4.2 - Education

By: flagator_    Read Original Post: Cafe Tropico
Game Guide: Education

If you expect to make serious money, you're eventually going to need educated workers. All the industries, from the lowly lumber mill to the huge rum distillery, require high-school graduates; without them, your economy will be limited to farming, mining, fishing and tourism. Almost all the other important buildings in the game, such as the Immigration Office, Diplomatic Ministry, Clinic, Hospital, Powerplant, Armory, Marketplace and even your Palace, also require educated workers. It's possible to build an island that's a socialist paradise, but you won't get very far.

There are four ways to get educated workers on your island. First of all, unless you're playing a predesigned scenario that specifically leaves them out, every game should start with five educated workers: one each male and female high school graduates, plus one female and two males with college diplomas. This is enough to partially staff your palace, plus a few early buildings like a marketplace, a clinic and perhaps a newspaper. But after those workers are allocated, you will need more.

Hiring Educated Workers

The most reliable way to bring educated workers to your island is through an outside employment agency. A building that requires educated workers will indicate that with a small graduates' cap in the corner of the building's employees window. This cap is blue for buildings requiring high-school educated workers, green for college. Clicking the cap icon brings up a dossier explaining the requirement, and giving you an offer to hire an appropriately trained worker from overseas.

If you say yes, a boat icon appears next to the graduates' cap, reminding you that at least one foreign worker is scheduled to arrive on the next freighter to dock at your port. You can hire more than one at once, if you have the money; they will all arrive on the next freighter, even if that freighter is already in your harbor and maneuvering to dock.

The cost of hiring overseas workers goes up with each one you hire. Your first high school grad costs $500, and each subsequent one costs $100 more. College workers cost $1,500 for the first, and get $300 more expensive for each one afterward. Expensive as this is -- hiring six college-educated workers from overseas would more than pay for the cost of building a college -- this method does have its advantages, at least early on. First, educated workers hired from overseas come not just with an education, but also a basic skill level in their intended job; right off the bat they'll do a better job than a Tropican straight out of college. Second, assuming the building is complete and the job is waiting for them when they arrive, they'll go right to work; there's no finding and firing them from other jobs to try to get them into the one you want.

Skilled Workers Welcome

One of the most cost-effective ways of getting educated workers is through the Immigration Office. This building costs $2,500, can be built fairly quickly, and can be staffed by a single high-school educated woman -- perhaps one of your initial ones. If you set the Immigration Office to "Skilled Workers Welcome," with just one staffer with no skill as a Bureaucrat, 10 percent of your immigrants have high school educations, four percent have college. Though the "tooltip" hint at the bottom of the screen says that a full staff of average skill can raise those numbers to 30% and 10% (which is pretty darn good), it actually reaches those numbers with two bureaucrats of middling-low skill. At high levels of skill, two bureaucrats can make sure that more than half of your immigrants have an education.

Be aware, though, that the Skilled Workers Welcome setting will not increase the number of immigrants your island receives.  If immigration is already low, perhaps because there are very few job openings and your average worker pay is well below the Caribbean average, you may still not receive many educated immigrants.  

Any educated immigrants you receive will most likely take unskilled jobs such as Dockworker, Teamster, or Farmer, even though there are appropriate positions available at your factory, clinic, or power plant.  Eventually, these workers may find there way to these better-paying jobs, but they will be unhappy in the meanwhile because they are underemployed.  If you have positions available for high-school or college educated workers that you are trying to fill, you may need to fire each of these educated immigrants from the fresh-off-the-boat jobs they take to "encourage" them to take the skilled jobs.  If all of the positions on your island for educated workers are filled, using the Immigration Office to import educated workers may simply increase the likelihood that you will have unhappy people.

However, if used with discretion, this setting is a great reason to build an Immigration Office early in the game, since it is cheap and can act as a substitute for a High School and College for a few years.

Fast Times At Tropico High

When you're ready to staff several industries and other jobs requiring higher education, you can't rely on immigration, though; it's just not fast enough or reliable enough. That's when you build a high school. You should probably be ready to build one when your population first reaches 100.

Staffing:  In a chicken-and-egg thing, you need high school educated females to be the teachers at your school. If you haven't built an immigration office yet, you'll probably have to hire them from overseas. But those should be the last overseas high-school grads you have to hire. Get two to start with; each teacher can teach two students (now there's a small class size!), and at this early stage, it's unlikely you'll have more than four prospective students.

At this early stage, you'll want to X out three of the teacher positions. Reason: Tropicans choose jobs not just based on pay, but also on their political leanings and the job's proximity to home. Tropicans who tend to go for an education often favor the Intellectual faction already, and if they don't have a wage-earning spouse at home to pay for their housing, they probably moved into a shack near the school shortly after enrolling. These factors combine to make teaching at the high school a very attractive job for new female graduates, so if you don't X those positions out, you'll end up with six high school teachers before you get a single shopkeeper or diplomat out of it.

Attendance:  Building and staffing a high school is the easy part. For many people, the hard part is getting any Tropicans to attend. To a Tropican, being a high school student is just another job, and a poorly paying one at that. So unless there are other factors involved -- particularly, unemployment at the uneducated level, and jobs available for educated Tropicans -- most won't quit the paying job they have to go to school. If you have a staffed school and nobody is attending, you probably have no jobs available at the educated level. Build another factory, and students will flood your school.

Education Settings:  Though you'll probably want to crank out graduates as fast as possible, there are other settings for your high school which serve special circumstances and may be worth looking at. General Education, the default, works the fastest at teaching your students; with two or three teachers providing an educational quality of 50-60, a student of average intelligence will graduate in a year, more or less. (Wish it worked that way in real life, eh? Well, you didn't have to move out on your own at age 13 either.) More teachers, more skilled teachers and more intelligent students lower this study time. The other settings, Parochial Education and Military Education, increase the time it takes for a student to graduate by about 30 percent, or four months. Parochial Education indoctrinates the students toward the Religious faction, which is good if you're having a hard time staffing your churches and cathedrals; Military Education does the same for the militarist faction, which is just the thing if you've got lots of Guard Posts to staff. Note that neither form of special education is much use to female students; they'll get the same boost to their Religious or Military faction support, but since they can't take jobs in either field, it's kind of pointless.

Tropico U., Home of the Fighting Banana Spiders

A college works the same as a high school, except that it costs more to build, maintain and staff, and instead of female high-school grads, you need male college grads to teach there. The other difference is that a college employs eight instructors who can teach 16 students, instead of a high school's six and 12. But there are similarities, including the time it takes a typical student to graduate. (Where were "El Cliffo's Notes" when I was in college?) Colleges can be set for General, Parochial or Military Education, also like the high school. And like a high school, you'll probably never need more than one.

You'll probably want to build it just before you plan to start building things that require electricity, like Luxury Hotels, Casinos, Nightclubs, Hospitals, TV/radio stations or powered industrial upgrades. That's because many of these buildings (not to mention the Power Plant to run them) require college-educated workers, and growing your own is in the long run cheaper than buying.

Like a high school, if students are staying away from your college in droves, it's likely because there are few or no college-requiring jobs available. But if you're building something that's going to require college-educated men, like a Hospital or Armory, and you want to have some staff ready the moment it goes up, here's a trick (which also works for females at the high school level): Temporarily unblock those Professor jobs you X'd out when you built the college. The available jobs will attract a few students to the school (especially if you "encourage" likely candidates by firing them), and when your new building is complete and ready to staff, fire the extra profs and they'll probably go right to work at the new building. Unless they're communists, in which case they'll probably go right back to work at the construction office, but that's a whole 'nother story.

The Nutty Professor - Dictator Traits

There are several dictator traits that have an effect on education and learning job skills. For example, choosing the background of Professor for your dictator means that all citizens learn 50% faster when attending Tropican schools and improve job skills 20% faster. But choosing the Moronic flaw means -50% educational learning and -50% job skill learning, not to mention the inability to build universities/colleges. Not a good choice if education is important to you. Below is a table of all of the dictator traits that affect education:

Dictator Effects Trait Education Effect Skills Effect Other Effects Background Moscow U. +10% +10%   Harvard U. +20% +20%   Biblical Scholar +10% +10%   Leftist Author +20% +20%   Professor +50% +20%   Positive Traits Administrator +10% +20%   Scholarly +30% +30%   Flaws Moronic -50% -50% Universities prohibited

See Ricardo Run - Edict Effects

Another important factor that can have a great influence on education is the Literacy Program edict. This costs $500 plus $2 annual maintenance per Tropican student/worker but means that students learn 30% faster and workers learn skills 30% faster. Definitely worthwhile if you are building an industrial economy or are trying to keep the intellectuals happy. Don't miss out on this one once you have a high school built.

And last but not least is the Book BBQ edict. This reduces education rates by 50%, presumably for both schools and workers. So watch out for this if you're trying to promote education, not that many are likely to enact this edict.

The False Theory of Education

There is this wide spread theory that you need to provide some cheap housings around the high school or university if you want your people to attend school. The cheap housing part is true but the proximity part is false.

I love following my people around. I guess I am a presidential-level stalker. So I was stalking this student who just graduated from high school and has immediately gone on to university. Because the high school and college are on opposite side of the island, I was curious to see how long it takes for her to travel across. Much to my surprise, she never made it across! She went home, slept, woke up, got some groceries and, presto, she was a college educated person a year later. She never stepped into the college at all! I checked this with another student. It's the same thing!

In view of this fact, the ideal locations for a college and high school are at the far-flung corners of your island. Your people don't actually have to visit it to use it, so why clutter up your central city locations with them?

However, some housing around the college and high school are needed for the teachers. For 2 reasons:
Reason 1: If the teachers live too far, they may simply quit the job and become farmers nearer their homes.
Reason 2: Experience!

I noticed that people only gain experience when they are actually working. In the case of factory worker, bureacrats, teachers, priests and the bunch of office based workers, this means having the people actually in the buildings. (This piece of information is again gleaned from stalking people.) So the closer they are to home, the more time they can spend at office gaining experience.

Skills Revealed!

We all know that the higher the job skills of your workers, the more productive they are.  Let's see what each one actually does shall we? (Note: I didn't look at the athlete, attendant, maid, cook, pitboss, bishop, tourists or the cows and goats.  However, cows and goats DO have a skill rating.

Farmer - Highly skilled farmers move faster while working and perform all their tasks with fewer motions.

Laborer - Highly skilled laborers move faster while working and perform all their tasks with fewer motions.

Fisherman - Highly skilled fishermen catch more fish, faster.

Dockworkers - Highly skilled dockworkers move their loads around the docks faster.

Teamsters - Highly skilled teamsters move faster while working.

Factory Worker - Highly skilled Factory workers produce their finished goods quicker.

Lumberjack - Highly skilled lumberjacks move faster while working and require fewer swings to chop a tree.

Miner - Highly skilled miners move faster while working and require fewer swings to do the mining.

Shopkeeper - Highly skilled shopkeepers cause the shops where they work to provide better service and get higher ratings, helping draw more tourists.

Barmaids - Highly skilled barmaids cause the pubs and nightclubs where they work to provide better service and get higher ratings, helping draw more tourists and providing higher quality entertainment.

Showgirls - Highly skilled showgirls cause the cabarets where they work to provide to get higher scores, helping draw more tourists and provide higher quality entertainment.

Soldier - Highly skilled soldiers move faster and shoot more accurately in firefights.

Policeman - Highly skilled policemen walk their beat faster and shoot more accurately, if it comes to that.

Bureaucrat - Highly skilled bureaucrats increase the effect of embassies and immigration offices on foreign relations and immigration.

Banker - Highly skilled bankers have a greater effect on construction costs, move money to Switzerland faster, or lower tourism account turnover, depending on the bank's chosen task.

Doctors - Highly skilled doctors cause the clinics and hospitals where they work to provide better service and get higher ratings.

Teachers - Highly skilled teachers teach students faster.

Professors - Highly skilled professors teach students faster.

Students - Highly skilled students learn faster.

Priests - Highly skilled priests preach better sermons, causing the churches were they work to get better ratings and provide better religious quality to the congregation.

Engineers - Highly skilled engineers.  If they work at a powerplant, it will generate more electricity.  If they work at an airport, it will turn planes around faster.

General - There is no information available on what the general skill actually does.  Possibly the same as soldiers.

Journalist - If the newspaper/radio station/TV station is set to a money-making option, more skilled journalists will bring in more money. If it's set to something that has an effect on the people, like BBC, All Presidente All The Time, Voice of God, etc., higher journalist skills will have a greater effect on Liberty, Respect, or whatever else the setting affects.


The following also have skills. However, they are rather worthless.  Funny, but worthless.  Read on to understand why.

Mother - Highly skilled mothers raise well nurtured children.  That doesn't help you, Presidente, one single bit.

Retiree - Highly skilled retirees spend much of their day playing bridge. No, Presidente, there is no tangible benefit to you for this.

Child - Highly skilled children don't do much of anything (though they'll likely make skillful adults at whatever profession they choose.)

Cow - Highly skilled cows graze more efficiently, and find better grazing faster.