Primary education has experienced some turbulence with the rise of free markets and increasing urbanization. As more families move to the cities urban schools are suffering from overcrowding while rural schools suffer from low attendance. After the communist regime stepped down and free markets were introduced, the Mongolian education system was reformed through decentralization and handing control over to local provincial governments. Before this, the government highly subsidized education, with education spending consuming 27% of the budget in 1985[23] (by 1999 this number dropped below 15% of the total budget).[24] Every child, no matter how rural, could go to well-equipped schools that had some of the lowest student-to-teacher ratios in the worl