I know many foreigners here who don’t make extreme salary or have old money send their kids to regular schools. It isn’t that bad and having savings is better for your kids future than sending them to snob schools. Don’t assume tas is full of Americans, it’s not, it’s full of taiwanese from rich families who buys citizenship from third world countries. Not only are you paying excessive tuition you must buy expensive crap for your kids.
These schools are designed so rich folks will only go to school with other rich folks.
Does your spouse have qualifications to teach at the lower/middle/high school level? That might be a way to afford sending your kids to one of the better international/American schools in Taiwan. You would need to check it out asap though…
As others mentioned, it would be very tricky to make that work in Taipei. If your partner works that could solve a lot of problems.
But what I would do is collect data on these tuition fees and use that to negotiate with your employer. They might be willing to go up to the 300k range, which I believe would be sufficient.
On a separate note, why the hell are international schools so damn expensive? 100k per month for a kid?! I can rent a classroom, hire good teachers for all subjects and start my own private homeschooling for that price
The best international schools in India were 1/5th the price at most. And even that seemed crazy
Are they catering only to those who make US salaries whilst living in Taiwan?
the issue is not just the language of instruction, but alos the curriculum. joining TW curriculum at the 9th or 10th grade is not practical for a foreign teenager, even if its in English.
overhead costs are significant, especially since even PE teachers are foreigners (you can for sure have a bilingual local teach soccer, no need to bring someone from the UK for it), facilities are also expensive, since as a private school they have little to no public funding for up keep.
I’ll hold off explicitly mentioning the school, but I did some science/chemistry/biology tutoring before for several students from one of the most famous/sought after/expensive ones, and I was a bit surprised by what the students said about their courses in those subjects (teachers having left midway through the year and being replaced with substitutes who apparently weren’t explaining things very well, the students getting behind and needing additional one-on-one tuition, etc.). Those students/classes might just have been the exceptions, but more than one of them mentioned it over the course of a couple of years, and I found it surprising to hear at all given the fees being charged.
I don’t know the housing allowance but flights are around 60,000 for the most expensive flight (assuming they are restricted to flying coach the way the public school teachers are).
I don’t think with all of this added together it comes anywhere close to matching the teachers compensation.
