Educational credentials are one of the most reliable tickets to a middle-class livelihood across the globe today. But as the costs of schooling rise, young people increasingly wonder whether their investment will pay off. Betting on Education: The Costs of Schooling for Cambodian Youth follows the experiences of rural secondary school students navigating Cambodia’s semi-privatized state education system. It reveals that when students are compelled to speculate about the value of their education, the “winners” of this gamble are the ones already most securely part of the middle class. The rest are left behind. In the process, the very meaning of education is transformed, as schooling becomes less about learning and more about its potential financial returns. By situating these stories in the wider global logics of neoliberal capitalism, Betting on Education challenges readers to consider what is at stake when young people must wager so much on the promise of schooling.

JENNIFER ESTES is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her work has appeared in journals including Anthropology and Education Quarterly (2025), Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology (2023), and Annals of the American Association of Geographers (2022).

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Hidden Costs: State Schools and Private Classes

Chapter 2 – Unequal Tracks: The Value of Science Versus Social Science

Chapter 3 – Speculative Investments: Students' Use of Time and Money

Chapter 4 – (Un)Fair Assessments: Cheating and the Promise of Meritocracy

Chapter 5 – Family Ties: Students' Trajectories and Relations of Interdependency

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Notes

References

Index