James Marshall Crotty, Contributor
I cover education as a sector and as the bedrock of all sectors.
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8/11/2013 @ 2:00PM |14,016 views
South Korean Tutor Makes $4 Million A Year. Can You?
Flag of South Korea (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This $17 billion after-school learning market has helped turn South Korea — a majority of whose citizens were illiterate sixty years ago — into the second top-performing country in the PISA global test of academic excellence (far outstripping the U.S.). Moreover, notes Ripley, South Korea’s 93% high-school graduation rate dramatically outpaces that of the U.S. (a lowly 77%).
Kim Ki-Hoon is a contributor to, and beneficiary of, South Korea’s high-tech, free-market approach to education. As “Mr. Kim” himself notes, “The harder I work, the more I make.” Indeed, as I noted a year ago in “The Coming Age of the Teaching Megastar,” a popular educator like Udacity’s Sebastian Thrun can earn far more as a private virtual instructor to millions than he ever could as a tenured Stanford professor to dozens.
However, what Kim Ki-Hoon uniquely proves is that the same tech forces — including the disaggregation of content creation from traditional modes of content distribution – that enabled Thrun-like collegiate stardom is now theoretically possible on the secondary level.
However, U.S. secondary education – though a form of content delivery, as my piece on safe social learning makes clear – has often been an outlier in this broader ed tech revolution. Strict government regulation and omnipresent state involvement in the education marketplace — combined with powerful unions preventing any one teacher from garnering a far bigger slice of the profit pie, let alone profitably branching out on his or her own — has insured that wage increases remain relatively constant and predictable. Moreover, a general lack of transparency on teacher performance ratings and on test results of students under a specific teacher’s care has precluded objective measurements of teaching talent – a kind of Sabermetrics of pedagogy — that could be used by parents and schools in making efficient and empirical teacher evaluations.
But, as Ripley intimates, that could change. The first U.S.-based tutoring rock star was Salman Khan of the Khan Academy. However, Khan Academy operates as a non-profit. And there is no equivalent American tutoring peer with Khan’s reach and status.
However, what Mr. Kim uniquely provides – and is the key to his 30-person-strong publishing, tutoring, and lecturing empire – is a direct relationship to individual students. Imagine Rafe Esquith, or even Khan himself, grading a student’s physics homework, or personally phoning home to check up on a student’s progress two or three times a month? The combination of mass appeal with individualized feedback is what propels Mr. Kim’s outsized net worth.
All that is needed in the U.S. is a genuine free marketplace where such tutoring superstars can flourish. Mr. Kim, for instance, works for a publicly traded online hagwon called Megastudy . Hagwons, in this sense, are like professional sports teams, constantly on the prowl for top tutoring talent. The more highly-regarded the tutor – whose reputation is linked to how his or her students perform on standardized tests and whether they are accepted into top colleges — the more the hagwon can charge. Moreover, since students sign up for specific tutors, the better a tutor’s reputation, the more money that tutor makes.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt that South Korean parents are willing to pay the extra Won to insure that their charges have access to South Korea’s best and brightest tutoring talent. According to Edutech Associates, South Korean “parents with school-age children spend close to 25% of their income on education and all parents spend a large portion of their income on supplementary educational materials.” That means big business for hagwons, South Korea’s primary supplemental education providers.
It is a true meritocracy, where the best and the brightest – or at least the most popular and passionately engaged — end up being paid the most. Moreover, to maintain high standards of accountability and performance, a representative hagwon fires about 10% of its tutors every year. In the U.S., about 2% of public school teachers are fired for poor performance every year.
The downside is that hagwon tutors receive no benefits and no guaranteed salary. The result is that for every Mr. Kim, there is thousands of hagwon tutors who make far less than their traditional brick-and-mortar peers do. It is a zero-sum system that would be written off as patently ruthless if it wasn’t so spectacularly popular.
Notes Ripley, a 2010 survey of 6600 students at 116 South Korean high schools found that South Korean students gave their hagwon tutors far higher marks than their regular schoolteachers, and regularly regarded their hagwon tutors as “better prepared, more devoted to teaching, and more respectful of students’ opinions.” In addition, hagwon tutors are far more likely to experiment with new technology and nontraditional pedagogies, mainly because their pay hinges on the positive reviews that flow from improved student achievement.
Is it all too good to be true? Moreover, is the hagwon model – and corresponding rock-star educator that the best hagwons fight to hire – a uniquely South Korean phenomenon? Or could this healthy level of pedagogical competition happen here in the USA?
Let me know what you think in the Comments area below.
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Just a few facts. The ROK graduates students from HS with a 0% average. There is no “holding back.” You graduate with what you earn – 5 Fs can get you through. For universities this changed in the early 2000s when it was discovered that a diploma was given to a student at Seoul national University (the ROK’s most prestigious) without ever having attended classes. He simply registered, paid, and received a 0.0 GPA – but in all the classes he needed, so he “graduated.” Calling Korea a meritocracy split my gut! There is an elite class – who attend Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, etc.. – who own the country. The best and brightest do NOT go places – unless they are of the right family. The tests are designed so that only those who had the advantage of private tutors excel – that would be the rich. The suicide rate amongst students is out of control. The classrooms are 45-55 to a room and so those who bribe the teachers the most on teachers day get the best support. You woul dbe stunned to find out how many kids are sick on PISA test day….yeah. You’d also be stunned as to the level of corruption involved in administration of the test, so yeah, their tests scores are higher, but I wouldn’t bet a paycheck that the kids necessarily achieved those scores! Finally, are you aware that Korea has the greatest number of middle and secondary school students on visa in the UNITED STATES? Yep, they are all the kids of elite families. Why, if the ROk system is so good? Well, because it ain’t and they don’t want their kids to turn into numbed-brain memorizing robots who can’t think their way out of a Cracker Jack riddle! It is also why most of the “best and brightest” in Korea actually dream of an American University – where they think and debate and actually do hands on work – not simply coming in and copying what’s on the chalkboard for memorization! The ROK system is NOT worthy of emulation. If you hve questions, send ‘em. I am a licensed teacher in Illinois – K-12 – have lived in Korea 18 years – on and off – since 1984. I can assure you my daughter wikl be getting on an airplane for high school! Kevin in Seoul, Korea
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- AuthorInteresting observations. And I have no doubt that what you say about the endemic academic corruption, crowded classrooms, and suicide rates are anecdotally true. But, my main point was about a free market approach to tutoring. And how tutors in the U.S. could make more money, and students could do better, if there was a culture supporting such an approach. In that regard, South Korea has the right idea. But, of course, they have a culture to back it up.
Finally, if South Korean students are so bad, why do they consistently outperform our country and most other countries on PISA exams? I would like to see some empirical proof on any of your alternative causalities.
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James – maybe you missed my note above. The students who TAKE PISA exams are not the slackers! Let me give you an example. I have two nephews who were good athletes in middle school – one in soccer and one in judo. From middle school on, their education everyday ended at noon and they went and did sport until 6 p.m.. In the entirety of their middle school and high school years (both received sport-ending injuries as high school upperclassmen) they never took ANY standardized tests – they were excused. The one boy never earned anything higher than 50% in any class, but he is a high school “graduate.” You can imagine how hard he has had to work in this society to make a decent living.
The tutoring system is ABSOLUTELY the way to go if the sole goal is to developed standardized test takers. In that case, tutor away – and you will have folks with great memories as well. But in terms of critical and creative thinking, the skills that take the math and science and actually apply it, the system is SERIOUSLY lacking. You should note that there are a couple tertiary institutions that are now starting to be recognized for original research – they follow the American classroom model.
If we REALLYw ant to address American education, we better quickly get to the family in America. I graduated from 8th grade in 1973 with 70 other students. ONE – exactly one – had a single parent home. My sister teaches in Kalamazoo MI – she has 65% single parent homes. My niece and nephew teach in ritzy Orland Park, IL. They have 40% single parent homes. I’ll offered I did well in school because everything taught in the classroom was reviewed and reinforced in home – plus we received other broadening education in home. That ended 30 years ago in America and we are wondering why teachers can’t make up the slack for dysfunctional homes! What an impossible mission! And one that tutoring certainly won’t solve.
I enjoyed your article because it is provocative and forces folks to look at what education is and should be – so thank you for that. That said, America needs to re-embrace a system that is solid, support its teachers (rather than cutting pay such as in Wisconsin and Michigan! how bizarre!), and develop models that can compensate for the current social conditions. In that regard, your article may get to an option – after school tutoring in core “success subjects” that replaces the playing of child care or “teen time.”
Thanks for yoru work.
Kevin
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- AuthorWell put, Kevin, though I would like to see empirical, not just anecdotal, evidence that South Korea systematically excludes under-performing students from PISA exams. This claim has been made about China. But, so far, these are just allegations. We need more evidence. If you can provide me with that proof, it would make an incredible story. So, please, please keep me posted.
As for your other major claim — culture matters — we are in total agreement. See my article on the Economist Report that Culture Matters More Than Income in Educational Outcomes. If there is not a culture of education in the home — whether a one or two-parent home — the student will suffer. There also needs to be a culture that supports learning over sports, rap, and other non-academic sports in at-risk communities. This is a no-brainer. But, foundations, so-called educational experts, edtech folks all want to focus on improving teachers or technology. They fail to address the real culprit: culture.
As I note in my piece on a Broken Windows Approach to Education Reform, there are effective ways to instill a rigorous culture of education. It starts with a tough love approach to students and their families, not with blaming teachers, whom, I agree, need to be paid far more.
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Just puzzling over the meaning of an expression you used, James: “anecdotally true”. Surely it cannot mean both “anecdotal” and “true”?
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- AuthorThere is a sense of “truth” that folks subjectively have. For examples, I and twenty of my fellow teaching compadres may feel the same way about X. Therefore, ipso facto, all teachers must feel the same way. You, thus, have anecdotal experience or reports masquerading as “truth.” Now, the great David Hume, showed us that even our expectation that the sun will come up tomorrow — with apologies to the musical Annie — is based on faulty understanding of cause and effect. According to Hume, because our anecdotal experience has taught us throughout our lives that the sun will come up tomorrow, does not, ipso facto, mean that the sun is, in fact, guaranteed to come up tomorrow. He wasn’t coming at this question from the standpoint of science — some cataclysmic event that prevents the sun from coming up — but from the standpoint of basic logic. No study or report is perfect. All have fundamental flaws. But I trust in reports with a large sample of carefully asked and weighted questions more than I do anecdotal impressions.
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I understand that Korean education seem to have some merits on the surface. However, I am not sure if I can agree that it is a good system. In fact, I remember watching a Korean version of TED talk regarding this very issue by Lee, Bum. Ironically, he was a star tutor like Kim, Ki-Hoon before he went into reforming Korean public education. If I remember correctly, he did more than 1 talk, and one of them was about the inefficiency of Korean education system reflecting on the time spent on studying and its result. He also criticizes(as I interpreted) the way Korean education system puts too much emphasis on the ranking. For example, you would know where you stand in a national ranking when you received your report card. Imagine 10 students all getting straight As That’s not good enough in Korea. Out of those 10, there is the 1st and the 10th. Education then becomes something other than learning (a student withholding information and study materials from friends to stay competitive and remain or become 1st in class, for example).
Also tutors making more money is only one side of the story. The hagwon fees are almost mandatory for every family with students. It is a huge burden for most families that are just barely getting by (and there are many). Also this approach creates a clear divide between the wealthy families who can afford the best of the best and the rest as I am sure you already know (Gangnam).
The advancement of technology can make best education available to all, but the hagwon fees and current income inequality doesn’t seem to allow that.
It’s not all bad, but I think current Korean education system has many serious flaws that need to be looked at before it is praised.
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- AuthorGood response. Actually, the star Hagwon tutors completely agree with you. They think the problem is inherent to the South Korean education system itself. That said, I think there is salutory merit in after-school tutoring. And I think we could benefit over here from a more market-driven approach to tutoring. Naturally, as with any capitalist enterprise, there are inevitable discrepancies that make access difficult for low-income participants. That can be partly ameliorated through non-profit support of after-school tutoring for low-income students. Perhaps a good mandate for the Buffett Foundation and others.
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Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the problem is with after-school tutoring. I think tutoring should primarily focus on those who need to catch up, under-achieving if you would call it. However, I have strong doubts that this type of market-driven approach will address the said issues. Instead I think it is more likely that Hagwon system will worsen the education gap between the high-income and low-income families.
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