The toll road to university

Thailand’s central university admission system is called TCAS, and it was designed with an explicit and honourable purpose: to stop wealthier students hoarding multiple offers — กั๊กที่นั่ง, seat-blocking — and to reduce the advantage money bought in the previous system.

It was built to make admission fairer.

For the intake that starts in 2027, the state has stopped charging for its own part of it. The Council of University Presidents’ published fee for the aptitude tests — TGAT and TPAT2 to 5 — is ฿140 a subject, and for the A-Level subject tests ฿100 a subject. Beside both figures the same calendars record that the Ministry of Higher Education is paying: every TGAT/TPAT subject a student sits, and up to seven A-Levels. The main admission round takes seven ranked choices free. Reporting of the announcement put the saving at up to ฿3,150 a student.

That is a real change and it is worth stating plainly before the argument, because the argument is not that the state is indifferent. It is that the toll it has just removed was never the large one.

In 2018, the first full year of the system, Thai reporting put the cost of a student’s passage through it — fees across the rounds plus tutoring — at around ฿61,000. Application fees, at ฿100–140 a subject and a charge per round, were reported at ฿6,400 to ฿10,000 of that. The rest was preparation.

(Those totals are from 2018 and I am presenting them as dated. No current estimate of the tutoring component exists that this site would cite, and I have not invented one. The fee component is current, and for 2027 the state pays it.)

A system designed to reduce inequality had an entry fee. The state has now paid the part it set. The part it did not set is still there.

What ฿61,000 meant

Set the 2018 figure against the numbers elsewhere on this site, all of which are of the same order today.

A street food vendor (article 13 What a Bangkok street food cart actually earns) nets around ฿20,000 a month. A child’s passage through TCAS, at the 2018 estimate, was three months of that income.

The state old age allowance (article 38 Six hundred baht a month) is ฿600 a month, ฿7,200 a year. The 2018 estimate was more than eight years of it.

A funeral (article 28 The envelope: what a Thai funeral actually costs, and who pays) costs ฿80,000–200,000. Applying to university sat in the same financial category as burying a parent.

And it was paid before anyone knew whether the child got in. Of that ฿61,000, fees of every kind were at most a sixth, and the state’s own tests a part of that. Subtract the tests, as the ministry now has, and the comparisons above barely move.

Where the structure does the damage

The per-subject, per-round design is the specific problem, and it’s worth being precise about why — and about what the subsidy changes.

A student who can afford more attempts has more chances. More subjects entered, more rounds attempted, more shots. That isn’t cheating and nobody’s breaking a rule; it’s a system where the number of tickets you hold scales with what you can pay for tickets.

The subsidy removes the price of the tickets the state sells. The central tests are free to sit in the 2027 cycle, however many a student enters. What it does not touch is the rounds the universities run themselves — the portfolio and quota rounds, each with a fee set by the institution per programme — and it does not touch what a student pays to be ready for the test.

And tutoring compounds it. The bulk of that 2018 ฿61,000 wasn’t fees, it was preparation, and nothing in the 2027 schedule reaches it. Article 41 ฿95 billion buying out described a ฿95 billion international school sector growing at 11.8% a year; the tutoring market sits underneath it doing the same job for families who can’t reach that tier but can reach this one.

So the sequence for a well-resourced family runs: better school, then tutoring, then more subjects, then more rounds. Four separate points at which money converts into probability, in a system explicitly designed to stop money converting into probability.

The toll nobody accounts for

There is no public accounting of what Thai families spend preparing for TCAS. Estimates circulate — one educator’s figure of ฿25 billion a year for the money moving around the system was widely repeated in 2018 — but they are estimates by critics, not audited numbers, and this article does not carry one as a fact.

What can be said is structural. The tutoring market exists because the tests require what the schools do not reliably deliver; it prices by the hour and by the subject; and it therefore scales with family income in exactly the way the admission system was designed to stop. The state’s new subsidy is a precise measure of the state’s own share of the toll — ฿140 a subject — and by the same token a measure of how much of the road it never owned.

That is the kind of thing a Thai-language investigation could establish and nobody in English has even asked.

Why this belongs with articles 41 and 53

Three pieces now describe Thai education and they form one argument.

Article 41 ฿95 billion buying out — ฿95 billion of international school fees, growing at 11.8% while the economy grows at 1.8–1.9%, driven by Thai families exiting the state system.

Article 53 Let it end with our generation, SOTUS, and a generation of students dismantling an institution built on seniority.

This one — a fair-admission system whose 2018 cost of entry was put at ฿61,000, of which the state has now waived the share its own tests took.

The through-line is that Thai education is a series of tolls, and each one sorts by ability to pay, while the reform energy is coming almost entirely from students rather than from the institutions.

Article 39’s court ruling on school hair rules fits the same pattern. Young people are the reform constituency in Thai education, and they have no money and no institutional power, which is why the changes they win are about dignity rather than about cost.

Nobody has won an argument about the cost yet.

The counter-argument, taken seriously

TCAS is genuinely better than what preceded it. Seat-blocking was a real problem, it disadvantaged students who couldn’t afford to hold multiple applications, and the centralised system addressed it.

Fees also fund something. Administering a national admission system for hundreds of thousands of students is not free, and somebody has to pay for it.

And the deeper inequality isn’t created by TCAS. It’s created upstream — by article 41’s exit of resourced families from state schools, by the quality gradient between urban and rural provision, and by a tutoring industry that exists because the school system doesn’t deliver what the exams require.

TCAS didn’t cause that. It’s just the point where it becomes a number you can put on an invoice, which is precisely why it attracts the criticism.

For foreign parents

If your child is in the Thai system and heading for a Thai university:

Budget for the process, not just the fees. For the 2027 intake the central tests are free to sit; the university-run rounds charge per programme, and preparation is the larger cost by a wide margin.

Understand the rounds. TCAS runs in stages with different mechanisms and different costs, and strategy across them matters.

And ask current parents, not the school. Article 49 Kreng jai: the one rule underneath all the others applies — the official answer describes the process, and other parents will tell you what it actually costs.