Don't send your kids for tuition

The tuition industry as the tragedy of the commons, and a suggestion on how to fix it.

A Singaporean version of the Lo-Fi girl. Photo credit: u/lester6793 from this Reddit post on /r/singapore.

I doubt that it’s an original opinion that kids shouldn’t go for tuition. But I doubt many feel it as strongly as I do.

I think the tuition industry is a plague upon Singaporean society. Its very existence creates a problem, and the only way to solve that problem for your child is to pay for their services. They are worse than mosquitoes, which are literally blood-sucking disease-carrying pests, because at least mosquitoes pollinate flowers, a tangible public good. In contrast, tuition agencies offer only the service of crushing the spirits of our youth and ruining their childhoods, and at a steep price at that!

I’m exaggerating, obviously. But only slightly. The very existence of tuition agencies is a statement to the power of kiasu-ism, and also a good example of the tragedy of the commons.

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In case you are unfamiliar, here’s a brief explainer on the tragedy of the commons. Essentially, it’s a situation in economics where a large group have access to a particular common resource. There’s enough to go around for everyone, so long as everyone uses up this resource with some moderation. The classical example used is that of a field for animals to graze on. If every farmer at the common field only allows their animals to graze within limits, the field will be able to grow back and support all the farmers’ animals.

However, that’s at the group level. As an individual, if you act selfishly and use more of the resource than you should, you would be rewarded for it. And, as a single individual, your own individual act will have little significance on the group as a whole, so you’re made better off, and no one else is worse off. For instance, if you let your animals graze just a bit more, you’re not going to clear out the entire pasture on your own.

However, if lots of selfish people make that same economic calculation, then the common resource is used up unsustainably, with the result being worse for everyone. With the grazing example, if enough farmers let their animals graze to their heart’s content, the entire field may be laid bare. Everyone loses.

But most cruel of all is that those who caused the downfall of the field are punished less; after all, they got as much as they could while the going was good! The economic incentives are such that if you don’t allow your animals to graze freely, you are worse off than the one who flaunted the restrictions regardless of whether the field is being used sustainably. This encourages more selfish use of the field, nudging it towards collapse.

What do animals grazing in a field have to do with the tuition industry? I’m getting there, hang on.

In Singapore, educational meritocracy is of utmost importance, and I’ve written about its problems before. For better or for worse (and in this case, for worse), we have decided that how well you do in school shall be extremely important for your future path in life. Parents want the best for their children [citation needed], and so they want their children to do well in school. The main (if not only) measure of this is test scores. And as the adage goes, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

Well, if how well you do in school on tests and exams is important, what’s a good parent to do but to send their child for tuition? At first, it may just be a few overly kiasu parents, and their kids enjoy a sizeable advantage. Their kids are doing better than all the rest, and the other parents eventually catch on - that kid’s not a genius, they just go for tuition after school!

The after-school tuition fever spreads rapidly from parent to parent. Demand picks up, prices for tuition go up. Now the tuition industry really begins to grow, as every single parent who can afford to send their children for tuition does so. Educational performance begins to be more about whether your family can afford tuition. Those who can’t afford it scrounge up what little they have in order to send their kids for tuition to give them a fighting chance, but they can’t afford the top tuition agencies. A respectable attempt, but they’ll never compete at the top echelons.

Speaking of the top echelons, now that all the kids are being sent for tuition, the competition at the top grows even fiercer. It’s no longer enough to simply go for tuition, you have to go to a good tuition agency, with the best teachers with the finest accreditations. Children spend hours in tuition classes, burning the midnight oil to complete both their tuition homework and their actual school homework. The kids are so thoroughly drained from this whole endeavour that they fall asleep in their school classes.

You know, school. The institution that’s supposed to be the whole point of this whole tuition thing.

These are the lengths we go to in order to eke out an advantage in this case study of kiasu-ism gone mad. But yet, who can blame parents? As an individual parent, when you see all the rest of the parents doing this, if you don’t do the same, your child will lose out!

It’s the tragedy of the commons. An individual self-serving decision to get your kid to do better than their peers in school, performed at a group level, spirals out of control into the situation we have today, making everyone worse off. But now your hand is forced - if everyone else is sending their children for tuition, neglecting to do so is to choose for them to underperform their peers in school!

The tuition industry is overjoyed. It’s a billion-dollar-a-year industry and only growing. Considering that the tuition industry is so big now, it no longer distinguishes a child to send them for tuition. In fact, you have to send them for tuition just to keep them normal. Parents are now damned if they do, but more damned if they don’t.

But that’s not all. A tuition agency offers you the chance to spend money to improve your child’s performance in school. In Singapore’s conception of meritocracy where school performance strongly influences your future success. If you doubt this, try getting into uni without doing well in school, or getting a decently-paid job without a bachelor’s degree! The meritocratic ideal is for education to be dependent solely on ability, allowing those across all upbringings from rising up through society.

Contrast this to the explicit purpose of these heinous organizations: to take your money and turn it into your child’s grades, transferring familial wealth & privilege to a child. The express purpose of tuition agencies, in other words, is to corrupt the meritocratic ideal that each student should have an equal opportunity to succeed, not just those from well-to-do backgrounds. They are a mechanism for passing privilege down onto the next generation in the form of better school results, akin to a family inheritance given while the parents are still alive.

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So how can we solve this problem? What if we agreed that all kids simply wouldn’t be sent for tuition? Everyone would be better off! Parents save money, kids get more childhood, all are happy.

Except, of course, this will once again create an incentive for parents to send their children for tuition. After all, if everyone else agrees not to send children for tuition but you do so anyway, then your kid is going to do better, so other people are incentivized to violate the agreement as well, and so on, and so on, and now all kids are going for tuition again.

So that wouldn’t work. Ultimately, the issue is the incentive towards sending children for tuition - exam results matter a LOT in Singapore. If school results didn’t matter, on the other hand, tuition agencies would become entirely benign! Just as no one complains about football coaches churning out the meritocratic elite, the same would apply for tuition centers.

So let’s make exams less frequent, and less important. In other words, let’s get rid of this idea that exam scores somehow should decide what you get to do later in life. After all, in a court of law, children aren’t fully held responsible for their actions because they can’t be reasonably expected to make decisions. Why on earth, then, are we staking so much on their educational performance in childhood?

I will note that the government has not been sitting idle on this front. Some mid-year examinations in Primary and Secondary schools are being scrapped, and this is part of a greater plan towards cultivating greater joy for learning. Fantastic first steps! It is my most sincere hope that the new Minister for Education sticks with this plan, and kicks it up a notch. But fewer examinations is one thing, reducing the importance of grades is another entirely.

You might wonder how I would propose to allocate schools if grades are less important. After all

It’s simple, really. All neighbourhood schools will be allocated on the basis of geography (i.e. living near the school). That leaves all the rest of the “elite” schools - spots in those schools will be allocated by a lottery. The number of lots for each school will be weighted by educational performance, so if you did better, you’re more likely to “get in” to a good school, but still nowhere near guaranteed.

That way, those that go to Raffles Institution can’t brag about that accomplishment, considering it was literally the luck of the draw that got them there.

Are there many problems with this suggestion? Absolutely, oh so many. But it’s a start when it comes to weaning Singaporean society off this idea that educational performance should determine your lot in life. It’ll also probably reduce kiasu-ism; if much of where you get is luck and thus outside your control, let fortune take the wheel. Do you feel lucky, punk?

As an added bonus, it’ll ruin the tuition industry! So really, what’s not to love?

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If you’re still around after that unhinged ramble on why the tuition industry is worse than Satan, I’d like to recommend this article - The Special Assistance Plan: Singapore’s own bumiputera policy. It draws a very interesting parallel between the bumiputera practices of Malaysia to our own SAP schools here back home; take that, Hwa Chong!

Catch you next week!

~ Kai