In twenty years, who will fill these schools?
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
I've been reading Super Trends, which talks about falling birth rates and an ageing population.
A thought suddenly hit me: so many people are still opening schools and kindergartens and expanding colleges, but in ten or twenty years, who's actually going to attend them?
I remember that when I was a kid, you had to queue to register for Chinese primary school. Especially for the better-known schools, parents worried about not getting in, and some even pulled strings. I was going to say that was twenty years ago, then I did the maths: I'm nearly forty, so primary school was thirty years ago. By the time I went to college, there was a different kind of boom: private colleges and private universities opening one after another, as if education were an industry where demand would grow forever. Even today, we still see people expanding.
The numbers are already shifting
On the other side, though, enrolment in Chinese primary schools is falling.
A report from Dong Zong shows that in 2025, Chinese primary schools nationwide had about 464,000 pupils, including preschool and special education classes, around 26,500 fewer than in 2024. Of the 1,303 Chinese primary schools in the country, 653 are micro-schools with fewer than 150 pupils. That's already half.
(I'm also curious whether politicians can still sell Chinese schools as an issue these days.)
Data from the Department of Statistics Malaysia also show that births nationwide in 2024 fell 9% from the year before, and the total fertility rate for ethnic Chinese is only about 0.9. Put these numbers together and you start to feel that some changes have already happened, even if we don't notice them clearly in daily life.
About five or six years ago, I was looking for a kindergarten for my child in Ampang. Finding one I felt was right wasn't easy, and in the end I had to consider ones further away.
At the time I just wondered why there weren't any good options nearby. Looking back now, besides the quality and positioning of the schools themselves, could it also be about the age of the community?
When a housing area is first developed, the people moving in are young couples. They have children next, so kindergartens, primary schools and tuition centres are in demand.
Thirty years later, the houses are still there and so are the residents, but the parents have grown older and the children have grown up and moved elsewhere to start families. The area still looks well populated, but there may no longer be as many families who need a kindergarten.
When we look at a place, we usually look at how many people live there, without really looking at what age they are.
A bigger market, or someone else's share?
Of course, this doesn't mean opening a kindergarten or school today is bound to fail. New townships may still have lots of young families, some parents are willing to pay more for better education, and some chains can draw students away from other schools.
Falling student numbers nationwide and queues at certain top schools can happen at the same time. We just need to be clear about whether our growth comes from the market getting bigger or from taking someone else's market share. Those two mean very different things for future expansion.
Universities are similar. They have more room than kindergartens: they can recruit across states, take international students, and offer adult education.
But if you tell me you're building a bigger campus or opening more branches, I'd still want to ask: where will future students come from? Have you seen new demand, or do you believe the next twenty years will be the same because education was a good business for the last twenty?
I think the education business has something especially worth thinking about.
In many industries, it's genuinely hard to predict customers ten years out. But many of a school's students for the next few years have already been born. How old they are now, where they live, roughly how many there are: these things can be found out. The birth numbers are already there. If we only look at this year's good enrolment when expanding, without checking how many children are in the next few cohorts, we're ignoring a risk we could see.
And population changes slowly, but business problems can come quickly. Say a kindergarten had 120 pupils, then 110, then 100. The owner might think it's harder but still manageable. But when numbers drop to 90, the rent hasn't gone down and you can't keep cutting teachers proportionally, and suddenly it can't go on.
From outside, people see a school that suddenly closed. In fact the change may have been happening for years; this was just the year it couldn't hold on any longer.
Where do our assumptions come from?
Lately I've also had a vague sense that fewer people around me are starting businesses. But that's just my impression. I can't say it's true nationwide, much less blame it all on population.
Costs, market confidence, what people went through after the pandemic, even more business moving online could all play a part. It just makes me notice that some of the growth conditions we're used to may be slowly changing.
In the past, in business, we were used to asking:
- How big is this market?
- How many outlets can we open?
- How much revenue can we make?
From now on we may also need to ask:
By the time these investments are supposed to pay back, how many customers will I still have?
Schools are what made me feel this, but other businesses are the same.
Of the assumptions behind our five- and ten-year plans today, how many come from our own judgement, and how many only from the fact that it's always been this way?