Aug 11, 2021
The Chinese Government Just Annihilated My Online Tutoring Job. What Now?
The Online Tutoring Industry is in ruins!
Last week, VIPKID, a giant online tutoring company with roughly 500,000 online students and 50,000 online teachers, announced that they would no longer offer tutoring services to children in China.
This is due to the Chinese government recently announcing a swift and severe crackdown on the tutoring industry that is now putting millions of people out of a job pretty much overnight. Everyone in the online tutoring gig is freaking out right now!
When VIPKID made the official announcement, teachers were understandably shocked and upset. I was upset and still am, but not for myself. After my bookings starting taking a serious nose dive earlier this year, I had to scramble to find something more stable and just found a job as a writer and creative director for an app that doesn’t deal with China.
When VIPKID dropped this bomb last week, I was already on a part-time schedule with the company, so I’m ok financially. But I’m still upset that the Chinese government destroyed millions of jobs during a pandemic!
The official reason the CCP gave for destroying the online tutoring industry is to reduce the cost of having children in China. Birth rates are lower than the government would like. Chinese families are spending most of their extra income on tutoring for their children and can only afford to have one or two kids. China now allows families to have three kids instead of two, but not many people want three because it’s too expensive.
Chinese schools are extremely competitive. Some of the more well-off families will send their children to the best schools possible, even relocating just to put their child in a good primary, middle, and high school that will give them a higher chance of getting into a good university.
Chinese children study so much that I feel it’s abusive. My VIPKID students say they have 6–8 hours of homework on holidays and 4–6 hours on school days. Even when Chinese students have holidays, they have to make up for those holidays by going to school on the weekend! They also get extra homework to make up for not going to school. It’s too much!
Fun fact: A Chinese student studies more in one week than an American student studies their entire lifetime!
Chinese students study way too much, and the cost of having a child is high because of their school fees and tutoring fees. But is destroying the tutoring industry overnight the right way to go? Of course not!
Millions of jobs are now getting deleted. Making tutoring illegal will just raise the price of tutoring and will push families and teachers to go to the black market.
The demand for tutoring won’t end because of harsh laws. It’s going to make it worse for parents and scary for teachers who now have to operate illegally and risk being raided by the police like they’re selling heroin instead of helping kids with math.
Other smaller online companies like GogoKid are completely shutting down. VIPKID is going to try to stay open by catering to adult students and students outside of China, but things don’t look good. Teaching adults online doesn’t pay as well as teaching students.
Most companies that I have seen were offering half the pay of what VIPKID offers. VIPKID has already cut our pay in the past so they won’t hesitate to do it again. I think they will need to since adult students won’t pay as much.
Even if VIPKID spreads its wings all over the world, it won’t match the half-million Chinese students in China willing to pay high prices for learning English. VIPKID is already in countries like South Korea and has been for years, but the low bookings and bad technical issues show that it’s not been fruitful. That won’t magically change overnight, especially with other online tutoring businesses scrambling to not sink into the Abyss of a destroyed $120 billion dollar industry!
So what now? I talked to many teachers on VIPKID’s private message board as well as the VIPKID Reddit group. Everyone is sad, but it looks like a good number of teachers will ride the VIPKID Titanic until it fully submerges into the water.
Some teachers are overly optimistic about VIPKID teaching adults and trying to make some money in other countries. I really hope those teachers aren’t relying solely on VIPKID for their income.
I learned over a year ago to have multiple sources of income due to my bookings being extremely volatile with VIPKID. I’m now thankful for my shitty bookings since it forced me to find another job before the Chinese Communist Party Iceberg hit my industry.
Since VIPKID money is extra income for me, I will ride it out until my student’s prepaid packages run out and there aren’t any more students. I don’t like teaching adults so I won’t be joining that program. I am more than happy to teach kids in other countries but am not optimistic about the success of that.
A few teachers have been joking about starting an OnlyFans. “People would pay a lot of money for a topless teacher.” True, that could be a niche.
And with a global pandemic, poverty on the rise, an unstable economy, and China now eyeing the gaming industry and other tech companies to destroy next, the OnlyFans train keeps coming closer and closer to my stop…
But I need to lose this lockdown weight first!
