Pyramid Academy. Ray Chinese School. Han Academy. Xilin. Kumon.

To many of my fellow Asian people out there in Naperville, these institutions are household names. You might have taken a class in one of these places, groaned while your mom mentioned possibly signing you up for one of their classes, or even spent eight years of Saturdays at one.

To the Asian community in Naperville, especially the Chinese population, these places are the lifeblood of academic success. These institutions supply a high local demand for academic and extracurricular excellence by offering a wide variety of extracurricular classes such as Chinese, math, chess, martial arts, SAT/ACT prep, physics, computer programming, essay writing, etc.

However, in recent years, fueled by crazed WeChat groups and inspired by Asian communities in California and New York, the Asian parents of Naperville decided that excellence wasn’t enough. They were bored of constantly seeing 99th percentile on their child’s standardized testing. They wanted more. Specifically, they wanted their child to be the best. Who doesn’t?

The solution was simple: competitions of all kinds. Speech. Math. Physics. Programming. Essay writing. Piano. Earth science. Chemistry. Chinese. Debate. Finance. Music.

Although these competitions have all existed across the nation for decades, recent years have really seen them become a focus to Naperville’s Asian community. Furthermore, a large demand for tutoring in these niche fields has given rise to new classes at Ray Chinese School as well as entirely new businesses like Pyramid Academy and Han Academy that specifically target this specific market of competition preparation.

Not only are these classes for high school students that have already identified their interests and just want further tutoring, they market to the parents of younger students with “introductory classes.” They prey on parental fears that one’s child will be left behind by saying things like “if your kid doesn’t start taking AP Physics 1 in middle school they will be left behind” or “look at [insert Asian poster child]. Take our programs to be like him/her.” That’s where my problem with this culture arises.

On one hand, I completely support the existence of these services to help better prepare high school students with lofty goals. Businesses like Pyramid and Han initially started with the business model of recruiting hard-to-find teachers that could teach advanced material to ambitious local students (that just also usually happened to be Asian). They prepared these students with existing passions for certain subjects (e.g. physics or speech) to make them competitive on the national level, leading many people, including many of my friends, to national success.

In short, they offered a supply to an existing demand. These kids used these new services to propel themselves further and, in turn, these businesses brought in decent revenue.

However, there’s not actually too many students in the area who actually are self-motivated enough and interested enough in these topics to seek out these kinds of opportunities. Once these institutions had already tapped into the existing market of driven high school students, their growth was limited. To no one’s surprise, it didn’t take them long before coming up with a new long term strategy: expand the market. In other words, they could convince people that had no initial interest that their services were in fact a necessity for their future goals. Or to be more precise, it was critical for one future goal: COLLEGE.

(life hack: If you listen closely enough at North, you will always be able to hear the words “college admissions” mentioned at least once. If you still can’t hear it, just follow Brian Zheng around for a day to get your fill)

Instead of targeting high school students who were already committed to their own interests, they focused on middle schoolers and even elementary schoolers. Through word-of-mouth marketing via Naperville’s highly interconnected Asian community they were able to convince hordes of young students and parents that they did in fact need these services. Asians might be cheap, but if they hear that something might increase their odds in the game of college admissions, they’ll practically start throwing their money at you. With a much larger market, these businesses could offer more classes and ultimately make more money. Kudos to them for their common sense business move.

However, their expansion has exacerbated one of the main problems with the Asian community in Naperville: hyper-competitiveness.

It will take me a whole additional blog post to explain my thoughts on hyper-competition in Naperville so stay tuned for next time!