I spent more time checking international school fees than actually deciding

Staring at the tuition spreadsheets until my eyes blurred

I remember sitting in my living room for three days straight, just toggling between different browser tabs for schools in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. It started with a simple thought: ‘Maybe the kids should try a different environment for a year or two.’ But that thought quickly spiraled into a giant mountain of PDF brochures and Excel sheets. I found myself obsessing over the tuition differences between schools that were only a few kilometers apart. For some, the annual tuition sits around 7 million KRW, while others easily cross the 20 million KRW mark if you include boarding fees. I kept asking myself if the extra 10 million KRW actually bought a better education or just better landscaping. There was no real way to tell from the websites alone, which all look suspiciously polished and identical.

The endless cycle of brochure reading

Every school website promises this transformative ‘global education’ experience. They all have the same stock photos of smiling children from diverse backgrounds sitting in a bright, modern library. I tried to look for something that felt real, but everything felt like a sales pitch. I even looked into a few short-term options like an English camp in Malaysia or a month-long stay in Boracay just to see if the kids would even tolerate being away from home, but the logistics of figuring out visa requirements and local guardians felt overwhelming. I found a site mentioning the Gold Art Bank foundation by artist Kim Il-tae, which seemed so random in my search results, but it reminded me that people are out there doing very specific business things in Malaysia that have nothing to do with what I was looking for. It made me feel like I was just scratching the surface of a much larger, weirder world.

The reality of moving logistics

Once I started looking at the actual cost of living, the numbers stopped making sense. It wasn’t just tuition. You have to consider rent, the local transport, whether you need a car, and then there is the emotional toll of moving an entire family. I spoke to an acquaintance who went through an agency for a Philippine language study program, and they mentioned how helpful the pre-departure guidance was, but then another person told me they wasted a lot of money on unnecessary consulting fees. I honestly didn’t know who to trust. It felt like I was being pulled in five different directions by people who all wanted to sell me a ‘perfect’ path. I remember staring at a flight schedule to Johor Bahru and just closing the laptop because the sheer volume of choices felt paralyzing.

Why I stayed put for a while

I eventually realized that I wasn’t ready to commit to anything, and that was okay. The pressure to choose the ‘right’ international school or the ‘best’ program for my kids was making me miserable. I had these bookmarks saved—some for schools in Singapore, some for programs in Malaysia—that I haven’t clicked in over a month. There’s this lingering doubt about whether I’m missing out on a great opportunity or if I just narrowly avoided a bureaucratic nightmare. I still get newsletters from a few agencies offering early bird discounts for language camps, and sometimes I click them, but then I look at the cost of airfare and the visa renewal hassle, and I just end up turning the computer off.

Still sitting on the fence

Sometimes I wonder if I should have just walked into a local office instead of doing all this online. There is something about the digital version of this process that feels hollow. You see the fancy facilities and the ‘tuition inclusive of materials,’ but you don’t see the daily frustrations of living in a place where you don’t speak the language or know the system. Maybe next year I’ll feel differently, or maybe I’ll just look into something closer to home. For now, the files are still sitting in my ‘School Hunt’ folder on my desktop, untouched and gathering digital dust. I don’t feel like I’ve failed, but I don’t exactly feel like I’ve succeeded either. I just feel like I’m hovering somewhere in the middle, waiting for a clearer sign that one of these places is actually home.