When I talk about tuition here, I am not referring to the tuition fees paid to colleges and universities. Those fees are necessary fees paid for your tertiary education. What I am referring to however, is the payments made for additional classes for primary school and secondary school (high school) students. These are the classes taken outside of school, taught by public school teachers after their official work or retired school teachers.

The Malaysian newspaper News Straits Times (which was until recently Malaysia’s premier broadsheet) reported that Malaysian parents spent a whopping RM 4 billion (more than US$1 billion) on such tuition fees - a sum normal perhaps by Western standards, but a huge amount for a rather small South East Asian country.

Parents cite reasons such as their lack of time to help their own children with their homework while students generally report themselves as kiasu, i.e. a Singaporean slang word that means afraid to lose.

But, in my opinion, such a phenomenon should not be surprising. Considering the mentality of Asian parents towards education (see my previous post on how American parents are urged to emulate Asian parents’ outlook towards education for more information on this), it is clear that they would want to ensure that their children receive an excellent academic education (which Malaysian public schools fail to provide to a large extent, of course). Add the fact that education is acknowledged as the only means for a developing country to develop further and we have a situation where everyone is happy, from students, parents and state.

In any case, there is only prospect for future growth for such an industry. These days, it is difficult to find Malaysian students not taking extra tuition classes for everything from language to mathematics and science. After all, given the rising number of students scoring straight As in Malaysian national examinations, students will lose out if they do not utilise all the means to score better grades that are available to them.