Failing Grade: Hong Kong Students Can't Stop Paying Cram Kings
Private tutors aren’t just about exams—they’re about a multi-billion-dollar need to keep our kids learning.
Tiffany Yip and Vivian Lee are just like any other 16-year-old girls—except they’re shooting for a spot at a top university. After class ends at the prestigious Maryknoll Convent School, they both go off to cram school. This costs Tiffany $3,000 a month and Vivian up to $5,000. They both see a private tutor, too—another $1,600 every month. Tiffany, who’s talented with music, also takes piano and flute lessons.
Over the next six months, Tiffany will spend $38,400 and Vivian $39,600 on cram schools and extracurricular learning. A full academic year at the city’s most coveted college, The University of Hong Kong, costs only slightly more: $42,100.
Cram schools are big business in Hong Kong—typically an hour at one of these mass-tutorial centers costs $100. And it costs more for the “celebrity tutors,” whose faces we see on billboards and buses. One celebrity tutor, who spoke to HK Magazine on the grounds of anonymity, says that it costs her students $400 to $500 an hour to supplement their English education. But she’s seriously considering a rate hike—after all, she’s been charging the same for three years. Other subjects can run anywhere from $300 to $700.
Read More: Ken Ng Is the King of Cram Schools and Celebrity Tutors
The majority of Hong Kong’s students are paying. A 2012 survey by the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups found that more than three-fourths of its student respondents attended a cram school.
“This isn’t a clever way to nurture young talents—we should try to get away from depending on private tutoring,” says education lawmaker Ip Kin-yuen. “This dependency isn’t a good sign.”
But it doesn’t look like that dependency’s changing anytime soon.
