Instead of bailing out Hong Kong’s greedy tuition centres, spend more on improving education

Tuition centres are of questionable benefit to society and propping them up mainly benefits landlords. If the government’s focus is on education, why not spend instead to improve the lot of schoolchildren, especially those from lower-income families?

Robert Badal

Published: 10:30am, 25 Apr 2020

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Covid-19 is wreaking havoc on many businesses in Hong Kong, notably the once-lucrative tuition centres. To help out owners and their landlords, the government is giving out HK$40,000 (US$5,160) each to the roughly 500 former gold mines.

Parents in Hong Kong traditionally spend more on their children’s education than almost anywhere else in the world, with much of it flowing into tuition centres. Now, with that river of cash cut off by social distancing, tuition centre owners are getting a nice government handout and begging for more. But, instead of giving more to these businesses, let us look at the whole picture.

Tuition centres are run for profit by businesspeople, not educators. Professional educators are the enemy of the profiteer owners because they cost money. Tutorial centres profit from economies of scale, where customers pay for mass-produced merchandise – in this case, classes.

The “manufacturers” are the teachers, and it is in the tuition centres’ interest to employ the cheapest teachers possible. Of course, this usually means they are unqualified. This is especially true in Hong Kong because of the exorbitant rents.

The exceptions are usually found in centres that cater to the upper classes. They can afford to pay more and employ better teachers because they can charge more. But this is not the case for most tuition centres, and not even for some of the pricier ones, where the cheaper programmes are concerned.

They trumpet the qualifications of their “consultants and coordinators” for the upper echelon programmes but waltz around the subject of teacher qualifications for the low-end programmes for the masses, usually using the catch-all “experienced” and/or “qualified”.

Questioning the cultural values that engender tuition centres is tricky, but observing that the businesses are, at best, of questionable benefit to society, is not.

If the boss of a tuition school chain, the 22-year-old scion of a billionaire Hong Kong property development family, can buy a mansion for nearly HK$1 billion while, by the Education Bureau’s own admission on its website, the average Hong Kong public secondary school student graduates with a vocabulary of 3,000 English words (less than a five-year-old American child), it is clear we have a dysfunctional education system.

What is the lament about the plight of tuition centres really about? Claiming that they perform some noble educational service to the community is laughable. Besides, no one seems really upset by the grotesque wealth-based educational inequality that exists.

I do not see any billionaires rushing to help the children of lower-income families. The real concern seems to be for commercial property owners losing a lucrative source of rent.

Well, boohoo for them. They were fine with bleeding tenants with cavalier rent increases in better times. Every Hongkonger has a friend who lost his businesses because of sudden rent increases or has lost a business himself for the same reason.

Long before Covid-19 and the protests, rent gouging was erasing Hong Kong’s character and replacing it with the same chain stores and slick corporate packaging everywhere. If there is a positive side to Covid-19, it could be that it questions our acceptance of property development as the city god: a very selfish, rapaciously hungry god.

If the government wants to bail out tuition schools, be honest and admit the money is to help commercial property owners. Perhaps the announcements could include sad stories of property owners putting off buying new mansions or yachts because of reduced rental incomes.

If the government truly wants to help education in Hong Kong, that money would be better spent directly on the issues and challenges that affect the hundreds of thousands of public schoolchildren.

Let’s look at this crisis as an opportunity to do something for them – and let property owners live with lower rents. As a building owner coldly told the father of one of my students, who was being forced to close the little restaurant he had saved for years to open because of the sudden 30 per cent rent increase: “That’s business.”

Los Angeles native Robert Badal is an author, teacher and former corporate consultant and CEO speech-writer

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