oliviatamccue

Further to the blog on “what is ccue?“, I have taken some rough angle in guessing the potential students for Cantonese education (aka. TAM Total Addressable Market of a school).

Obviously, there is limitation with the approach below and can be refined with more accuracy.

• Start with the total Chinese Population based on the US Census Bureau.
• Check out the population speaking Chinese at home (to double check).   It includes people speaking Mandarin, Cantonese and other dialects.
• Check out the population by age.   Student age for Chinese school would be around 5 to 14.
• It is not so easy to differentiate Mandarin Speaking and Cantonese Speaking population in various statistics.  The school district is likely the source of more reliable information.

Taking this approach, the number for Santa Clara County, California reflects the followings

• According to US Census Bureau for 2011, Chinese is 8.2% of the total population, total to 148,995 +/- 10,801.   As a reference, the US  Census Bureau reports the following (compatible) statistics on population of 125,813 speaking Chinese at home.   That is in the ballpark enough for me to keep using 148,995 as the baseline for Chinese population.

• Around 13.9% of total population (all races) is of age 5 to 14. Using the same ratio, the Chinese with age 5 to 14 is estimated to b e 148,995 * 13.9% = 20710.

• How to figure out the allocation of Chinese speaking Cantonese vs Mandarin? The school district would have more accurate statistics.   For estimate purpose, I didn’t check out each of the school districts and just use the allocation of home language for foreign speakers in two Cupertino Schools.   It came up to a real rough ratio of 16 (Mandarin) to 1 (Cantonese).   Using the 16:1 ratio on the Chinese at age 5 to 14, the Cantonese students would become 20710*1/(16+1) = 1218.

It seemed low in number, relatively high compared to enrollment in a typical Cantonese Chinese school.

A few areas to make the assessment of “potential customers” more accurate:

• There could be interest from non-Chinese students to learn a foreign language – it can be considered,  unlikely it would affect big picture.
• It is possible the population by age for Chinese is significantly different from the overall population.  How likely?
• Adults could be interested too.  Most non-profit Chinese school focuses on school-aged students.
• Is the ratio between Mandarin and Cantonese accurate – if it becomes more like 1:8, then the total “poential Cantonese” students would become 20710*1/(1+8) = 2301.  This is something to be validated based on the statistics of the school districts in the neighborhood.

A rough approach to get to TAM assessment for a school.   Love to hear better approaches.

Posted in About Learning