Keeping up with the Khaws: luxury private education

Hi guys. Recently, there was an interesting article on the BBC about these 'posh British schools branching out in Asia'. The article focused on the story of a rich Malaysian family the Khaws - Mrs Khaw was sent to study in one of England's most expensive private schools when she was 15 but now, her son Ren is enrolled in the Malborough college near Johor Bahru, just across the border from Singapore at the cost of 200,400 Ringitt a year which is US$47,466 or £36,320. To put things in perspective, that's a lot more than what one would normally pay for university in the UK - to put things in perspective, a degree in biomedical engineering at UCL would cost an international student £31,200 a year in fees in the current academic year. Of course, university fees will vary depending on your subject, so a course in the arts & humanities will cost less than a lab based course like chemistry but they are all cheaper than what the Khaws are paying for their 15 year old son to study at the Malborough school near Johor Bahru. So I have a few issues I wish to explore in this post: is it worth it to pay that much for your children's primary and secondary school education? Would sending a student to a school like that be truly worth it or as the saying goes, you can't polish a turd: if the kid is truly stupid, then it doesn't matter how much money you through at his education, you can't cure stupidity. Or am I just jealous given that I came from a poor working class family in Singapore and didn't get a good education unlike my posh and privileged peers who enjoyed a much better start in life with a substantially better experience at school then? And as the article reported, these schools are spreading all over Asia from Malaysia to Myanmar to to China, so clearly there is a demand for this kind of very exclusive and expensive education in Asia - but what does it tell us about the standard of education in Asia? 

So I thought I'd introduce myself to the readers who have stumbled upon this blog post for the first time to establish some credibility: my name is Alex, I'm 46 and I was born in Singapore to a very poor working class family. The only thing my parents could afford was to send me to the local government school which yielded mixed results - I had some truly awful teachers and some incredible ones, there was little quality control in the system and so terrible teachers were able to get away with anything as students tended to seek help outside the system through private tuition. I was lucky - I won the genetic lottery and was academically brilliant, I won three scholarships along the way and the one that had the most impact on me was the humanities scholarship that allowed me to do my A levels in Singapore as part of a programme with much smaller class sizes. Whilst most Singaporean students had a 1:30 teacher to student ratio, mine was usually between 1:5 to 1:10 as a scholar and all my teachers were white expatriates from the UK or US. Hey that's the colonial mindset in Singapore: a white teacher was always considered superior to an Asian teacher. This led to another scholarship which allowed me to study at UCL in London where I encountered some students from extremely privileged backgrounds, whose parents had paid for a much more expensive education for them. I settled in London after graduation and I work in investment banking today where the vast majority of my peers in the industry are from a very posh and privileged background - thus of course, they all went to expensive private schools and rubbed shoulders with minor royalties during their PE lessons. They went skiing in Val d'Isere during their winter breaks and sailing in Santorini during their summer holidays, whilst I was catching tadpoles in that ditch outside my primary school in Sembawang Hills. 

Hence some of you may be thinking, okay if working class scum like you can come from the ditch in Sembawang and make your way into the investment banking world in London, then surely you're going to claim that these expensive private schools are a waste of money, right? But no, I need to point out that working class people are quite rare in my industry, it's not like we don't exist but we're certainly in the minority in this world. Now you need to consider the fact that in the UK, the majority of the UK are indeed working class and those who are middle/upper class are in the minority. I wouldn't try to put in a figure on it as a lot of working class people 'self-identity' as middle class despite being poor and not having any of the privileges that come with being middle class, thus any of the surveys out there are therefore quite inaccurate but it is safe to say that the majority of the UK population are still working class. I would compare this to the situation in Apartheid South Africa where white people were in the minority (about 13% in 1990) but practically all the good jobs went to white people. I'm the only non-white person in my company and certainly, it is rare to find anyone in the industry in London who isn't white. Women are also underrepresented in the industry, even if you find women in the industry, they are not in senior management but relegated to roles in admin or accounting. But my point is simple: if an expensive private education didn't give the elites a massive advantage, then we would see a lot more black and Asian, working class women in senior management within investment banking today but that's certainly not the case. I look around and all I see are rich, posh, privileged white men in positions of power and authority. But how many working class, Asian, openly gay, immigrants like me can succeed in banking when the odds are stacked against people like me? 

So back to the key question: is it worth it for families in Asia to send their children to such posh, expensive British schools then? Ironically, for most Asian families, this is just out of the question as it is way too expensive - undoubtedly, the Khaws in Malaysia are extremely rich to be able to afford it. So even if it is bad value for money, it doesn't matter to them as Mrs Khaw would be the kind of woman to spend a crazy amount of money on a designer handbag and use it only once. And even if a working class family in Singapore or Malaysia really wanted to give their children a good start in life by enrolling them at the Malborough school, guess what? There's just no way they can find the money to do so. The advantages of attending a private school like that are obvious: much smaller class sizes, excellent facilities, a wider range of activities outside the core syllabus but nobody ever talks about one of the key advantages so let me address the elephant in the room: you would never find working class scum like me in such a school for rich kids. All your classmates will only be other extremely rich kids but it's not so much that you're sending your child to a private school like that to learn how to act posh (that's far more a function of your upbringing and your parents' wealth rather than the school you attend), it's just that rich people don't like socializing with poor people. Thus you have everything from golf clubs to 'gentlemen's clubs' which are private members club which are so exorbitantly expensive you will never run the risk of sitting next to a working class person in there as your average bus driver can never afford the fees and the security at the door will keep the non-members away. It is an ultimate act of snobbery, to use your wealth to keep poor people far away. 

What if we took a working class kid from Ang Mo Kio in Singapore, gave him a scholarship to do his education at Malborough College Malaysia - would that then guarantee that he would acquire the right social skills to thrive in the upper echelons of British society then? The answer is no, there's never a guarantee when it comes to education because so much of the outcome depends on the student rather than the teachers or the system. You can't 'cure' stupidity but let's go back to Mrs Khaw the very rich Malaysian lady in the BBC story. She would buy expensive handbags because she can afford it - but she is not rich because of the handbags she buys, a poor auntie buying an expensive handbag would not become rich simply in making that purchase. At best, this poor auntie may use that expensive handbag to project the illusion that she is rich and can afford such luxury goods. Thus rich parents send their kids to exclusive private schools the same way Mrs Khaw would treat herself to expensive handbags, but that exclusive education wouldn't automatically make the students there any cleverer or richer. Here's an analogy: Sun Mingming is the world's tallest basketball player at 2.36 meters tall, he is great at basketball because he is so tall but would I become as tall as Sun if I started playing basketball regularly? No of course not, my height wouldn't change at all no matter how much basketball I played - Sun would be just as tall even if he never played basketball, he wasn't a really short guy who suddenly experienced a massive growth spurt when he started playing basketball. Basketball didn't make him tall, he chose to play basketball because he was so tall. We need to be very careful when we consider the causality in this case: Mrs Khaw didn't become wealthy because she attended a posh school, she attended a posh school because she came from a rich family. Her exclusive education didn't magically transform her from a dirty peasant to a desirable princess like a modern Cinderella! 

We shouldn't put rich people on a pedestal and imagine that everything they do contributes to their success. Rich people have the luxury of spending money on anything they want - sometimes they make wise choices and sometimes they make silly choices but none of that really matters since they are never going to run out of money. So if Mrs Khaw's son signs up for an expensive computer course then drops out after two days because he isn't enjoying it, then guess what? It doesn't really matter, since Mrs Khaw wouldn't be bothered about the money. Rich people get away with bad decisions like that all the time but poor people don't - this is why going to university is such a big deal for working class students because their poor parents are probably investing much of their life savings into that one degree. When the stakes are so high, when your parents are betting their life savings on your degree paying off in the long run, you would be under a lot of pressure to pick the right course at the right university and then perform very well in it. Furthermore, it is hard to judge if Mrs Khaw's son's expensive would make that much difference because of the nepotism factor - let's take Prince Harry for example. He was a dunce academically, despite attending the most prestigious schools in the country, he only managed two A levels: a rather dismal D grade for geography and a B grade for art, only to be revealed later that he was so terrible at art that a teacher had to complete his coursework project to make sure he got a decent grade. But did any of that matter? No, of course not - Harry is royalty after all (and sixth in line for the throne) and he has managed to go on to make a very successful if not unconventional career despite having been a terrible student who cheated in his exams. 

Thus for many of these rich kids, whether they do well at school or not doesn't really matter because they have so much wealth in the family anyway, they're not like these poor working class students desperate to attain social mobility through education. The Khaws probably chose to send their son to this posh school because they wanted him to enjoy the better facilities there and they're probably not putting that much pressure on him to excel academically. Sure their son could thrive academically when given such brilliant conditions to study, or he could just turn out to be like Prince Harry and not be that bright after all but my point is none of that really matters when his parents are that rich. But not all rich kids 'get away with it' like Prince Harry, allow me to share with you two case studies. Firstly, I want you to meet Edward (not his real name), his family sent him to one of the most expensive private schools for his secondary education but he still failed to attain the A level grades to get into a decent university - at that point, he really didn't care as he thought his father would just bail him out and get him a job regardless. Things didn't go to plan at all for Edward; when he was at university, his father became quite ill with cancer and his health went downhill. This meant that he was unable to run his business and by the time Edward's father had died around a year later, they then realized that Edward's father had hidden quite a lot of his debts from the family and thus they were not as rich as they thought they were. So Edward had nothing to inherit as his late father's business had already failed by then and so he had to find a job like all the other young people who had just graduated and that was how he ended up as my colleague around 2005, despite his privileged upbringing. 

There was a part of me that thought, what the hell is he doing working with me - surely he could just call up some of his friends from his super exclusive school for the aristocrats and ask his classmates' parents to help him find a much better job? Well no, it doesn't work like that: after all, Edward was no longer rich and as a result, his old friends were unwilling to associate themselves with someone who was outside their social class. It sounds harsh but that's the way it was: they had accepted Edward as 'one of them' on the basis that he was super rich like them but he no longer fulfilled that criteria so they turned their backs on him. He was shunned by his old friends who didn't want anything to do with him, thus he had to go out there and apply for any job he could get hold of to support himself and his family. So despite the fact that Edward and I had vastly different childhoods, because of the way his father lost practically all his money before he died, Edward was effectively competing on level footing with me once he had lost that privileged status in British society and his expensive education didn't help him at all. It's not a competition but I've checked on Linkedin, I'm definitely a lot richer and more successful than Edward today. Perhaps if he had taken his education more seriously and made it to a respectable university, then his degree may have been a lot more useful to him but no, he was a willful rich kid who thought, "nah I don't need to study, daddy is so freaking rich, I don't ever need to work when I am an adult. I'll just be an international playboy having a lot of fun - my life will be a holiday that goes on forever, this party will never end!" Oh dear.

The second case study is this lady we shall call Madeline (not her real name) who is in her 50s today. She attended the same exclusive private school in Sherborne as Mrs Khaw did and who knows, they are around the same age, maybe they have even met each other there back in the day. Now to say that Madeline is eccentric is like saying the sea is a bit wet or that the sun is a bit hot - our paths crossed many years ago and it took me a while before I realized, oh she is actually from a very rich family because she has certainly hid that well. The thing is with these very rich people, you can easily tell they are of that upper class background: usually I can pick that up from within moments of talking to them, people who were brought up with that much privilege come across very differently. Oh don't get me wrong, I get along well with Madeline and we're still friends today but she just came across as somewhat weird and eccentric rather than posh and rich. She worked at a design agency in London when I got to know her and came across as the kind of creative, artistic hippie who didn't want to be tied down by the norms of society - she had a boyfriend for many years (mind you, I know him - heias just as eccentric) but she refused to get married or even contemplate the idea of having children. She  retired during the pandemic and bought a small cottage in deep the countryside, now before you imagine that she is living in a manor like in Downton Abbey - no, it is literally a little cottage that is like a little hut in the countryside and she now spends more of her time working at the neighbour's organic farm next door, not because she needs the money but because she loves being on the farm in the beautiful countryside. So even if Madeline has a lot of money stashed away in some Swiss private bank, well she is not spending it whilst she is working so hard on that organic farm. 

You might argue, what's wrong with Madeline's choices then? If she wants to be a hippie on an organic farm in the English countryside, that's her choice - as long as she is happy doing that. Madeline is my friend and it is not like I am judging her, but I just wanted to use her as an example to show that not all students of these schools end up living the kind of lifestyle that Edward would have loved to have had. Given that it is a lovely sunny day today, I can just imagine Madeline on the organic farm feeding the free-range chickens and harvesting the onions. Furthermore, unlike Edward, Madeline was actually a really brilliant student who did her first degree at Cambridge. Nonetheless the case study of Madeline shows that you can give a student the best education money can buy but if she would rather be living in a little hut in the countryside and work on an organic farm, then there's very little her parents can do to tell her what to do. I can just imagine them thinking, "do you know how lucky you were to have an education like that Madeline - yet you want to work on a farm like that and wake up at the crack of dawn to feed the chickens like a Polish migrant worker? You had a great life in London, you had a good career. You can be as eccentric as you want but why do you want to live like that when you have money? You can be a hippie who is still willing to spend some money on luxuries to enjoy life." My point is that you only hear about the students from these posh schools who end up as CEOs, celebrities and in positions of power in the government, but people like Madeline exist and they are the ones that nobody talks about and thus we shouldn't make any assumptions about the benefits of such an expensive education at a school like Malborough college. 

As I work with investments, allow me to apply the concept of ROI = return on investment. So if I invested $100,000 in a company and I got back $106,750 then I would have made a profit of 6.75% on that investment. We're all looking for a decent return on our investments and in this case, I would have liked to at least break even and not lose any money. Thus in the case of Edward and Madeline, their parents have actually invested a lot of money in their education and have seen a very poor return. Of course, I realize that I have specifically picked two examples to highlight that this is a possible outcome - there are plenty of others who have invested very heavily in their children's education and have seen a great return on it. Take myself for example - I am from a poor working class family so my parents effectively spent the bare minimum on my education by sending me to the local government school and any perks I got along the way (such as from my three scholarships) did not come out the very limited budget that my parents had allocated for my education. So in the case of Edward and Madeline, the ROI on their expensive education was terrible whilst the ROI on my education has been incredible. But does that mean that such expensive, posh schools are just a waste of money? Not necessarily so, because all three of us are exceptions to the rule: most of Edward and Madeline's former classmates have ended up in very good jobs whilst if you looked at my classmates from my primary school in Singapore, most of them are still working class and have not attained that much social mobility as a result of their education. Ultimately, rich people sending their children to these exclusive posh schools is no different from Mrs Khaw buying that very expensive Birkin handbag - it is a luxury that she can easily afford and she really doesn't care about the ROI on the handbag at all. 

Thus for the loving parents in Singapore who are wondering if they should pour every dollar they have into their children's education by sending them to Malborough college in Johor, I would advice against that because that would be really overestimating the impact that the education there would have on their futures. By all means, if you are filthy rich and can afford it, then please go ahead and do that and I'm sure your child will have a brilliant time there, but if you're barely middle class and would struggle to find the money to do so, then bear in mind the fact that the ROI on such an education is never guaranteed as much of that depends on the child rather than the quality of the education you buy. Of course, I am always in favour of parents investing in their children's education but the price tag for such a posh school is so high that we need to make sure that the parents do a sensible cost-benefit analysis before assuming that expensive always means 'better' and that there is a direct correlation between price and quality. There is a massive market out there for luxury goods and services catering for rich people who have a very different relationship with money and it should be no surprise that the education sector is cashing in on this market by providing this kind of luxury alternative to mainstream education but as for the rest of us who do care about value for money, there are other far more cost effective ways to improve the quality of your children's education and whilst a lot of those benefits are indeed offered by a very posh and expensive school like Malborough college in Johor, you don't need to send your children to such a school to reap the same benefits. So that's it from me on this topic, what do you think? Do you have friends who have received this kind of 'luxury' education and how much of an impact did it have? Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.