Tuition: The Educational Arms Race

Educational arms race (noun): the continuing competitive attempt by two or more people in society to have more and more educational qualifications than the other 

Our families tell us that high rates of tuition – in terms of frequency and cost – are a big source of concern, and so we try to keep abreast of trends and directions.  It’s a complex picture without a clear overall pattern emerging, and I’d like to share with concerned parents what I wrote a while ago on the choice to engage in tuition or not as I think it’s still relevant.

We’ve also recently come across two further fascinating issues.

First issue: The Arms Race.  If we look at High Schools, and the fact that tuition is largely about securing a place at a University of choice, then the emerging metaphor of an arms race seems to capture something very important. It means that education has become a positional good – that is, it’s only one’s position relative to others that matters, and not one’s absolute position.  So it’s no good if I am doing really well at school – I have to be beating you to be satisfied.  And of course the same applies to you too; so if either of us (or any other competitor) gets a tutor, then so must the rest of us.  This is the classic recipe for an arms race, and Christopher Gee,  Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies in Singapore has explored how this plays out in terms of overall social costs (details of the paper are here, and you can watch him discuss it here).

Gee’s starts by noting that in Singapore in 1995 33.9% of secondary school students received private tuition.  While this is high, it’s nothing compared to the equivalent 2011 statistic of 71.3%, and one wonders what it is likely to be now.  With levels like this, Gee argues that the social norms and fear of missing out mean that tuition is now no longer an extra but (perceived as) an essential.  Arms races being what they are, though, no-one is better off as a result (except the tutors, some of whom drive Rolls Royce cars and boast of their high incomes – I kid you not; we have the emails).  Actually, most people are worse off in terms of time, money and stress.

The most striking evidence here comes from Korea, where because of the high costs of private tuition, “the net present value of lifetime earnings for a student who attends private college and works to the average retirement age of 57 now trails that of students who go directly from high school to employment. Nevertheless, South Korea has the highest rate of college attendance among OECD nations: 71 percent of high school graduates are admitted to four-year colleges.” (McKinsey Global Institute).  Read that and weep!  The cost of tuition are so high that they outweigh the extra benefits conferred by Higher Education; but everyone chooses to participate rather than ‘fall behind’.  It may not be military in nature, but that seems pretty close to a long-term version of Mutually Assured Destruction to me.  Singapore may be headed that way – here the next step in the arms race is parents getting tuition so they can help their children. Once that’s a saturated market, grandparents, aunts and uncles will be targetted.  God help us all!

Second Issue: Does tuition really help individuals?  I had always assumed that tuition is likely to help students (individual lessons always seems to work for piano or swimming!).  But surprisingly, a series of recent Singaporean studies showed that children who received tuition in Maths, English and Science actually scored worse than those that did not – even after adjusting for differences in students’ age, gender, home language, family structure, schools, parents’ education levels and employment status!  This is a very counter-intuitive finding; and while this is not the place to explore in detail, researchers have speculated as to some possible explanations:

• Could it be that students who receive tuition choose to receive it precisely because they are not doing well in school?  
• Could it be that students end up disliking the subject if they are forced to attend extra classes?
• Could it be that access to a tutor alters the learning attitudes of students for the worse? 

It’s hard to collect data here to know which may be true – but we have certainly seen students not focus in class because they expect tutors to make up for lost ground.  The value-for-money aspect of this for parents seems highly questionable to me, but this is all anecdotal.  

So what can we take away from all this?  All this analysis works on averages, so it rightly remains with parents to determine what works or does not work for their children, and for their family budgets.  So there are no easy answers.  For me, this is an individual – collective matter.  We need to remember that in pursuing what may be good for individuals we can be in danger of creating collective difficulties that actually leave all individuals worse off.  One positive step has to be to consciously guard against seeing education as a positional good.   It’s about more than beating others.  Happily, this is entirely in line with our thinking elsewhere  – we know that comparison is the thief of joy and moving away from comparisons would likely improve life for our students overall.