At the core of the demand wallahs’ view is the idea that education is just another form of investment: People invest in education, as they invest in anything else, to make more money—in the form of increased earnings in the future. The obvious problem with thinking of education as an investment is that parents do the investing and children get the benefits, sometimes much later. And though many children do, in effect, “repay” parents for the investment by taking care of them in old age, many others do so only reluctantly, or they simply “default,” abandoning their parents along the way.
