South Korea’s Education Exodus: The Life and Times of Study Abroad ed. by Adrienne Lo et al. (review)

South Korea’s educational system has attracted considerable international attention, but the scholarly literature on it in English is mostly confined to articles written by and for pedagogical specialists. Therefore this multidisciplinary collection of thirteen readable chapters by authors from the fields of anthropology, communications, education, psychology, and sociology is a welcome addition. Rather than focus on the mainstream educational system, the chapters in this volume are concerned with Korean primary- and secondary-age students who go outside the country for education, a phenomenon known as chogi yuhak (early study abroad). While this topic has been widely covered in the South Korean media, 400 articles were published on it in the Chosǒn ilbo, the popular conservative daily, between 1994 and 2007 (p. 43), this is first major study of the topic in English.

Despite this interest, the scale of early study abroad (ESA) has been modest. The number of pre–college-age Korean students studying abroad reached 29,000 in 2006 (p. 41). Afterward the number declined to just under 11,000 in 2014 according to recent estimates by the Korean Education Development Institute. Even at its peak the number of ESA students amounted to only 0.4 percent of the country’s eight million primary and secondary students. The number of college students was many times higher peaking at over 260,000 in 2011 or 6.7 percent of all Koreans in higher education, and declining to less than 220,00 in 2014.¹ These figures may underreport the real number of young people engaged in ESA, but even so, they hardly constituted a great flood of students. Furthermore, this includes both those enrolled in short-term foreign language programs—usually to learn English—and young people engaged in long-term study at foreign schools.

So the question arises, why devote so much attention including an entire volume to this rather minor and perhaps fleeting phenomenon? Because it provides insights into South Korean education, and understanding South Korean education is central to understanding South Korea. The authors do not make this case directly, but it is implied throughout the collection. Education is a national obsession in South Korea. Of course, one could argue this is also true in Japan, China, and throughout East Asia and even to some extent across Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. But South Korea is truly an extreme. Statistics bear that out. As pointed out in my own book Education Fever few if any developing nations have so focused their attention on education. South Korea’s educational expansion even outpaced its legendary economic growth rate so that at every point in its economic development from the 1950s to the 1990s the country had the highest school enrollment rates of any country in its GDP per capita range.² This is still true today. By 2010, 98 percent of all twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-olds had completed secondary education, the highest percentage of the thirty members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.³ In 2013, South Korea had the highest percentage of students who had completed some form tertiary education.⁴ South Korean education has earned international praise most notably from President Obama.⁵ Its students have in recent years scored near the top in every international comparative test of science, math, and reading. Pearson, an educational service, ranked South Korea first in the world in 2014 in overall academic attainment.⁶

Yet, for all its achievements, South Korea’s educational system is also an incredibly high-pressure and expensive system. Studies by the OECD and by the Korean Education Development Institute indicate that South Koreans spend a higher percentage of family income on education than any other developed nation, a figure that has been true for at...