Unveil The Mysteries of Buxiban(Taiwanese Cram School) Market
Are they schools?
Buxiban is actually the English romanization using Pinyin for 補習班. In Korea, this type of school is called a hagwon. Another common word used is cram school. Two common beliefs as to why the term “cram” is used are:
1. These schools try to cram as many students into them as possible.
2. These schools try to cram as much information into kids’ heads as fast as possible.
Buxibans are Businesses
First and foremost, these establishments exist to make money. They are not institutes of learning struggling to survive on donations and depressed tuitions in order to educate the nation’s youth. They are here to make the owner or owners money.
They do so by offering supplemental education, but the difference is the goal. Cram schools educate to make money, not for the sake of education.
You can decide for yourself on the pros and cons, and what moral implications this may have, but if you choose to work in one, knowing the boss or owner’s primary concern directly affects your experience. Students and their parents are customers. Happy customers mean happy bosses. If you have a happy boss, your life will be much more enjoyable.
— Move To Taiwan, “What Exactly is a Buxiban?”
As the quotes above, it’s quite obvious to find out that Buxibans seem to be a huge market in Taiwan. Actually, parents in Taiwan usually desire their children to achieve high grades so they send their children to this kind of after-school program for more study time. Buxibans, on the other hand, being advertised successfully among Taiwanese parents, become the first image when parents come to children’s ideal grades.
However, we can’t give the accurate amounts of money in Buxibans market since Buxibans will not unveil their finance status easily. But the figure below published by 1111 HR Agency just give us a glimpse of this surprising market. While students are giving 1–3 times of tuition(or even more) to Buxibans, cram school teachers are getting great salaries among this industry.
Since I knew that cram schools have a pretty well income from parents, the first question came into my mind was how they develop their loyal customers.
I used to be a cram school teacher.
Take my experience in Taipei city. Cram schools usually spent most of their time advertising themselves in their districts so they can gain the most efficient feedback. That is to say, the brands in Taipei can be generally separated by districts. I used to recruited as a teaching assistant by Renda cram school which is dominant in Daan District. I was completely shocked when I first stepped into this industry. Parents in Taiwan are actually not so familiar with the new technology yet so the promotion channels are very, very traditional : distributing the flyers in front of schools. Especially during the exam period, dozens of cram school employees from different brands will stand in front of schools to give away the flyers. You may thought this as a joke but this is exactly happening in Taipei. Moreover, the flyers usually contains some kind of discounts to motivate parents bring the flyers back to cram school and get a better price.
The another way of promoting is the social circle of students. It’s quite often to see that parents are really afraid of children's learning progress. When they saw their child’s classmates are progressing faster than theirs, parents get nervous and tend to make their child go to the same cram school or take the same courses as the progressing students. In my experience, these kind of students usually come to cram schools forced by their parents. They don’t actually want to study after school so cram schools become another place for them to make friends. Ironically, these students usually pay way more than the progressing ones because their parents are easier to be persuaded for more courses since parents are worried about their grades.
Both distributing flyers and using the social circle of students are effective ways to help cram schools develop their own loyal customers, or we can say parents. In my experience,cram schools don’t actually treat students as students. The teaching environment and quality are always less important than the parents’ wills.
Since I am also a BA student, I observed students’ behaviors while working as a teacher in the cram school. Before we talk about students, let’s take quick view of teachers. There’re usually two types of teachers in cram schools. One is recruited for professional courses but usually launch classes in different cram schools. In other words, this kind of teacher don’t bound with particular cram school brands and they usually have a certain extent of exposure. The other type of teachers, which I was, is recruited by single cram school brand and usually take multitask including administration, negotiation with customers, instructor of classes …etc. A manager usually deal with a whole single grade and have their own teachers(two types above) to handle all the courses. So in bosses’ and managers’ views, the lower the labor cost in productivity, the more the company will gain.
The management of every cram schools are different. In my experience, I used to work with one colleague in one classroom, which means one teacher deals with the administration and one focus on teaching while there are about 20–50 students. But I don’t see this kind of management as a good way to control the students. Students come to cram school so often so they actually won’t behave so well because they see cram school as a social place. Teachers need a lot of effort to get them calm down and make them behave themselves. For instance, there was a class that we called “Zoo Class” because the students come here just for fun. Moreover, they don’t actually respect teacher. We have responded to manager but we only got the answer that our boss doesn’t want to see students dropped out by us. So it was quite a difficult time for us to overcome that period, five of my colleagues resigned and I was the only one left after we finished that semester.
Despite the hard time with “Zoo Class”, I still insist on giving students better learning qualities. I was actually not agree with my boss’s decision on keeping some students in class. But since he was the boss, I just tried to overcome that hard time and finally I got promoted after all. It’s also easy to find out that employees in cram schools usually turnover very fast.
While managing a class of students in cram school, I found that there’re some tips to control them more smoothly :
- Respect students first(then they will respect you).
- Understand what they are passion for.
- Always be a friend for them.
When a student thought you as a friend, they will actually listen to your request more mildly. Compared to other colleagues, I spent more time to stand on their perspective and try treating them same as treating my friends.As a result, when my colleagues encountered problems with controlling students’ behaviors, they called me for help first instead calling manager to go for punishment to students.
It seems these rules are similar when we are having relationships with our own friends. Constant rules should be followed when we are making businesses between humans. For honest, even though cram school culture seems to be left behind by the booming technology, it still has something for us to reference. I was really appreciate the time I worked in cram school, without this experience, I won’t have the experience to negotiate with “Monster Parents”and tackle with these students-management problems.
In my opinion, the strategies of cram schools in Taiwan are not fitting the new age so well. When it comes to cram schools, the traditional image just come into my mind. They keep their brands through chaining and dominating the market but most of the traditional cram schools don’t actually consider the better environment for students to gain knowledge. There’re so many technologies nowadays can be used by cram schools to improve their qualities but they are still using information asymmetry to get money from parents’ pocket.
Furthermore, after they get the money, cram schools don’t actually renew their facilities or improve their employees’ professional skills. For example, smartphones are a very useful tools for gaining knowledge but most of the cram schools aren’t allow students to use smartphone while studying in classroom. In my view, the learning environment really affects a child’s growing. From his/her learning abilities to his/her values. If cram schools didn’t improve their environment and managing principles with the trend of time, it’s easy to say that I won’t send my children to cram schools.
For me, personalities are important. And a traditional cram school can’t actually teach students how to find themselves. To be more specific, how can a company that don’t know their personal brand teach me how to brand? If we can gain knowledge and develop our own brands from our sweet and comfortable home, why do we need to go to cram schools?
“You have to understand your own personal DNA. Don’t do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it.”
“People are chasing cash, not happiness. When you chase money, you’re going to lose. You’re just going to. Even if you get the money, you’re not going to be happy.”
“I’m the happiest because I’m doing exactly what I want to do”
– Gary Vaynerchuk
So how can this industry progress, or how can it be replaced? There’re actually some people working with this topic. Knowledge management or skills learning are always a big issue in the whole world. Cram school is just one of the platforms for KM and skills learning. I will introduce more Taiwan startups which want to make some different in this field in my next article.
