Not a cent to $1 billion on tuition

My daughter pointed this out to me yesterday. She had often told me how almost every classmate except the scholars having tuition. How they are often ahead of her in class, but with only two multiple choice papers left and given the experience of her older sister before her, I am fairly certain she would do better than most of her classmates who have had tuition.

I always tell her that what mattered is how you finish the race. Too many parents use tuition as a security blanket. Top students at RI and HCI signed up for tuition to be triply sure they get their As. They don't realize this is a bad habit that would serve them very poorly in working life. The elder girl often tell me that most of her project mates are not confident and insecure about their work. That is from a cohort where at least 90% of them have four As. They have not much thinking skills and try to use their scoring skills for university.

It takes more than a decade to learn that in many situations tuition isn't that useful. Today kids brought up on tuition is not likely to serve this on their children. As our society mature we will come to rely less on tuition. I don't expect to see the industry hitting $2 or 3 billion dollars.

As the desire to gain an edge over others will never cease, the tuition industry will have to adapt. This is going to be an exciting and constantly changing space. My wish for the industry is to evolve to become more inclusive, relevant and useful beyond exams. For that to happen their customers must be far more informed and sophisticated. And we will not call it tuition.