The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Exam-obsessed Hong Kong makes celebrity tutors rich Posted: 04 Jun 2011 06:50 PM PDT  Richard Eng, a co-founder of tutorial school Beacon College, teaching an English class to secondary students in Hong Kong. — AFP pic With their glamorous photographs showing megawatt grins and flashy attire splashed across billboards and buses, the star teachers claim to transform failing students into A-grade pupils — and earn up to $1.5 (RM652,000) million a year. The former British colony's tutoring industry is reportedly worth at least HK$400 million (RM173 million), with official figures showing as many as half of secondary school seniors seek private tutoring after school. Hong Kong parents, often desperate to help their children succeed in the city's intense public-exam system, are more than willing to shell out handsome sums for extracurricular help. "Hong Kong has a very examination-oriented school culture and tutoring is regarded as a kind of educational investment," said Kelly Mok, an English tutor who teaches at King's Glory, one of the largest tutorial schools in Hong Kong. That focus on academic success at almost any cost has turned celebrity tutor Richard Eng into a rich man who wheels around the teeming city in a Lamborghini, wears expensive watches and lives in a multi-million dollar mansion in the city's Yuen Long district. "Enrolment in tutorial schools is astoundingly high — we are talking about 100,000 students every year," Eng told AFP. Eng and other top tutors have successfully tapped that demand, using flashy, commercial marketing tactics to make themselves household names or academic superstars, otherwise known as "tutor kings" in Cantonese. His empire, Beacon College, employs over 100 tutors and Eng plans to take the firm public. "There are only 20,000 degree places in Hong Kong every year, but there are 100,000 aspiring college students" Eng said. "When you think about this keen competition, you will understand why there is this obsession with doing well in public examinations — especially college-admission ones." Dozens of students turned up to Eng's lecture on a recent spring day to learn how to ace the city's English public exam for 16 year-olds. Glass walls separate the teenagers into groups of 45 students — the maximum class size allowed by the government. Clad in skin-tight jeans, a shimmery grey shirt and a big-buckled Gucci belt, the 47-year-old lectured animatedly in a mix of Cantonese and English, gesturing frequently to his powerpoint slides and enthralling students with his quick-fire delivery over a headset microphone. Mok, who has the looks of a model, concedes that her lessons are also almost as much entertainment as academics. "I suppose it is a bit like a show," she said before a class, clutching a Louis Vuitton handbag and sporting a mini-skirt and a pair of high heels. "But bear in mind these students are bored and tired after school," she added. "It's our job to make these extra-curricular lesson a bit more exciting for them." Some tutors, like economics teacher Alex Lam, star in their own online soap operas. Lam has self-financed the production of about 10 hours of his own show over the years, using it as a way to draw in students. Schools also pay to have instructors' faces plastered throughout the city on giant billboards and the backs of its ubiquitous double-decker buses. King's Glory, one of Hong Kong's leading tutorial schools, went the extra mile in its bid to attract students, awarding points to pupils that they can redeem for gifts like stationery and toy robots. But some tutors try to boost class enrolments through unethical means, such as claiming to have access to exam questions, Lam said. "A few bad apples in the industry tell students they have access to exam questions — it is just a way to bump up student enrolment. But so far as I know, none of it is true — no one really has had that kind of access," he told AFP. Despite his own success, Lam warns that some parents and students may be taking educational achievement to the extreme. "The tutoring culture is getting a little crazy," he said. "Some students are taking tutorial lessons for five to six different subjects. The truth is, students might not necessarily benefit from taking so many lessons. They're better off concentrating on one or two subjects that they're weak at." The craze also has veterans warning that quality may be slipping. "The newcomers like to use gimmicks to attract students — telling jokes, being pretty faces," Lam said. "They're not focusing on their teaching, which worries me as the teaching quality is dropping." But while the big names are millionaires, the average rank-and file tutor earns much less. "The younger tutors — they have unrealistic expectations," Lam said. "They think are they are superstars and expect to earn superstar salaries — but not all of them will." Hong Kong's Education Bureau has shied away from endorsing the popular schools, saying in 2009 that "students receive essential education at formal schools". But as long as parents fret about their children's scholastic success, the industry seems likely to thrive, the Lamborghini-driving Eng predicted. "Education will always be a priority because every parent wants his or her child to be better than their own generation," he said. — AFP-Relaxnews Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
| India’s pilgrim trail: a godsend for hotel chains Posted: 04 Jun 2011 05:22 PM PDT  Cities like Amritsar, home to the Golden Temple pictured here, are experiencing growth in the hotel sector. — AFP pic But a rise in disposable incomes and more Indians experiencing foreign travel — both the result of India's buoyant economy — have led to demand for more than just a bunk-bed in a community centre or floor space at a guesthouse. "There was a time when people who were visiting these temple towns didn't have the money for quality accommodation," the associate vice-president of Best Western India, Gaurav Sarin, told AFP. "That's changed very drastically in the past few years. The people who are now visiting are people looking for an international hospitality experience and they have the disposable income to spend on the room and other facilities." For Best Western, temple towns and "Tier-II" cities — India's fastest-growing cities outside Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore — have become a key market and religious tourists core clients, he added. It's not hard to see why: religious pilgrimages remain an essential part of life for millions in India, from the lowest-paid manual worker to the high-flying corporate executive, cricketer or Bollywood movie star. The latest available government figures show there were just over 650 million domestic tourist visits in 2009 — up 15.5 percent on a year earlier. The number of foreign visitors fell 3.3 percent to 5.1 million. "The bulk of (domestic tourists) are religious tourists wanting to visit places like Shirdi near Mumbai, Vaishnodevi in the north, Haridwar and Rishikesh in the Himalayas," said Ankur Bhatia, executive director of the Bird Group, a travel and hospitality conglomerate. "The sector is growing tremendously. We're looking at about 10 per cent growth every year. It's from the lowest to the highest economic groups in society." Demand for rooms outstrips supply in places like Tirupati, a temple city in southern Andhra Pradesh state which reportedly receives a staggering 50,000 to 70,000 visitors every day. Chains see high returns, even at lower room rates and without additional revenue from hotel bars and restaurants on the pilgrim trail, where being teetotal and not eating meat are prerequisites. "The international travel market in India is quite seasonal and fickle," said Kaushik Vardharajan, managing director of hotel sector analysts HVS Hospitality Services. "A couple of travel advisories can see numbers drop steeply. We saw it during the downturn and after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai (in November 2008). "The demand for these temple cities and heritage sites are pretty recession-proof. They're not seasonal in nature and if it's bad times, people are going to go to the temple more." Vardharajan said that there are currently plans to build 90,000 to 95,000 new rooms in such places in the next five years. Best Western, which has hotels in Amritsar and Shirdi, is looking to build in Ajmer in the northern state of Rajasthan, Puri in eastern Orissa state and Kapra in Andhra Pradesh. Sarin said they are also looking at "three or four" other religious centres for development, without elaborating. The Bird Group is developing its existing resort near Rishikesh to cater for the top end of the market, said Bhatia. Ginger Hotels, a budget chain part of the Indian Hotels Company Limited which operates high-end hotels like Mumbai's Taj Mahal Palace, is also expanding to cater for the boom in domestic business and leisure travel. The chain's chief executive and director, Prabhat Pani, said "eight to 10" of the 40 to 50 new hotels they plan to open in the next five years will be in Tier-II cities or temple towns. "The big story is the Indian traveller. The Indian traveller is not only travelling for business and going abroad but with disposable income going up many are travelling within the country," he said. "All this really means is that demand for rooms is increasing and the category that's growing the fastest will really be the budget and economy sector." — AFP-Relaxnews Full Feed Generated by Get Full RSS, sponsored by USA Best Price. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Features To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 ulasan:
Catat Ulasan