LOLZ
I dont. The games that people with that kind of wealth play with everyone around them make me wonder how they even manage to wake up in the morning and face themselves in the mirror.
I can tell you my uncle isn’t a good person. He treats me well because I’m family but I wouldn’t be doing business deals with him otherwise.
I can tell you they’re likely heavily involved with mafia.
I was just thinking that. 12k a year at the one I was looking at but they give a lot of discounts 10 to 100 percent depending on how much the parents earn.
I guess there are a lot more expensive ones
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I could have had my son in a good boarding school in Australia for same money spent here. Issue is I wanted my son to be able to spend time with me on weekends and also attend his school events with him. There are options for people with enough funds and I know some expats who sent their wives and children to Philippines for international schools there as much cheaper. Some expats will send their kids to boarding schools or to live with their close relatives in their home countries. Some send the wives and kids. Same for wealthy Taiwanese who have PR or citizenship abroad. They can afford to have their wives and children outside of Taiwan so their sons don’t do military service here and get into good universities overseas.
Lets not forget top private schools in the UK and Australia USA Canada etc are not priced for the poor.
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Some of my friends who send their kids to international schools had to make sure the riff raff foreign teachers some of who wanted to introduce drug taking culture to the students were kept away from their kids. Let alone the kids pocket money per month was more than that teacher would ever earn. Especially those experimental type teachers
Even with 140k USD pre-tax household income, you would be saving very little if you were sending two kids to TAS
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You can home school and give just as good an education. What it’s about is making relationships for later in life. And a grammar school in the UK or a Swiss boarding school beats the fuck out of TAS for that.
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Depends on how dumb one is, presumably. 
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actually i kinda wished my mom sent me to a chinese grade school, if she did i would be able to read and write mandarin, instead i never learned that (i do speak it fluently simply by being in taiwan and forcing myself to learn how to speak it, took ten years).
TAS is what 700,000 ntd per school year now? crazy. But that is relatively cheap compared to US prices. Wifey works at a US preschool (essentially day care) now and the price is about 100,000nt/month per child . And some of the kids are in elementary school (private) and the cost is 150,000nt per MONTH. !! How much is TAS nowadays?
dark but probably some truth there
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Who said they need to face themselves in the mirror?
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Funny thing is that my son met 5 of his very good friends who maintain close contact with even now when at AST. Two of them a brother and sister who like my lad went back to Australia where they were born and raised for Uni. Sometimes people who meet at international schools do bond and make lifelong friendships.
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Answering the original question: if we stay we’re considering it (expats from the US). We’re making local Taiwan money, actually, but on the relative higher end. TAS is very pricey now, $900K - 1M / year. Then I have two kids at home, so it’s on the order of $60-70K US a year.
Our reasons are the same as some others mentioned: 1) english is still more important (imho) than mandarin, and the TAS folk I’ve met in the past generally speak close to native English. Maybe not as perfect as going to school in the US, but close enough that re-assimilation should be fairly easy should we decide to go back. 2) there seem to be no other good options for this.
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You speak English to your kids at home, don’t you? And they watch TV and movies and listen to music in English, no?
They’ll be fine.
Many of the kids who speak (near) native English at TAS speak native Mandarin at home. They’re going to end up being fluently bilingual while your kids only speak English if you send them to TAS.
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Pretty much the only people I’ve met raised in Taiwan who had some sort of a free-thinking western mindset either went to TAS or TES. When I have kids, I won’t raise them here unless they go to TES. I love Taiwan, but I don’t want my kids being raised with a Taiwanese mindset. Kids here are mollycoddled beyond belief, and people are taught to be extremely passive and subservient to authority, with less strong and more homogenous personalities, scared of conflict and scared to voice their opinions because they worry about being wrong and looking stupid too much.
Individualism and freedom of thought is frowned up here for the most part. It’s a case of the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. There is absolutely no way I want that for my kids. Sure you can show them the way at home, but school influences behaviour a lot.
Having said all that, I do think TES and TAS are too expensive for what they are. For the same price of around 1 mill NT a year, you could send your kid to a private school in London that has a list of alumni as long as your arm of eminent scientists, doctors, musicians and more, plus get access to much cheaper tuition at good universities afterwards, and live in a much nicer house in a leafy area too. At TES you’re basically paying for luxury of a decent western education while being outside of western society.
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Sometimes I’m wondering if individualism is even working in the US. I think there needs to be a balance but nobody seems to want that.
When did you apply?
I remember reading that the national rules for international schools used to be stricter. For example, children living in Taiwan on a Taiwanese passport weren’t allowed to apply - the student had to have an ARC.
But they relaxed the law, seemingly to make it easier for Taiwanese students to enroll.
Upper middle class is a flexible term, but I’d put $30k tuition solidly in the realm of upper middle.class range. And those that can afford $30k/yr in tuition certainly aren’t generally in the fund capital improvements range of income.
We have one of those types of school locally. Practically a straight up Japanese school, with all Japanese kids.
So that explains the mystery of TL closing shop, suddenly going from everyone making 30k to “1 million nt isn’t that hard to make per year…1 million nt a year in Taiwan is harder but doable.” I was guessing his dad was finally giving him money or something, and certainly didn’t pick “business with mafia involved uncle” on the bingo card!
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Waa probably in 2005 My son was on an ARC as he only had Australian citizenship. Yes you are correct local citizens cannot join the international schools. The law still is the child has to be here on an ARC. Most schools will also look at the parents citizenship some like AST ( at the time anyway ) required that at least one parent was on an ARC.
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