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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @11:00PM
Accounting details mean money spent on schools isn't the same as money that can be spent on teacher salaries. Basically it comes down to salaries are recurring costs while useless things like new athletic fields and laptops for all the students are one-time costs, and a lot of money is allocated via grants which can only be used for the latter type. That's how you can simultaneously have too little money for teachers and a lot of money being spent on schools. Other posters suggest a lot of salary money is going to administrators.