarithm School has jumped 41 percent to 13.9 million MNT, while Sant School’s fees have risen by four million MNT. Across the sector, fee increases of this kind have become the norm, and even a bill of 20 million to 30 million MNT a year is a heavy lift for a solidly middle-income family.
But families keep paying, often taking out loans to do it, because so many have simply given up on the environment and quality on offer in the public system. Give parents a classroom with a manageable 35 pupils, a safe environment and qualified teachers, and most would happily choose a public school over a private one. Instead, a lingering assumption has taken hold that anything calling itself a “private school” must, by definition, be good, an assumption many operators have been only too happy to exploit, treating children less as pupils to be educated than as a revenue stream to be tapped.
The data bears this out. When parents surveyed for the 2018 PISA assessment were asked what mattered most in choosing a school, 92 percent pointed to a safe environment, 89 percent to a pleasant atmosphere, and 81 percent to their child's academic success, priorities that changed little in the 2022 survey. In other words, what parents want most is not a shiny brand name but somewhere safe and nurturing for their children to grow. Improving the public system, then, is not simply a matter of fairness, it is the only real check on an industry that has learned to treat education as a business first and a public good second. The government cannot credibly claim to be reining in private schools with one hand while continuing to wave new ones through the door with the other. New schools have kept opening this year regardless, among them the Imperial Italian School in Khan-Uul District’s 23rd khoroo, whose opening ceremony featured Labour Hero A.Dolgor performing the Mongolian national anthem and People’s Artist B.Sarantuya singing Italy's national anthem, a genuinely moving occasion, and also a telling one.
Sooner or later, the assumption that a glass tower, a plush classroom and a fashionable foreign name (American, Russian, Chinese, Singaporean, French, Italian, Swedish, take your pick) automatically adds up to a good education will run its course. Left unchecked, this drift is quietly sorting Mongolian children into different tiers of schooling based on nothing more than their family’s income and background. If the government does not step in now, through policy rather than press statements, to correct a divide that is already hardening along social lines, it may soon find there is no clean way back.
