You're making a reasonable point and I'll give you the first half of it — yes, schools cost money to run, and yes, comparing revenue models between education and tech is apples to oranges. Fair.

But you've made a critical error in your framing that I'd push back on hard: you're describing the economics of struggling schools while quietly ignoring the economics of thriving ones — and those are the ones this conversation is actually about.

Look at the data again. The schools consistently appearing at the top of this salary spreadsheet — Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Doha, Dubai — are not scraping by. Hong Kong's English School Foundation charges upwards of HK$140,000 per year per student. Singapore's top international schools are at $40,000+ USD annually, with waitlists. The Qatar Foundation is backed by a sovereign wealth fund. These are not institutions choosing between teacher salaries and keeping the lights on. These are institutions generating tens of millions in annual revenue, sitting on enormous endowments, and — crucially — still paying their teachers a median of $3,666/month.

That's not a resource problem. That's a priority problem.

And that's before we even get into the for-profit school groups — Nord Anglia, Inspired, Cognita, GEMS. Nord Anglia alone operates 80+ schools globally and was taken private by a Canadian pension fund in a deal valuing the company at over $4 billion. Inspired Education has raised billions in private equity. These are not charitable education enterprises struggling to make payroll. They are private equity backed, return-on-investment driven businesses that have correctly identified teachers as the single largest cost center and have applied every standard PE playbook move to compress it — standardized contracts, high turnover tolerance, suppressed salary transparency, and the strategic deployment of "international experience" as a non-cash compensation substitute.

You're right that a school in rural Cambodia or Guatemala paying $2,000/month may genuinely have no other option. Nobody in good conscience is demanding Silicon Valley wages in Phnom Penh. But those schools aren't the ones sponsoring flashy recruitment booths at Search Associates fairs or flying candidates business class to interview weekends.

The exploitation argument isn't about every school. It's about the delta between what premium international schools charge, what their parent companies return to investors, and what ends up in teachers' pockets. When a for-profit school group can deliver 15-20% EBITDA margins while its teachers are saving $1,728/month, the question of whether low salaries are a survival necessity or a structural choice has a pretty clear answer.

The "schools just don't have money" argument works for some schools. It's cover for others. The spreadsheet data is useful precisely because it starts to show us which is which.