Hitting new heights in private education costs

South Korea’s pricy spending on private education has hit new heights. According to a joint survey by the Education Ministry and Statistics Korea of 74,000 students of 3,000 elementary, middle, and high schools across the country, education outside schools cost 27.1 trillion won ($20.5 billion) last year, a 4.5 percent increase from 2022 despite the decrease of 1.3 percent in the student count to 5.21 million.

The government campaign to fight the notorious clout of private education derailed from the moment President Yoon Suk Yeol last June ordered education authorities to carve out so-called killer questions from the state-administered College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) as students were not taught such difficult questions at school. Although his instruction was aimed at alleviating the burden of private education, experts worried about greater reliance on private academies after a sudden change in the test guideline just months before the CSAT in November.

A sudden shift in guidelines can aggravate the burden on students and their parents. Last year’s test ended up being the toughest one with efforts to mitigate concerns about a lack of differentiation due to the removal of overly tricky questions. There was only one student who got a perfect score — and the two with the highest standardized scores were test re-takers who studied in a popular cram school in Gangnam, southern Seoul. Students flocked to the school due to its emboldened credentials from last year’s feat.

President Yoon worried that private tuition costs could be a critical social issue for the country in a slow-moving economy coupled with low births and fast aging. Data clearly back the gloomy forecast. Private education spending per student grew 5.8 percent to average 434,000 won a month last year, much faster than the 3.6 percent consumer price growth rate. Spending by families earning a minimum of 8 million won a month averaged 671,000 won, sharply more than 183,000 won for households earning less than 3 million won a month. That shows a widening private education gap between the haves and have-nots.

College entrance is at the heart of Korea’s unconquerable private education dependency. Ensuring predictable difficulty of the CSAT should be the key to education policy. Authorities must be more attentive this year given multiple factors, including the proposed enrollment quota hike for medical schools, which can fuel additional private education spending.

Breaking up the collusive relationship between public and private educators is also imperative, as implied by the sticky cartel cases recently revealed by the Board of Audit and Inspection. Most of all, the education authorities must learn from their last year’s mishap in which a sudden change in CSAT guidelines ended up sending more students to cram schools.