[Diagnosis and Prescription] Korea’s Education Market: Problems, Causes, and Solutions
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Writer
CFE
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Contents
I. Raising the Issue
II. Problems in the Education Market
1. The Deterioration of Public Education
2. Excessive Education Expenditures
3. The Seriousness of School Violence
4. The Failure of English Education
5. Waste of Resources and Inefficiency in Resource Allocation
6. Other Issues
III. Causes of the Problems in the Education Market
1. Egalitarianism
2. Interventionism: Regulation of University Tuition and Enrollment Quotas
3. A Society Focused on Academic Credentials
4. Conclusion
IV. Solutions to the Problems in the Education Market
References
1. Raising the Issue
In the 2017 presidential election, even the abolition of the Ministry of Education was proposed. This can be seen as reflecting the public’s judgment that the Ministry of Education, far from benefiting people, imposes only harm and costs on them. This means that Korea’s education system and education policy have already reached their limits.
The Ministry of Education changes the college admissions system almost every year. It likely does so because it regards the college admissions system as the root of all problems. However, changing only the college admissions system—the method for passing through the university gate—while leaving that gate itself virtually untouched cannot improve educational problems and harms in the slightest. Such an approach merely increases confusion for students and parents preparing for college entrance exams, while imposing on universities the costs associated with implementing a new admissions system. Another reason the college admissions system is changed every year may be to reflect the core values that the administration in power considers important. Such core values may include, for example, giving more low-income students opportunities to enter university. However, there are likely ways to induce the desired outcomes while leaving the admissions system to autonomy—and to do so at far lower cost.
The current admissions system is so complex that it is not something a person of common sense can easily understand. As a result, during admissions season, college admissions briefings held by famous cram schools are packed with parents. In some cases, moreover, students are able to enter universities better than their grades would ordinarily warrant by exploiting loopholes in each university’s admissions system. In other words, the college admissions system has become a lottery—at least in some cases.
Why is Korea’s current school education failing? The fundamental reason for the failure of Korean education is that there is too little “freedom” in it. For example, students do not have the right to choose their schools. Of course, some students can enter autonomous private high schools and the like. But most students still go on to high school through assignment. At the middle school and elementary school levels, there is not even room for such choice. Schools likewise do not have the right to select students.
Economically speaking, Korean education is interventionist. This is because educational costs, including tuition for universities, high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools, are regulated by the government. The most important regulation is the price ceiling imposed on tuition or educational costs. At the elementary and middle school levels, tuition is free, so this amounts to a negative price ceiling. Since high school tuition will soon also become free, it too will become a negative price ceiling. Of course, even now it is a price ceiling, though not a negative one. Through measures such as half-price tuition, university tuition is not only subject to a price ceiling but is also set far below the free-market price.
The general principle of interventionism is this: interventionism first creates many harmful side effects, and the government then introduces new regulations to eliminate them. The new regulations add new harms. As a result, in almost all cases, because the new regulations cannot eliminate all the previous harms, the total amount of harm increases. And interventionism gradually becomes socialism. Korean education since liberation is a representative example.
Korea’s education system is egalitarian. The high school equalization policy is a representative example. Over the past several years, through the introduction of autonomous private high schools and similar measures, the egalitarian elements of the high school equalization policy have been reduced somewhat. However, the influence of egalitarianism in education has not diminished; if anything, it has grown stronger. The implementation of half-price university tuition is good evidence of this. Since egalitarianism is merely another name for socialism, egalitarianism in Korean education is socialism. And the reality is that socialism in Korean education has grown in importance.
In education, nationalism—the educational ideology of the 1960s to 1980s (the eras of the Third Republic and Fifth Republic)—still exerts considerable influence on Korean education and society. Sexual violence and sexual harassment in athletics, violence in medical education, and violence at the elementary, middle, and high school levels persist because nationalism, the educational ideology of the developmental era, is still being handed down. For a detailed explanation of nationalism as the educational ideology of the 1960s to 1980s, see Jeon Yongdeok (2019).
In education, as with many other government policies, there are many actions that are individually optimal but highly wasteful from a system-wide perspective. For example, repeating a year to retake college entrance exams is an optimal choice from the individual’s standpoint, but from the system’s standpoint it is a waste of resources. In fact, most educational activities are like this. Yet not only the Ministry of Education, but also no one with a stake in education seeks to solve problems at the level of the education system as a whole. This is equally true of Ministry of Education bureaucrats. As a result, students excel at preparing for entrance exams, but perform very poorly in terms of the overall outcomes of education, not merely academic grades. And in order to maintain such abilities, students and parents pay enormous sacrifices and costs.
In Korea, the “age of first employment,” the age at which people start their first job, is 27.2, the highest among OECD countries. The labor force participation rate of youth aged 15–24 is 31.4% in Korea, far lower than the OECD average of 51.7%. This is because of repeat test-takers (including those retaking for a third or fourth time), language study abroad, extended periods of university enrollment caused by difficulty finding employment, and those preparing for various state examinations. The concentration of top talent in particular professions such as medicine and law is also more pronounced in Korea than in other countries. According to OECD data, Korea’s “knowledge input index,” an indicator showing resource input for knowledge formation, is 90.2% of the level of advanced countries, but its “knowledge process index,” which indicates the diffusion and utilization of knowledge for knowledge formation, and its “knowledge output index,” which indicates the productive outcomes of knowledge, are only 45.9% and 30.0%, respectively. This shows just how wasteful and inadequate Korean education is at the system level, rather than the individual level.
What is the way to eradicate the ills of Korean education? More proactively, how can the competitiveness of Korean education be strengthened? The answer is to abandon egalitarianism as an educational ideology and adopt libertarianism. Egalitarianism can realize neither freedom nor even equality. Recognizing this point is very important. I also propose abandoning the interventionism deeply rooted in education and adopting capitalism. We must not neglect efforts to eliminate the nationalism deeply rooted in our lives. Unless the direction of Korean education is fundamentally changed, there is no way to eradicate its ills, reduce the waste of resources, or strengthen its competitiveness.
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Wiki:
https://www.cfe.org/w/bbsDetail.php?&idx=28
Original title: [진단과 처방]한국의 교육시장: 문제, 원인 그리고 해법
Author: Yong-deok Jeon
Date: 2019-02-20
Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=report&pn=3&idx=11444