Taiwan's Cram School Culture: The Rise and Fall of One Street, and an Entire Society's Anxiety Bill

30-second overview: Taiwan has over 18,000 cram schools — more than the total number of convenience stores nationwide. Thirty years of education reform later, the number of cram schools has tripled. The spectacle of 100,000 retake students crowding onto Taipei's Nanyang Street in 1981 is over, but the demand for cram schooling has not disappeared — it has dispersed from a "retake pilgrimage site" into neighborhood alleys across the island, filtering down from high school students to fifth graders. From elementary school through university graduation, the average Taiwanese family spends approximately NT$1.7 million on cram school tuition for one child. The bill behind that number has long since exceeded education itself, exposing a society whose imagination of "fairness" has been locked into exam scores.

How Much Youth Can One Street Hold?

In 1981, on Nanyang Street beside Taipei Station — a road less than 500 meters long — 48 college retake cram schools were squeezed in side by side. Chang Hao-ran, secretary general of the Taipei Cram School Educators Association, recalled: "Back then they were one after another — students could comparison shop."¹

Student numbers exceeded 100,000. Against a backdrop of fewer than 20 million people in Taiwan at the time, this meant that one in every 200 Taiwanese people was retaking college entrance exams on Nanyang Street. They took trains from all over the island to Taipei Station, turned right after exiting, and headed straight for Nanyang Street — to find a cram school, rent a room, and buy reference books. The whole street was dense with lunch box shops, book rental stores, and photocopying services, all oriented toward a single goal: get into a good university next year.

Why Nanyang Street? From the 1960s, the top retake instructors were all in Taipei, and students from central and southern Taiwan had to come north. Nanyang Street was close to Taipei Station, with cheaper rents than Da'an District — cram schools could rent entire apartment buildings and convert them into classrooms. A hundred students could be packed into one room, with a star teacher standing at the podium with a microphone, chalk dust drifting to the back row. No air conditioning in the summer, all the windows open, the sound of the class next door bleeding through.

This had passed beyond any definition of a learning environment. It was a battlefield. But under the joint entrance exam system, that battlefield at least had one rule that everyone acknowledged: scores decided everything.

The Joint Exam Disappeared — and Cram Schools Thrived

In 2002, the national university joint entrance examination was officially retired, replaced by a multiple-pathway admissions system. The original intention of education reform was to break the pattern of "one test determines your fate" and relieve student pressure.

The result was this: before 2002, there were roughly 6,000 cram schools in Taiwan. By 2017, that number had ballooned to 18,492 — three times as many.² Among them, 11,045 were academic subject cram schools, up 2.7 times from 2003. The entire private tutoring industry generates annual revenue of approximately NT$150 billion.³

What does 18,000 mean? There are roughly 12,000 convenience stores in Taiwan. Cram schools outnumber convenience stores by 50 percent.

The 7th Republic of China Education Yearbook, in its "Supplementary Education" chapter, records the institutional evolution of cram and continuing education, presenting the official face of this enormous industry existing outside the formal educational system.¹² Why did education reform end up spawning more cram schools? Because the rules got more complicated.

In the joint exam era, there was only one game rule: score high. Parents knew what to tutor, for how long, and how high the bar needed to be. After multiple-pathway admissions, there is the General Scholastic Ability Test (GSAT), the Advanced Subjects Test (AST), the star recommendation scheme, individual application tracks, and learning portfolio documentation — each pathway has different scoring methods and preparation strategies. Parental anxiety changed shape: from "afraid of scoring poorly" to "afraid of not understanding the rules."

When you don't understand the rules, you pay someone to understand them for you. That is the commercial logic of cram schools.

The Class Map Inside Cram Schools

Taiwan's private tutoring industry has a fact that is rarely discussed directly: it is an amplifier of class.

Tsou Cheng, associate professor of sociology at Tunghai University, found in a 2006 study, "Supplementary Education in Taiwan: Changes, Effectiveness, and Stratification," that the time and type of cram school participation contains stratified inequalities.⁴ Long-term tracking research by Huang Min-hsiung of Academia Sinica's Institute of Sociology further found that the higher the parents' educational attainment, the better the child's academic performance — and this gap begins widening from first grade in elementary school.⁵

In plain terms: wealthy families spend more, start earlier, and tutor more precisely. Families without money find even tuition fees a problem.

Looking at enrollment demographics, in 2018 there were 8,800 cram schools in Taiwan serving elementary school students — 45.6 percent of all cram schools.⁶ Elementary students became the largest client group for private tutoring. Particularly in Taichung, many parents begin sending their children to "private middle school preparatory classes" in fifth grade, because private middle school entrance exams cover first-year junior high school content. Fifth graders are studying extra to prepare for entering a junior high school.

Six metropolitan areas account for 75 percent of all cram schools in Taiwan. Children in rural areas who want to cram have nowhere to go.²

Academia Sinica research also uncovered a counterintuitive finding: students with the weakest academic performance appear more often in urban and intermediate-location schools, not in remote rural villages.⁵ The places with the most cram schools have not seen the education gap narrow.

The Economics of Star Tutors: The Chalk-Wielding Earner of $1 Million USD

Taiwan's cram school industry once gave rise to a unique professional species: the star tutor.

In 1996, Taiwan Panorama journalist Chen Shu-mei wrote "When the Glamour Fades — Biographies of Famous Cram School Teachers," documenting the absurdity and the cost of this group. A math star teacher only two years into the profession was earning nearly NT$3 million annually; another English star teacher was earning $1 million USD.⁷ They wore designer brands, lived in upscale homes, and earned on par with doctors and lawyers.

Social status, though, was another matter. A veteran figure in the tutoring industry once quipped: "Social status is probably just above prostitutes. The two share the same characteristic: people only think of you when they need you." One tutor tried to buy an office in a commercial building, only to be rejected by the building management committee.⁷

The costs were real too. Star tutors taught forty hours a week, ramping up to six to eight hours daily through school holidays. One young math teacher developed multiple inflammatory conditions from standing too long, and refused hospitalization to keep teaching. One math star who had been teaching since the 1970s, commanding the tutoring world for over twenty years, converted to Buddhism in middle age, donated his income, and eventually died of a hemorrhage on the podium, aged 60.⁷

In the 2010s, star tutors moved from the podium onto TV screens. Lu Jie became an internet celebrity after a clip of him teaching about the Tiananmen Square Massacre went viral on YouTube, and he later transformed into a history knowledge content creator.⁸ Kao Kuo-hua's extramarital affair with Chen Zi-xuan was widely covered by media; netizens dubbed it "cram school life" (補教人生).⁹ The gossip of star tutors replaced their teaching as the content the public found more interesting.

A Regional Structure: East Asian Shared Burden

Taiwan's cram school culture is often discussed as a unique phenomenon, but it is in fact a shared regional structure in East Asia. Academics call it "shadow education": the shadow of formal schooling, moving in lockstep with the school system — whatever schools teach, cram schools supplement.¹⁰

In 2008, 80 percent of South Korean elementary and middle school students received at least one form of after-school tutoring, with roughly half attending 학원 (hagwon). Japan's 2007 data showed more than 65 percent of ninth-grade students attended 塾 (juku).¹⁰ A survey after Taiwan's 12-Year Basic Education Act went into effect found that over 70 percent of children were still getting tutored, at an average monthly cost of approximately NT$5,500 (based on figures compiled from a survey cited by The News Lens).¹¹

Three countries, three languages, one practice: school teaches something, then you pay someone else to teach it again.

The differences lie in government attitudes. South Korea once comprehensively banned cram schools in 1980; underground tutoring became even more rampant, and the ban was struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2000 as unconstitutional. Japan tacitly accepts the existence of juku, even treating it as a supplement to public education. Taiwan sits between both positions: no ban, but no treatment of cram schools as a variable that educational policy needs to confront.

Education reform claimed to relieve pressure, but never answered one question: if schools were genuinely good enough, why would parents still pay to send their children to cram school?

Nanyang Street's Last Lesson

In 2023, Nanyang Street had only three college retake classes left, with approximately 2,500 students.¹ Most ground-floor storefronts had become bubble tea shops and food stalls; the second floors were hair salons.

The disappearance of retake students has a direct cause: university acceptance rates are near 100 percent, and combined with accessible transfers between departments and institutions, there is no need to stake your youth on a retake year. Changes in building codes also made the old Japanese colonial-era buildings on Nanyang Street difficult to re-license as cram schools, and some tutoring operators shifted to nearby streets.¹

But cram schools didn't disappear. They scattered from the concentrated battlefield of Nanyang Street into neighborhood alleys across all of Taiwan. From 48 to 18,000. From the battleground of high-school retake students to the daily routine of fifth graders.

The Nanyang Street story, on the surface, is the rise and fall of one street. Underneath it is three decades of a society's anxiety bill for education — only the way the bill is paid has changed from "squeezed onto one street" to "distributed across every family's monthly expenses."

Cross-national surveys show that Taiwanese parents' total education spending from elementary school through university is considerable, with tutoring fees accounting for a significant share.² Whether the money buys children's futures or parents' peace of mind — no one has been able to give a definitive answer in thirty years.

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