Opinion: Korea’s Education System Is Its Greatest Asset — and Its Biggest Problem

The following is an opinion piece by our editorial board.

Every November, South Korea holds its breath. Air traffic is rerouted. Stock market hours are adjusted. Police motorcycles escort late-arriving students to exam halls. The country effectively stops for the Suneung — the College Scholastic Ability Test — a single examination that, in the minds of most Korean families, determines the entire arc of a child’s life.

This is simultaneously the most impressive and the most troubling thing about South Korean society.

The Miracle It Built

Korea’s educational intensity is inseparable from its economic rise. In 1960, South Korea’s GDP per capita was lower than Ghana’s. Today it rivals France and Britain. The driving engine of that transformation was human capital: a society that collectively decided education was the path to prosperity and invested accordingly.

The results speak for themselves. Korean students consistently rank among the world’s highest performers in mathematics and science. Korea boasts one of the highest rates of tertiary education in the OECD. Its universities produce world-class engineers, doctors, and scientists who staff the R&D labs of Samsung, Hyundai, and LG.

The Trap It Created

But the same system that built modern Korea is now generating serious social pathologies. The private tutoring industry — hagwons — consumes an estimated 26 trillion won annually, creating a two-tier system where educational outcomes correlate closely with family income. Young Koreans are delaying marriage and parenthood because they cannot afford to give children the educational investment they believe is necessary. The birth rate is collapsing.

Moreover, the system’s obsessive focus on measurable academic performance comes at the cost of creativity, entrepreneurship, and psychological wellbeing. Korean adolescents report among the lowest levels of happiness in the OECD. Youth suicide rates are a national emergency.

A Path Forward

The solution is not to abandon educational ambition — that ambition is a genuine national asset. It is to redirect it. Korea needs an education system that rewards curiosity alongside compliance, values technical vocational paths alongside university degrees, and measures success in human flourishing rather than just test scores.

Some promising reform efforts are underway. But true change requires a cultural shift that no government policy alone can engineer. It begins with parents, and with a collective willingness to ask whether the race they are running is worth the cost of the race itself.

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