Just a brief post this afternoon. We just wanted to comment on the fact that Wall Street has opened 2 more branches in Greater Jakarta in the past twelve months. One is called Kota Kasablanca and the other is called Alam Sutera, which is out in the booming West Jakarta area it seems. (TBI Serpong won’t be pleased.) It is clear that for teachers with the right “English” degree, WSI is the obvious choice. It can properly staff its centres while Luke Preece whines about DIKNAS and blames them for his failed stint managing TBI.

WSI’s promotional literature is very open compared to TBI’s. In TBI student numbers are now treated as a matter of state secrecy and no one is allowed to now them. (Teachers and staff are even forced to sign insane confidentiality agreements and are threatened with legal repercussions if they share the truth about TBI.) WSI says that it has already passed 8000 registered students and are moving towards 9000 this year. TBI’s three biggest schools, Dago, Jalan Riau and Kuningan used to have a combined enrollment of around 2,600 students in good times and many franchise schools had as little as 150-200 students. This means that Wall Street just a few years after opening, already has more market share than TBI. TBI’s 16 schools had only 6000-7000 current enrollments at any given point as late as 2012. Since then 2 branches have closed and TBI Bekasi has rock-bottom student enrollments, so it has hard to see how this has improved much if at all. (Though if you ask Luke Preece, he may start claiming that TBI now has more students than the total population of China if he thinks it will score him any points. He lies as easily as he breathes.)

In short, Wall Street is piling on new students and powering ahead. In the past 12 months it has opened 2 new centres, while 2 TBI centres have closed. WSI is booming while TBI stagnates. When you consider that Wall Street has taken just a few short years to gain more market share than TBI, which is almost 30 years old, you can see how badly TBI is faring. WSI has the money and resources to succeed, while TBI has some Aussie con-man with a photocopied degree and a bag full of broken promises. WSI is investing in  the future while the COO of TBI, Reza Suriansha, is more known for his spectacular losses of TBI funds and his unfathomable “accounting methods”, by which large sums of money routinely disappear. It is clear that TBI is losing badly to both EF and Wall Street, and no one in charge wants to take any responsibility. But the facts speak for themselves.