Elite Private Tutoring in Asia: Is It Worth the Money?
NOTE This is simply a personal reflection to a WSJ article. Not particularly pertinent to the finance world, but an interesting revelation I thought I would share.
Yesterday, while casually glimpsing through the Wall Street Journal, I found an interesting article that captured my attention on the front page: “The $4 Million Teacher.” The article, in summary, discusses and reveals the lucrative business of private tutoring offered by elite teachers to students in Korea who dream of entering a top-notch university.
It is without saying that the amount of money these private businesses make is off the charts. In a way, they are compensated for helping students achieve their dreams by assisting them with academic studies. However, is this the path Korea, and Asia in general, should be taking?
As a Korean who left the country to immigrate to United States before having to face the pressures of these tutoring regimes, I will start out by saying that I cannot empathize with the students of Korea because I have never shared the same experiences. However, I do have many friends in Korea who have told me of their perils and challenges that they had to face for college entrance exams. They, as well, had to pay thousands of dollars in order to receive supplemental tutoring from these private businesses. In the end, they believe the money paid off and helped them enter the universities of their dreams.
However, as the WSJ article writes, the private tutoring business “also creates bidding war for education, delivering the best services to the richest families, to say nothing of its psychological toll on students.” As such, the post makes a note of such disparity in educational standards between financial classes. Moreover, it is not only that these private businesses widen the gap of rich and the poor, but also seems to really lessen the importance of public education by making these private tutoring essential:
The report quoted studies, polls and other sources as saying that 97 percent of all Singaporean students, nearly 90 percent of South Korean primary students and about 85 percent of Hong Kong senior secondary students receive tutoring.
It is quite clear that it is necessary to improve the public education system. However, it appears that regardless of whatever the Korean government does to amend the situation (such as creating curfews and even banning the whole private tutoring system itself), these lucrative entities survive.
As for myself, my instinctive solution to this matter is to limit the emphasis placed on the single college entrance exam (unlike the SATs, the entrance exam is only offered once a year…essentially success or failure) and broaden college acceptance criteria to include performance beyond academics in extracurricular activities and such. However, I am sure this idea also has countless flaws in it as well.
What do you think?
I think it's becoming more and more common for highschool kids to know college level materials. And not first year intro AP exam stuff, but actually very advanced math or science. The tests really need to measure depth now and make the ad-coms work a little harder than reading a few numbers, SAT, AP, and GPA scores.
Of course most ad com people are uneducated morons. So they'd never agree to it because they can't even read data.
Actually, the article I think you are referring to mainly focuses on the effort of one man in particular, who, in addition to his teaching career, owns some sort of tutoring business that generates millions of dollars.
Yup I agree, but I thought a prevalent issue was still behind the article though that I thought was interesting
For SK, there is no single solution to this problem.
There are many statistics revealing that high portion of students who come from a good background also tends to enter into top universities.
You can't really imagine to get a score without revieving private tutoring on the college entrance exam. So, the article rightly points out that this has social problems and widens the gap between the rich and poor.
Your suggestion of including extracurricular activities will only breed specialized private tutors on those areas.
I can't really extrapolate the causation between private tutoring and economic success, but my hunch is that this overall educational trend is inhibiting people in SK to become creative or innovative.
This is why they have no Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and so on, who started their business from nowhere.
All of the profitable and big companies are subisidiaries of Samsung, Hyundai, and few other conglomerate companies.
I'm not sure till when this will last, but not for very long..
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