1976. By 1998, almost 100,000 females attended Imam Hatip high schools, making up almost half of all students. This statistic is particularly revealing because women are not eligible to become either priests or ministers. However, the introduction of eight years of compulsory education in 1997 has seen a sudden decline in the popularity of Imam Hatip schools. In 1999, the reclassification of Imam Hatip schools as "vocational schools" meant that, although more options had been made available to graduates, attaining places at prestigious university courses became more difficult. By requiring that all eight compulsory years of schooling be spent under the same primary-school roof, middle schools were abolished. Children could not enter vocational schools (one of them the Imam Hatip school) until the ninth grade (rather than the sixth, as before). By the mid-1990s, Imam Hatip schools were attracting some 11 percent of children in the relevant age group and developing into a parallel system of education. When the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, only about 2 percent of eligible children attended clerical schools. The reform in education introduced in March 2012 extended mandatory schooling to 12 years and divided into four years of primary school, four years of middle school and four years of high school. In 2002 attendance at imam hatip schools was about 60,000; by 2017 this number had increased to over 1.1 million (about 10% of all public-school students). Pro-imam hatip school reforms undertaken by the AKP government include reducing the minimum population requirement for areas where the schools are allowed to open from 50,000 to 5,000 and lowering the age at which children can enter them from fourteen to ten. Criticism Since their creation in the 1950s, Imam Hatips have been controversial in the debate about Turkey's secular state. Kenan Cayir, assistant professor of sociology at Istanbul's Istanbul Bilgi University, says the schools can have a positive impact so that religion and modernity can be together. An objection to the free choice of Imam Hatip graduates came from TÜSIAD (Turkish Industrialists' and Businessmen's Association). According to their research conducted in 1988, approximately 32% of graduates of Imam Hatip schools picked faculties of law as their first choice in university entrance exams, proving more popular than religious based alternatives. The report concluded that, due to fundamental differences in their upbringing, Imam Hatip graduates were rendered unsuitable for public office. Politicians tended