The Cost of an International Education in Thailand
We’re almost half way through April, and I suspect many of you are already dreaming about summer. Many of you might be graduating in a month. Some of you might be wondering how freshman year went by so quickly. A lot of you might be deciding what university to attend. I thought it would be interesting to re-share this post I wrote last year on how much it costs to be a “dek inter” or “dek nork”. Sometimes we cruise through our educational career and never take time think about how much all of this costs… so lets try calculate it.
Kindergarten and Elementary education:
For the top international schools in Bangkok, you will be paying between 500–700 thousand baht per year of education. Multiply that by 8 years, you will be paying anywhere between 4–5.5 million baht total for your child’s early years education.
There’s no doubt that after elementary school, you will already be speaking english like a farang. Don’t forget to combine this with the fact that you have been rolling up to school everyday in a fancy van after being fed breakfast by your lovely nanny.
Middle School and High School:
Things seem to only go uphill from here…
If you chose to finish middle school and high school in Thailand, you will be paying no less than 600 thousand baht a year. And on the high side, you can even expect to pay as much as 850 thousand a year at the top schools. This totals to roughly 3.6–5.1 million baht.
However, if your parents decided to turn things up a notch and send you to boarding school, your family will be paying more than 1.5 million baht a year. Factoring that to the calculation above, we can roughly say it will cost you upwards of 8 million baht.
College:
Surely, the true ‘dek inter’ doesn’t attend an international program at Chula Thammasat or Mahidol. US, UK, Australia anyone?
Since the cost of tuition varies given country and university, we can average 4 years of undergrad to around 5 million baht.
The Grand Total:
So, by the time you are around 21 or 22 years old your family would have spent between 12–18 million baht going to school. That’s a lot isn’t it?
Don’t forget, we haven’t even factored in the cost for food, airplane tickets, SAT tutors, and all the many other things related. Depending on how lavish of a lifestyle you live, you can top that sum with another million or two. So its certainly safe to say that one child costs at least 20–25 million baht. Starting to regret the B’s and C’s you got in college now? Don’t worry, I do too.
This means that, on average, your mommy and daddy will be spending 1 million baht each year on your schooling.
Its extremely hard to debate the worth of this because we all lead different lives and follow different career paths. Some people come from families that own large businesses, having a child with a degree from a top university is subsequently an investment in the future leader of your company. For the rest of us, studying abroad often gives you a competitive advantage when trying to find jobs at big companies. But if you put that into perspective, without any monetary help from your family, how long would you have to work and save before you yourself can consider having kids and sending them to international school?!
**If you just came here to find out the numbers you can stop reading here. For some more commentary… keep reading :)**
Lets think of this in terms of social inequality and mobility. If you can relate to anything that I have written above we can all assume that you come from a wealthy family. By wealthy, I mean, really wealthy in comparison to the rest of the country. According to a 2015 Credit Suisse report, 75% of Thailand’s wealth is held by the population’s top 10%. So, in a country of around 67 million people, around 6.7 million people (probably even less in reality) possess almost all the money. Thats pretty sad isn’t it?
Wealth inequality is not a problem that can be easily solved. Given the case of Thailand, “we” the rich will continue being rich and the poor will continue being poor. Your nanny and driver who sent you to school every day can never expect their children or grandchildren to gain the same access to education as you.
According to the world bank, the average income in Thailand is around 190k baht. Therefore, you get a very very very small part of the population who can even think of affording this luxury for their children. Inherently, attending international school and going to study abroad is is an elite thing.
On the education front, people of different economic backgrounds live in separate worlds. Some children struggle to make it through high school. What job prospects do you think await them if they leave school at 14–15 because they need to get into manual labor to feed themselves and their family? The Thai school system in Bangkok is a bit different. The quality of education is much higher than the rest of the country and at the top schools you can find the brightest kids who go on to win olympic gold medals and obtain government scholarships to attend Ivy League universities. Your average middle class student has their future somewhat secured. They will most likely attend Chula, Thammasat, or Mahidol, and will most likely find a stable job in Bangkok.
However, true freedom of choice for education only exists for the families that have millions of baht to spare in their bank accounts. The option to get a degree from abroad is only reserved for the very few in society. You might be reading this and thinking, “well everyone is going to international school nowadays,” you must recognize that you are part of a very small bubble in relation to the rest of the country. Don’t forget, it will cost you around 20 million baht per child!
I mention all this because the difference in wealth and education is an important factor in Thailand’s political conflict. Although the divisions in society during the current government is not a visible as it used to be, it hasn’t disappeared. The poor state of the Thai economy does not give us much hope about anything in Thailand getting better.
What is surprising to me is the type of ignorant speech that sometimes spurs out amongst anti-Thaksin Bangkokians. You probably, at one point, have said or heard someone say something along the lines of “the poor people are uneducated that is why they get tricked by Thaksin.” This type of statement, I believe, has no place in the minds and mouths of “educated” people. If we have any hope of solving the deeply engrained conflict in Thailand we must start at the social level. Marginalizing statements such as the one above do nothing but divide people. It breeds a sense of “us” versus “them.” At the end of the day isn’t the goal of the current government all about fostering national unity?
What is most important here is the idea of respecting and acknowledging the existence and needs of people from different social classes. By no means is this discussion biased towards any particular political group. But the inconsistencies in Thai society about the good and bad guys in society are perplexing. Instead of consistently trying to identify dissidents and enemies, the “highly” educated Bangkok population should focus their intellect on understanding arguments presented by people that are different to them. Don’t just subject yourself to silly rhetoric. Its a waste of your brain…and money!
