Hagwon

Based on Wikipedia: Hagwon

Imagine being five years old and already behind.

That's the reality for children in South Korea who haven't enrolled in a hagwon—a private, for-profit educational institution that has become so ubiquitous that skipping one feels like academic suicide. By 2022, nearly eight out of ten Korean students between first and twelfth grade attended at least one of these schools, spending an average of seven hours per week cramming subjects their regular schools supposedly already teach.

But hagwons aren't just extra tutoring. They've become the hidden infrastructure of Korean society, shaping everything from real estate prices to birth rates to the national psyche. To understand why South Korea has the lowest fertility rate on Earth, you have to understand hagwons.

The Numbers Are Staggering

South Korea has over seventy thousand hagwons. Let that sink in. That's roughly one hagwon for every seven hundred citizens, creating an educational shadow system that operates alongside—and often in competition with—the public school system.

Most Korean children don't just attend hagwons. They begin attending by age five. A full eighty-three percent of five-year-olds are enrolled in at least one. Some parents, anxious about falling behind in an invisible race that never really ends, enroll their children as young as two.

The subjects vary, but the pecking order is clear. English dominates, followed by mathematics, then Korean language instruction. Science and humanities trail behind. Beyond academics, hagwons exist for music, art, swimming, taekwondo—even flight attendant training for adults. If there's a skill that might provide an edge in life, someone in Korea has built a hagwon around it.

Why This Intensity Exists

To grasp why Korean families pour so much time and money into supplementary education, you need to understand one test: the College Scholastic Ability Test, known as the Suneung.

This single exam, taken in November of senior year, determines which universities students can apply to. And in Korea, university prestige isn't just about bragging rights—it's a sorting mechanism for the rest of your life. The university you attend shapes your job prospects, your marriage prospects, your social standing. The stakes feel existential because, in many ways, they are.

Nearly seventy percent of Korean students pursue higher education, compared to about half in the United States and United Kingdom. This creates brutal competition for spots at elite institutions. In affluent districts like Gangnam and Seocho, over half of test-takers retake the exam a year later because they weren't satisfied with their scores. Not because they failed—because they didn't do well enough.

The pressure is so intense that on test day, the entire country adjusts. Stock markets open late. Planes are grounded during listening portions. Police escort late students to exam sites. The nation collectively holds its breath.

The Economics of Educational Arms Racing

In 2022, Korean families spent twenty-six trillion won—roughly twenty-three billion American dollars—on private education. The average family shells out four hundred ten thousand won per month, about three hundred fifty dollars, per child. This makes South Korea the most expensive country in the world to raise a child.

Think about what that means for family planning. If you're a young Korean couple contemplating children, you're not just budgeting for diapers and school supplies. You're budgeting for fifteen to twenty years of hagwon fees that feel impossible to opt out of, because everyone else is paying them.

The system creates a classic collective action problem. If your child is the only one not attending hagwons, they fall behind. So everyone attends. But when everyone attends, the baseline rises, and you need even more hagwon hours to stand out. The race has no finish line.

A Brief History of Cramming

Hagwons weren't always this dominant. The first proto-hagwon appeared in 1885 when an American missionary named Henry Appenzeller founded the Paichai school as cover for his religious work—preaching other faiths was illegal in Korea at the time. Though his real goal was spreading Christianity, Koreans used the school to learn English, planting seeds for a cultural obsession that would bloom a century later.

Through the nineteen-seventies and eighties, hagwons remained optional, used mainly for remedial studying. Then in 1980, President Chun Doo-hwan—a military dictator who had seized power in a coup—banned private education entirely. The reasoning was egalitarian: wealthy families shouldn't be able to buy advantages that poor families couldn't afford.

The ban didn't last. Through the years, restrictions loosened until courts ruled the prohibition unconstitutional in the nineteen-nineties. What emerged from the ashes was today's hagwon economy: largely deregulated, highly profitable, and practically mandatory.

The Government Fights Back (Sort Of)

Korean authorities have tried repeatedly to tame the hagwon beast. In 2009, Seoul and Busan implemented curfews requiring hagwons to close by ten at night. Parents, teachers, students, and hagwon owners challenged the law as unconstitutional. They lost.

The constitutional court's reasoning was poignant: "Because it's important to secure sleep for high school students to overcome fatigue and for the sake of their growth, it's difficult to say that the ban excessively restricts basic rights."

Sleep. The government had to legally mandate that children be allowed to sleep.

But the curfew barely dented the problem. Hagwons added weekend classes to compensate. Parents hired private tutors for late-night sessions. Some hagwons simply ignored the rules. A 2009 survey found sixty-seven percent of sampled hagwons overcharging for tuition, with forty percent charging more than double their registered rates.

Other interventions have been equally ineffective. Teachers were banned from selling test questions to hagwons after scandals revealed some were leaking exams. Hagwons were required to disclose their fees and issue receipts. The government even started rewarding people who reported violations—turning hagwon regulation into a kind of bounty system.

None of it has fundamentally changed the dynamic.

Daechi-dong: The Mecca of Private Education

If hagwon culture has a spiritual center, it's Daechi-dong, a neighborhood in Seoul's Gangnam District. Here, the concentration of elite hagwons is so dense that real estate prices have risen to three hundred percent of comparable areas elsewhere in Seoul.

The neighborhood's reputation traces back to the nineteen-seventies, when the government relocated several top schools to the area. Over time, attending schools in Daechi-dong became associated with entry into elite high schools, which fed into elite universities, which led to elite careers. The feedback loop cemented the neighborhood's status.

Parents camp outside overnight to register their children for spots at top hagwons. They relocate their entire families to Daechi-dong, paying premium housing costs just to access these institutions. In 2003, the government proposed building a hagwon center in nearby Pangyo to relieve pressure on Gangnam. Critics pointed out this would merely shift the problem rather than solve it. The plan was scrapped within weeks.

The Human Cost

According to a 2015 New York Times report, the average South Korean student works up to thirteen hours a day. That leaves roughly five and a half hours for sleep.

The mental health consequences are devastating. Among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, South Korea has historically had the highest suicide rate. While multiple factors contribute to this grim statistic, experts consistently point to the crushing academic pressure beginning in early childhood.

The stress isn't limited to students. Parents face enormous financial strain and emotional anxiety trying to curate their children's education in an environment where any misstep might doom their futures. Some hagwons explicitly exploit this fear through what's called "anxiety marketing"—using phrases like "If not now, then when?" to panic parents into signing up for more services.

One story captures the culture's extremes. In 2022, a mother so worried about her son's study habits posted an advertisement seeking someone to sit with him at a study cafe and wake him up anytime he fell asleep studying. She didn't want a tutor. She wanted a monitor—someone to ensure her child's consciousness during every possible studying moment.

The Inequality Problem

Hagwons were supposed to level the playing field by giving everyone access to excellent instruction. Instead, they've widened the gap between rich and poor.

The data is clear. Students from high-income districts like Gangnam and Seocho are dramatically overrepresented at elite universities. Matriculation rates at SKY Universities—Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei, the Korean equivalents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—are inversely proportional to household income. Poorer families spend nearly as much on hagwons as they do on food, stretching budgets to the breaking point without achieving the same results as wealthy families who can afford the best instructors and longest hours.

The cultural phenomenon has even spawned its own entertainment genre. The 2018 television drama "SKY Castle" portrayed upper-class families destroying each other through identity fraud, murder, and suicide—all in pursuit of getting their children into top universities. It became one of the highest-rated Korean dramas in cable television history, striking a nerve precisely because it felt true.

The Foreign Teacher Pipeline

Walk into any English-focused hagwon and you'll likely encounter a native English speaker at the whiteboard. This practice dates back to 1883, when the first foreign English teacher, Thomas Hallifax, was hired at a government school. The preference for native speakers has never wavered.

Today, thousands of foreigners—primarily from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—teach at Korean hagwons. The requirements are straightforward: citizenship in one of those countries, a bachelor's degree obtained there, and a clean criminal background check. In return, instructors receive a monthly salary, round-trip airfare, usually a rent-free apartment, and sometimes pension contributions.

The arrangement has created its own subculture of young Westerners living and working in Korea, often fresh out of college, teaching English to children who may be more motivated—or at least more pressured—than any students they've ever encountered.

Can Anything Change?

The Korean government keeps trying. In recent years, it allocated one hundred fifty million won—about one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars—to each of four hundred schools nationwide to improve after-school programs, hoping to reduce hagwon dependency. The Ministry of Education claims this sixty-billion-won project could halve private education costs for middle and lower-income families.

Skeptics abound. The underlying drivers remain unchanged: extreme competition for university spots, a rigid class system tied to educational credentials, and cultural expectations that have calcified over decades. Until those shift, hagwons will remain essential—not because they're effective, but because opting out feels impossible.

The Connection to Fertility

Here's where hagwons intersect with South Korea's demographic crisis. When raising a child means committing to decades of expensive supplementary education that consumes family time and financial resources, having children becomes a much harder decision.

The calculation isn't complicated. If each child costs hundreds of dollars per month in hagwon fees alone, multiplied by fifteen or more years, multiplied by whatever number of children you might want—the math quickly becomes prohibitive. Especially when you also need housing in the right neighborhood, near the right hagwons, at real estate prices inflated by everyone else making the same calculation.

South Korea has become a society where educational investment is so all-consuming that many young people look at the prospect of parenthood and simply opt out. Why have children you can't adequately prepare for a competition you're not even sure they should be running?

The hagwon system didn't create Korea's fertility collapse on its own. But it's impossible to understand why South Korea has the lowest birth rate on Earth without understanding the relentless, expensive, exhausting treadmill that awaits every Korean parent—a treadmill that begins at age two and never really stops.

The children of Korea study until midnight in fluorescent-lit classrooms, preparing for tests that will determine their futures, while their parents work overtime to pay for it all. And increasingly, young Koreans look at this system and decide: maybe it's better not to have children at all.