Tutors were fired en masse because of the policy of tightening tutoring 2
An internal meeting of New Oriental Education and Technology Group (New Oriental) in mid-September proposed a plan to lay off more than 40,000 employees by the end of this year and eliminate all tutoring business activities for students.
China introduced the `simultaneous reduction` policy at the end of July to ease children’s academic pressure caused by private tutoring and meet the needs of working parents.
Chinese students at a school ceremony.
As the education industry begins to adapt to this `new normal` situation, some tutoring centers announce a scale-down or staff reduction.
According to a Late Post report, about 10,000 employees have left the company amid unrest at New Oriental.
When contacted by Sixth Tone for comment on the mass layoffs, an employee at New Oriental’s Shanghai branch did not deny it but added that there had been no official announcement on the matter.
On September 27, one of New Oriental’s teaching locations inside a shopping mall in Pudong New Area – which previously advertised tutoring during the summer vacation – suspended classes.
At another New Oriental branch, three kilometers from the shopping mall, the two-story space and dozens of classrooms were empty on Sunday.
Meanwhile, parents and teachers in Shanghai said other tutoring centers, such as Xueersi, plan to stop in-person classes from October, moving online instead.
Some say that the move to cut or cancel face-to-face classes is due to a new national directive on tuition fees, which prohibits private tutoring centers from raising prices more than 10% above government-regulated prices.
However, not everyone is happy about tutoring centers switching to online learning.
`Sitting in front of a computer screen for too long greatly affects my child’s eyesight,` said the mother of a second grader.
Huang, the father of a first grader, said: `If operating costs were the result of pricing according to government guidelines, we might have to pay about 130 yuan per classroom. But
