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Abstract
Widespread use of "shadow education," is a major policy issue in East Asia, especially South Korea, where officials view it as harmful to educational and fiscal equity. Although previous research emphasizes functional explanations, this study takes an institutional approach, exploring how students' desire for prestigious matriculation influences their parents' spending on shadow education. It is around that that "prestige orientation" (1) significantly predicts parent spending, especially among students of lower socioeconomic status, and (2) yields strong impact among students with the least likelihood of prestigious matriculation. Such findings indicate that Korean shadow education serves purposes that are as much symbolic as instrumental.
Keywords
Shadow education, South Korea, East Asian education, educational attainment
The growing expenditure on private tutoring by families of public school aged children has become a major social policy issue in East Asia, and particularly in South Korea. Private tutoring services, often referred to as "shadow education," include a range of formal after-school academic activity, such as individual or group tutoring, instruction from for-profit Hakwon (the so-called "cram schools"), self-study or practice exam sheets, Internet tutoring, and after-class lessons within regular public schools (Bray 1999; LeTendre 1994; Stevenson and Baker 1992; Tsukada 1991). Empirical studies consistently report that a high percentage of families have purchased private tutoring services for their school-aged children and that the number of these families and the amounts they spend are growing from year to year. In 2005, for example, the Korean Institute for Health and Social Affairs estimated that families with two children were spending an average of 22 percent of their income on private tutoring services, with that figure rising as high as 30 percent for students in middle or high school (Bray 2006; Song 2006). In 2009, 87.4 percent of primary school students, 74.3 percent of middle school students, and 62.8 percent of general high school students used some form of private tutoring service, and the average monthly private education expenditures per student was 242,000 won (242 U.S. dollars) (Statistics Korea 2010).
The growth of private tutoring service has been criticized for causing students' low engagement in school, placing a heavy financial burden on families, and contributing to overall educational inequality. The South Korean government has thus sought over the years to implement...