Japan’s gakushu juku industry — private, after-hours study schools — has spent decades monetizing the country’s notoriously busted education system, and parents have spent decades paying for it. The so-called “cram schools” are a multi-billion dollar market, and they’ve now reached their next logical step: Virtual Cram School Wish High, a private school where every teacher is a virtual anime character.
As reported by ITMedia News, Virtual Cram School Wish High is a new online school by Tokyo-based company Luminaris. According to the publication, all teachers are “active VTubers,” meaning streamers who use digital avatars to represent themselves instead of showing their real faces.
Tuition at the online academy is the equivalent of around $63 per course per month, on subjects including mathematics, English, physics, chemistry, world history, Japanese history, and geography.
An “Instructor Introduction Stream” uploaded on YouTube by Wish High shows three potential VTuber teachers walking the audience through the cram school’s website while introducing their courses. It’s unclear if teachers will be giving group lessons or individual lectures to virtual classrooms when the service goes live on March 1.
One thing’s certain from the video’s description: there is “no age limit” for students to enroll, meaning minors could find themselves in courses with adult followers of the cutesy VTubers. “The day you decide you want to learn is the start,” the description reads.
On its face, the Wish High model seems built on parasocial attachment — fans follow these streamers because they feel some sort of personal bond with a character. Importing that feature into private education is a novel way to get students hooked on their service, as adolescents who feel emotionally attached to their favorite streamers might be more likely to subscribe. (Whether or not those VTubers are trained to be effective teachers is another story altogether.)
Japan’s cram school industry has long been criticized for monetizing access to tutoring for standardized testing which is not otherwise offered in grade schools. While cram schools have been found to effectively boost student grade school and university exam performance, they do so at tremendous cost to families. The majority of poor families who enroll a student in cram schools do so by taking out loans.
Given that some elite cram schools can cost over $9,500 a year, Wish High definitely falls on the lower end of the spectrum, with an annual cost around $756, assuming a student enrolled in one course over a 12-month period. If nothing else, low-income Japanese families can now send their kids to train for college entrance exams with bubbly anime waifus — a bargain, for those with no other option.
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