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Today, Mi is 33 and founder of a startup that aims to give Chinese kids the kind of education American children receive in top U.S. schools. Called VIPKid, the company matches Chinese students aged five to 12 with predominantly North American instructors to study English, math, science and other subjects. Classes take place online, typically for two or three 25-minute sessions each week.
Mi is capitalizing on an alluring arbitrage opportunity. In China, there are hundreds of millions of kids whose parents are willing to pay up if they can get high-quality education. In the U.S. and Canada, teachers are often underpaid—and many have quit the profession because they couldn't make a decent living. Growth has been explosive. The three-year-old company started this year with 200 teachers and has grown to 5,000, now working with 50,000 children. Next year, Mi anticipates she'll expand to 25,000 teachers and 200,000 children.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SunTzuWarmaster on Thursday December 22 2016, @07:04PM
I've always wanted to run the numbers.
I live in Orlando.
Median household income here is $41K (source: http://www.bestplaces.net/economy/city/florida/orlando). [bestplaces.net] This is right around "assistant manager of Walmart" (43K), "GM of the Olive Garden" (39K), and what I consider to be a "normal job" - not enough to really buy a house ($49K, source:http://money.cnn.com/infographic/real_estate/what-you-need-to-earn-to-afford-a-home/) (unless two people work).
Median (primary school) teacher salary here is $53K (source:http://www1.salary.com/FL/Orlando/Teacher-Elementary-School-salary.html).
Teachers here obey this schedule (https://www.ocps.net/pages/schoolcalendar.aspx), which indicates 2 weeks for Christmas break, 1 week for Spring break, 8 weeks for summer break, and ~4 holidays on top of that. In comparison, a federal Post Office employee (or any other federally employed person, including STEM folks) with 3-15 years tenure gets 10 federal holidays and ~3.9 weeks of vacation. Let's call it 6 weeks.
Let's assume that they both work 8 hour days, the teacher is getting about 12 weeks of vacation yearly to the has-a-degree-entry-level-GS-7, or assistant-manager-of-post-office-GS-7. Teacher is making 4 weeks of additional vacation, which is valued at 1/12*53000=$4500. All things being roughly equal (assuming federal pension/401K are roughly equal to county pension/401K), the 'normal job' comes out around $41K+benes, and the teacher comes out around 57.5K+benes. 'Normal job' probably requires a business degree or technical training, and teacher job requires a 4-year degree. This indicates that teachers, as a category, are out-earning the median income by $16.5K in "total package". Draw your own conclusions for overpaid/underpaid; these numbers indicate that a family can afford to live in a house with a teacher as a sole breadwinner (just barely), but cannot afford to do so with most jobs.
Final note - in my state (FL) anyone with a STEM degree can choose to be a teacher and has a 2-3 year grace period in which to obtain a teaching certificate (which is trivial). Few do, for a variety of reasons, some of which are likely economic. There is a proposed bill to set starting teacher salary at $54K ($50K+vacation premium), while starting salary for a "Bachelor of Science" degree ($71K), or "Bachelor of Engineering" ($81K) is somewhat larger (source:http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Location=Orlando-FL/Salary/by_Degree#by_Years_Experience). There is, of course, ongoing state-wide debate on whether people with a degree in Biology should teach high school physics (90+% of teachers aren't certified in the subject they teach in this state).