Private Education Service

I had been taking an online study course on English writing from the end of 2008 to the beginning of 2010. A company in Mumbai, India provided me with the course. The course was good. Every lecturer in the course has an academic background necessary for English education. In addition, the price for the course was lower than the ordinary rate. This was probably because the company was located in Mumbai and hired local people as lecturers, so the administrative cost could be reduced to a minimum level.

During the course, I had an actual feeling that my English writing skills were improving. The style of the course was simple. A lecturer provided me with one theme, and I wrote several paragraphs along with the theme. Then, the lecturer reviewed my original writing and made comments on it, and corrected spelling and grammatical errors if necessary. I had been repeating this simple work once a week over one and a half years. However, at one moment, I realized that I had done enough practices, and decided to complete the course.

Yesterday, I received a phone call from a staff member of the company. The company seems to have a headquarters office in Mumbai and has a subsidiary office in Japan, and, the person who called me yesterday belongs to the Japanese office. He asked me to make comments on the course, and he said that he would seek to develop business strategies to promote the English writing service in the Japanese market, especially for business people.

I hope that he will be successful. However, I think that there is an intrinsic difficulty in promoting private education services. From the viewpoint of cost and benefit analysis, people want to purchase a high quality service at a low price. Thus, for example, we buy food, because food satisfies our hunger and provides us with nutrition. It is easy to distinguish between the cost and benefit.

On the other hand, how much benefit can we expect from education? Education asks us to spend our precious time on studying. In addition, we need to focus our mind on the study otherwise the education provides us with nothing. Education needs continuous effort. Thus, education requires much cost – money, time, and concentration. In this sense, who wants to pay money for private education services?

In my mind, I understand that education can give me an opportunity to broaden my career. This is a benefit, but rather an abstract one. The more concrete the distinction between the cost and benefit expected from a service, the more we want to pay money for the service.