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After the “double reduction”, the demand for tutoring has not disappeared and the market is still there, but it has become more hidden.

This summer, many middle school and high school students took tutoring classes at the homes of "one-on-one" teachers or in hidden corners of institutions. They took several subjects at the same time, and the cost of one class (two hours) ranged from several hundred to one or two thousand yuan. The intensive summer classes resulted in shocking statistics. Some people spent more than 100,000 yuan in one summer vacation, and some people were shocked when they calculated that they spent "500,000 or 600,000 yuan" in the year from the second to the third year of junior high school.

"My child's tutoring has become the biggest expense for my family" and "Should I take tutoring?" are being recommended to more parents on social platforms. Anxiety is spreading further. The investment of middle-class parents in education is like a gamble. If you invest, you may not get any output, but if you don't invest, you will always be afraid of being left behind. You take tutoring, I take tutoring, and we end up at the same starting line.

Text |Wang Xiao

Editor |Zhang Qingsong

Operations |Killer Whale

500,000 or 600,000 per year

In order to find a one-on-one tutor for his daughter, Zhang Runcheng harassed everyone he could think of.

He flipped through his WeChat friends list, stopped at each avatar to think about whether there were children of the same age, and then sent group messages. The chat page was flooded with "Excuse me...". He had to ask four or five people to find a teacher, and it also depended on whether the teachers were available. Zhang Runcheng spent half a month asking before he found a Chinese teacher with the right time. "I really looked all over the world for (a teacher)."

Zhang Runcheng works in Beijing, and his daughter has been taking English lessons at Xueersi during her primary school years. After the implementation of the "double reduction" policy in 2021, the child stopped taking tutoring classes. In 2022, the "double reduction" policy was strictly enforced, and the child who entered the first grade of junior high school did not participate in any tutoring for the whole year. But in the second grade of junior high school, the approaching high school entrance examination and the anxiety of "general and vocational separation" made parents start to secretly tutor their children again, and more people chose more hidden one-on-one tutoring. This means more investment and higher costs.

Before the “double reduction”, finding a tutor only required three steps: looking up reviews of several tutoring institutions, comparing prices, and then paying for the class. After the “double reduction”, finding a tutor has become an activity that tests the ability of parents.

Usually, we let the children ask their classmates first, and the answers they get are mostly "no, I haven't registered it". Occasionally, we meet someone who is straightforward and may directly reply "Of course I have registered it", but "I definitely can't tell you".

In the end, the parents had to "ask around the world". And the process of finding a teacher had to be repeated several times. The child not only had to make up for Chinese, but also many other subjects such as Taoism, law, and physics. Zhang Runcheng and his wife divided the work and shared the contact tasks. In order to find a teacher, they almost contacted all the friends around them. When looking for a physics teacher, Zhang Runcheng wanted to take a shortcut and directly ask the Chinese teacher for a recommendation, but the teacher did not introduce him, and he felt that "the information between teachers was also completely closed."

In the process of finding a teacher, anxiety can also spread among parents. When Zhang Runcheng asked other parents about Chinese teachers, one parent immediately became worried. His child didn't take extra Chinese classes, so he asked, "Do I need to find one too?" As a result, the army of people looking for teachers gradually grew in the process of searching.

Li Lanlan, who also works in Beijing, also started looking for a one-on-one tutor for her son in the second year of junior high school. She went directly to ask the parents of children who had just finished their high school entrance examinations, and they told her frankly: "Of course we will tutor them," and they were more willing to introduce teachers to her.

One-on-one tutoring not only tests parents’ abilities and physical strength, but also their financial resources.

The Chinese teacher hired by Zhang Runcheng charges 1,300 yuan for one class (two hours). His son studied four or five subjects in total, and the tuition fees for many subjects were not less than 1,000 yuan. The most expensive one was the Morality and Law after the first mock test in the third year of junior high school, which cost 1,500 yuan per class. The tuition fees for the third year of junior high school were almost 100,000 yuan.

Parents with better conditions will choose teachers in schools to tutor, especially those from prestigious schools. An industry insider told Daily People that the price of teachers in schools generally ranges from 1,000 to 2,000 yuan per hour. For example, a teacher at Beijing Renmin University High School charges 2,000 yuan per hour. "Very few teachers charge more than 2,000 yuan because there are too few families that can afford it."

Zhao Xiaohui, a Beijing resident, asked a friend to recommend a tutoring institution. The teachers in the institution are said to be in-school teachers. A two-hour class costs 2,000 yuan. Because her child is weak in many subjects such as mathematics and English, she directly signed up for four courses, "at least to fulfill my responsibilities as a parent."

Classes are only held on weekends, and the cost is more than 30,000 yuan a month. During the winter and summer vacations, the cost rises sharply, "over 100,000 yuan for one vacation." Zhao Xiaohui rarely calculates the cost of tutoring. After the high school entrance examination, she was shocked to find that "500,000 to 600,000 yuan" was spent just for the year from the second to the third year of junior high school.

Ordinary working families will intentionally control tuition fees, but over time, it will also be a large expense. Li Lanlan and her husband are both working in Beijing, each earning a little over 10,000 yuan a month. She capped the tuition fee at 900 yuan per class. Her son took three extra classes in total, three classes a week, but in a month, it still cost nearly 10,000 yuan, "one person's salary was thrown away."

Even if you are not in a first-tier city, the accumulation of long-term one-on-one tutoring can add up to a river. Zheng Jianjun lives in Jinan, where the price of one-on-one tutoring is much lower than in first-tier cities. In junior high school, a class costs 300 yuan, but his daughter has to attend classes every day. Cumulatively, it costs nearly 10,000 yuan a month, "accounting for more than half of the family's total expenditure." When she was in high school, the price of one-on-one tutoring doubled to 800 yuan per class. If she attended classes every day, "the tutoring fee would account for half of the family's total income."

After junior high and high school, I calculated the money I had spent on one-on-one tutoring over the years, and found that it was "at least 700,000 or 800,000 yuan, if not one million."

Tutoring Guerrillas

One-on-one tutoring is not something that can be done overnight. It is a systematic project that requires dynamic monitoring. Parents are like project managers. They need to set KPIs, monitor results, manage teachers, arrange students, review regularly, and adjust strategies in a timely manner.

"Finding" a teacher is only the first step. Whether it is suitable or not requires further adjustment and screening. When selecting a teacher, grades are a criterion. But grades are uncontrollable. In the end, the most convenient way is to "spend money".

Li Lanlan's biggest headache is her son's math grades. Almost all her energy is spent on hiring a math teacher. Each time she hires a teacher, she has to spend several months testing to see if the grades have improved. For a while, Li Lanlan hired a math teacher who charged 900 yuan per class. After one semester, the results improved by two or three points. "Isn't this just throwing money away?"

In the one year between the second and third year of junior high school, my son had four or five math teachers. In the end, he hired two math teachers, one for the basics and one for the advanced level.

Zheng Jianjun had a clear standard when selecting one-on-one teachers: "The grades must be guaranteed to improve by 30 points." Junior high school only lasts for three years, and the six-month large-class course did not show much improvement. Excluding the six-month sprint exam, it means that my daughter only has two years left to study. In order to move from the bottom to the middle in these two years, the grades must improve by at least 20 points. Considering the fluctuations in the execution process, the KPI was finally set at 30 points.

As long as the grades are improving, parents will not be so particular about the qualifications of teachers. In June this year, a parent in Nanjing spent 700,000 yuan to hire a one-on-one tutor for his child, which became a hot topic on the Internet. The reason was that the child's math grades did not improve after entering junior high school. After investigation, it was found that the teacher did not have a junior high school teacher qualification certificate, and the parent demanded a refund.

Li Wanying works as an assistant teacher at a one-to-one training institution in Shanghai. She revealed that sometimes, even if the teachers in the institution are of varying quality, parents who lack choice have no other choice. The one-to-one teachers and institutions have a loose cooperative relationship, and their identities and qualifications are not uniformly managed. Some of them claim to be school teachers, but in fact they have worked in schools for a few years and left early to work on their own, "specially running institutions."

The level of teaching of teachers also varies. Some teachers will assign homework in advance, and each class has a lot of knowledge points, which is "very planned". But some teachers seem very casual, and let students do an hour-long test for a one-and-a-half-hour class, which "feels very watered down". The daily report of this type of teacher is the most difficult to write, and Li Wanying has to "make the daily report look good" as much as possible.

The management of the institution is also more chaotic than expected. In the sprint before the exam, some students choose to study in a closed environment in the institution. It is difficult to determine the schedule of one-on-one teachers. Often, a teacher comes and randomly calls a student to take a class. "The management is very chaotic." Although each student has a schedule, most of them do not follow it. Some students even do not take a few English classes in a month. During that time, Li Wanying was worried every day and even felt a little guilty: Can students really get good grades in the class here?

The teachers are unstable and the class locations are guerrilla-style.

Xiang Yu's daughter has been taking extra classes at her teacher's home. Every time she takes extra classes, he hangs around downstairs, smokes, or goes to sleep in the car. For a while, the teacher moved the extra classes to a more secluded public area in the mall. Xiang Yu thought it was good because he had more places to hang out. But after one class, the teacher decided to go back to his home. He was always a little scared to take extra classes in public, fearing that he would be reported.

According to parents' descriptions, the locations of one-on-one tutoring vary. Some are hidden deep in the community, and from the outside they look no different from residential areas, so you wouldn't know they are tutoring classes. Some are hidden behind other non-academic training classes. For example, there is an institution that teaches math. Before entering, you have to go through a children's painting studio, which contains tutoring "classrooms." Strictly speaking, they can't be considered classrooms. The children sit next to each other, separated by a board, "like workstations, one grid after another."

Institutions must also be prepared for transfers at all times.

Li Wanying's organization had been reported before. In order to cope with surprise inspections, the boss simply rented two office areas and was ready to move at any time.

Some people also shared on social media that in order to prepare for the inspection, the cram school temporarily moved the class location from the community to the top floor of an empty office building for rent. "It was hard to find because I got lost and almost got late." As a result, halfway through the class, I heard that the inspection team had come. So the teacher "quickly turned off the class notes projection and quickly changed it to an English movie projection. When asked, "What is this for?", the teacher replied, "English dubbing interest course."

A more hidden "roll"

As long as you search for "supplementary lessons" on social platforms, big data will continue to push content related to "supplementary lessons".

"In Shanghai, is 60,000 yuan a lot for summer tutoring?", "My child's tutoring has become the biggest expense for my family", "Should I take tutoring?", anxiety arises unconsciously. Parents are caught in a huge information cocoon of education anxiety.

Zhang Xiaomei's daughter is in primary school. When she opens WeChat and scrolls through her friends circle, an advertisement from an educational institution pops up every few messages, "Today it's programming, tomorrow it's art." Not only WeChat, but institutions call Zhang Xiaomei almost every day. They don't explicitly mention subject tutoring on the phone, but Chinese is about reading literacy and mathematics is about logical thinking.

After the “double reduction”, schools no longer encourage the publication of grades and rankings, but parents are actively positioning their children’s “positions”.

After each test, Zhang Xiaomei could only see grades A, B, C, and D. But parents have their own ways to know the specific scores. For example, each parent uses a nickname to send their child's scores to the group owner, who collects them and sorts them and sends them to the group. In this way, parents can know their children's ranking.

Zhang Xiaomei calls herself a "sit-up" parent. She wants to lie down for a while, telling herself that the country is also reducing the burden on children and managing the internal circulation of education. There are many children with emotional problems now, so don't mess with the children. "At this time, I lie down." But after a few days, I see other children have been like this, or I see that what the blogger said is right, "I start to worry again."

The attitude towards children is also divided. On the one hand, she tries to be "pleasant" and encourage the children; on the other hand, she secretly worries about her children. After a final exam, the school announced the results but not the rankings. The daughter excitedly took home a math test with a score of 91, thinking that she did very well. Zhang Xiaomei encouraged her daughter by saying "Great, you've worked hard this semester" and took her daughter to eat.McDonald's, but I couldn’t help muttering in my heart: This result must be among the lowest in the class.

When the open competition is transferred to the dark, the fear of "opacity" even exacerbates the anxiety of some parents.

What made Zhang Runcheng feel consumed was a basic logic. He had never really seen "other people's children" and could not determine who was taking extra classes, what progress they had made, and whether there were any famous teachers. But if others were learning and making progress, and his own children did not make progress, it would be equivalent to regressing. "It is true that if you don't advance, you will regress."

Parents and children alike can feel this undercurrent of competition.

After entering junior high school, the daughter complained to Zheng Jianjun more than once that the teacher lectured too fast and that she finished her homework very late. Zheng Jianjun asked the parents around him and found out that learning ahead of time was a common phenomenon. With so many people taking extra classes, "those who didn't take extra classes were left behind."

Zheng Jianjun started taking extra classes in junior high school, and he clearly felt the pressure of "not keeping up". He used the analogy of eating steamed buns, saying that if you eat 100 steamed buns in 100 days, it would be easy, but if you don't finish them, you have to wait until the next 100 days, but there will be new steamed buns to eat in the new 100 days. In order to catch up, his daughter had extra classes every day, alternating between math and Chinese, and persisted for several years.

In such an atmosphere, children will even take the initiative to ask for extra lessons. Xiang Yu's daughter took the initiative to ask for extra lessons. My daughter's grades in elementary school were always at the top. When she entered junior high school, she became the class study committee member. However, her grades in one course were not ideal, and she felt that there was a gap between her and the position of study committee member. Even if she took the initiative to ask for extra lessons, her state before going to extra lessons every weekend was very different from when she did not take extra lessons. When she did not take extra lessons, she would get up early in the morning, pack up, dress up, and prepare to go out and play with her classmates. After the extra lessons, she would stay in bed until after ten o'clock, and she would be in a very depressed state.

You make up for it and I make up for it, and we are all back on the same starting line.

Imaginary competition among peers is the source of anxiety. The junior high school entrance examination and the college entrance examination are like catalysts, urging parents to seize the time and invest money regardless of the cost.

In recent years, the "middle school entrance exam" has been created to be more terrifying than the college entrance exam. In 2017, the Ministry of Education issued the "High School Education Popularization Plan (2017-2020)", which proposed a goal, namely "a more reasonable structure for general high schools and secondary vocational education, with roughly equivalent enrollment scales." "Roughly equivalent" has gradually become a rumor of 50-50 split: 50% of junior high school students will not be able to pass the high school entrance exam and can only go to vocational high schools, technical secondary schools, etc.

At the national level, diversion is to optimize educational resources and rationally allocate talents. But in the eyes of parents, diversion is a kind of "screening", and being diverted means being "eliminated".

In first- and second-tier cities with concentrated educational resources and strong parental support, the "high school entrance examination" score line has been "rolled out of the sky". The results of the 2024 high school entrance examination have been announced. In Beijing's four educational strong districts of Dongcheng, Xicheng, Haidian and Chaoyang, more than half of the students scored above 600 points, with a total score of 670 points. On a 100-point scale, nearly 90 points is just average.

Generally speaking, test scores follow the normal distribution principle, with more in the middle and fewer at the ends, and both top students and poor students are in the minority. But when you look at the distribution map of high school entrance exam scores in various districts in Beijing, each district is a terrifying "mushroom cloud". Most students' scores are concentrated at the top, forming a huge mushroom head, and there are very few students with poor scores, forming a thin mushroom stem. In other words, almost all parents and students have tried their best and used up all their resources to reach the ceiling of their scores.

After passing the junior high school entrance exam, the children flock to the "junior high school transition classes" because the difficulty of high school will be a step higher and they will not be able to catch up without extra classes. The one-on-one tutoring fee is also doubled compared to junior high school.

Faced with mushroom-cloud-shaped grades, parents dare not stop tutoring. As a result, parents' anxiety, involuted scores, and rising prices of one-to-one tutoring classes form a flywheel triangle that cannot be stopped at all.

Someone shared on a social platform that after she finished the college entrance examination, her mother urged her to "prepare for college courses" in advance. Netizens in the comment section joked: If you don't play now, you will never be able to play in this lifetime.

A gamble

Three years after the implementation of the "double reduction" policy, how is the effect of reducing the burden? According to Caixin, Wei Yi, an associate researcher at the Institute of Chinese Educational Finance and Economics of Peking University, found that since the implementation of the policy, the participation rate and family expenditure of primary and secondary school students in extracurricular subject training have dropped significantly, and families have begun to turn to after-school services in school. However, high-income families are investing more costs to allow their children to continue to participate in extracurricular training, and their children's schools can often provide better after-school services, which widens the gap with low-income families.

This is also consistent with the feelings of parents: the current education is built up with the resources, money, time and energy of parents. The current education competition is a competition of the entire family's resources, including cultural level, educational environment, investment of money, and of course the cooperation of the children.

Some people on social platforms have raised the question that when high-priced one-on-one tutoring becomes the norm, does it mean that families with a monthly salary of only a few thousand yuan will have to withdraw from the competition?

For different families, the cost-effectiveness of education spending is different.

When parents have too few cards in their hands, they will pay special attention to the input-output of education. For ordinary working-class families, parents have to reduce their quality of life for the sake of education. Since enrolling her child in a one-to-one tutoring program, Li Lanlan has not gone shopping for clothes for a long time.

The most recent pain caused by education expenses was two months ago, when her son had just signed up for tutoring in chemistry and physics competition classes. The total cost was more than 40,000 yuan, but no matter how Li Lanlan tried, she couldn't afford it. She was too embarrassed to ask her relatives for money, so she simply usedJD.comIOU was used to give my son a loan for tutoring.

In Li Lanlan's family, education expenses account for the largest part, but in a way, this expenditure is like a gamble, using money to bet that the child's grades will improve. The cost of losing becomes more difficult to bear.

Apart from studying, her son "has almost no shortcomings", but when it comes to studying, the mother and son seem to have irreconcilable conflicts, especially after each test results, there will be a few battles at home. The battle is most concentrated in mathematics, which takes the most effort. Every time when she sees that the results have not improved by a few points, Li Lanlan will be angry, "The family spent so much money, but you don't study hard", almost every time she blurts out, "The family spent so much money, but you don't study hard",

During the first and second year of junior high school, there was a big quarrel every three days and a small quarrel every two days. In the second year of junior high school, Li Lanlan found that she often had high blood pressure and sweating. She went to a regular hospital for a checkup but could not find the cause. Finally, she was diagnosed with anxiety disorder at Beijing Anding (a mental health medical institution).

If there is no outlet for emotions, playing with mobile phones can also become a fuse for an outburst. Once, her son had just finished an exam and was playing with his mobile phone at home. Li Lanlan looked at her son curled up on the sofa playing with his mobile phone and instantly became furious. Her son felt that he had to relax after the exam, but Li Lanlan felt that he still had to study after the exam. Li Lanlan was so angry that she smashed her mobile phone. This was the second mobile phone that Li Lanlan had broken. While comforting Li Lanlan, her husband joked, "How many cram schools can you enroll in with this money?"

When highly educated small town test-takers become parents, the habit of "testing" naturally extends to their children's education. Li Weiliang used to be a class teacher at an online English education brand, and nearly half of his clients were first-generation test-takers parents in Beijing and Shanghai. He found that compared with other parents, first-generation test-takers parents "care more".

If the child does not listen carefully, the parents will call Li Weiliang and start to analyze the reasons before he can give feedback. If the phonics method is used in class, the parents will also ask for the specific meaning and operation method, and Li Weiliang has to be ready to open the reference manual to answer their questions at any time.

Although the first generation of parents are "difficult to deal with", they are the most loyal and the easiest to renew their subscriptions. For an online foreign teacher class (25 minutes) at 170 yuan, one parent once paid more than 50,000 yuan in one go, "for three years at a time."

However, the role of family resources in children's future is not reflected in the upper limit of the family's education spending, but seems to be more reflected in the escape route the family prepares for the children.

Liu Chuan is obviously a more "relaxed" parent. His child has never taken extra classes until the first mock exam results came out in the third year of junior high school. Li Chuan realized that his son's results were much worse than he had imagined. He quickly enrolled the child in a one-on-one sprint class, which cost him 60,000 yuan in one and a half months.

His son's final high school entrance exam results were still not ideal, but the sky did not fall. Before the exam, his son had applied for Hong Kong citizenship. That was Liu Chuan's plan B. If his results were good, he would continue to study in the mainland. If his results were not good, he would go to Hong Kong to study.

The day after the results of the high school entrance exam were released, Liu Chuan took his son on a plane to Hong Kong. There is no high school entrance exam in Hong Kong. High school lasts for six years, leading up to the college entrance exam. Some schools will leave some places for transfer students. If you want to transfer to a school, you need to go through an interview and a written test, "just like looking for a job." For his son, education in Hong Kong seems to be more suitable. His academic performance is average, but he is good at sports, especially basketball.

When he was studying in Beijing, teachers didn’t value his sports performance and thought it was a waste of time. But when he was interviewing at a school in Hong Kong, the interviewer heard that he was good at basketball and immediately called the physical education teacher to say hello: “The physical education teacher must like you very much.”

Zhao Xiaohui also gave up internal friction early and took the initiative to withdraw from the war. Born in the 1970s, she is the only daughter in her family. Although her family is not rich, they are relatively well-off, and "the collection of books is one of the best." She has been a top student since she was a child, but failed the college entrance examination and only went to an ordinary undergraduate school. But she still found a job very smoothly after graduation, and was promoted to management within a few years. Zhao Xiaohui knows that in addition to her comprehensive ability, part of her luck is due to the favorable times. "If I look for a job now, the situation is completely different."

Zhao Xiaohui is also very Buddhist about her daughter's education. She enrolled her daughter in cram schools just to fulfill her responsibilities. "As for how she learns, it is entirely up to the child herself." She is not obsessed with her child going to a prestigious university or studying abroad in the future. Many of her relatives' children graduated from Peking University or Tsinghua University, or returned from Ivy League schools, but still couldn't find a job after graduation. Even if they did, the salary was often below expectations.

"Educating children is like controlling a robotic arm in the vast ocean. At most, you can use the upper arm to move the lower arm a little bit. But there are many things in front of the arm and fingers that you cannot grasp or reach. You can only grasp this line. You worry for a long time, and at most you can get into a 985 or 211 university, but this is only a very small, controllable part, so there is no need to worry at all."

(Except Wei Yi, all the characters mentioned in this article are pseudonyms)