The Cram School (Hagwon) System: What It Is and Why It Won't Stop

More Children Are Leaving — and More Money Is Flowing In

Between 2020 and 2023, South Korea's school-age population shrank by 14.5 percent. By 2024 it had fallen to 5.02 million students, and projections place it at 3.83 million by 2031. In the same period between 2020 and 2023, total private education spending increased by 40 percent. In 2024, it reached a record 29.2 trillion won — approximately 20 billion dollars — its highest level ever recorded, growing 7.7 percent year-on-year despite an ongoing decline in student enrollment. The participation rate in private education rose to 80 percent of all school-age students. The per-student monthly average, which was 302,000 won in 2020, had reached 434,000 won by 2023 — a 43.7 percent increase. Among parents who actively use private education services, the average monthly spend surveyed in 2024 was 1.06 million won.

These numbers describe a market that is not governed by ordinary supply and demand logic. When the pool of potential customers shrinks by 14 percent but the money flowing into the market grows by 40 percent, something else is driving the behavior. Understanding what that something is requires understanding the hagwon system not as an education industry but as an anxiety management infrastructure — a set of institutions that exist primarily to respond to a specific fear, and that have become structurally indispensable precisely because the fear they respond to is rational.

A brightly lit Korean commercial building at night with rows of hagwon signboards glowing in yellow and white light along its exterior facade

Daechi-dong in Gangnam has a higher concentration of hagwon per block than almost any neighborhood on earth. The lights stay on until 10 p.m. by law — and sometimes past it.

What a Hagwon Actually Is

Hagwon — the word means, roughly, "school of learning" — are for-profit private educational institutions that operate outside the public school system. They are not tutors working with individual students; they are organized businesses with classrooms, teachers, marketing departments, and in many cases multiple branch locations. As of 2020, South Korea had 73,865 registered hagwon. They teach virtually any subject a student or parent might require: math, English, Korean language, science, coding, art, music, and — from an age that increasingly surprises outside observers — test preparation for university entrance. The majority of their students are school-age children attending them after the regular school day ends, in the hours between roughly 4 p.m. and 10 p.m., the curfew hour after which operation is prohibited by law.

A high school student in Seoul attending four hagwon — Korean, English, math, and science — on weekday evenings plus weekend sessions is not unusual. Among the first-year high school students who describe their own schedules, this is the expected configuration, not the exceptional one. Students in that position spend roughly seven additional hours per week in structured private education on top of their regular school curriculum, arriving home late in the evening, eating dinner, and beginning homework that keeps them up past midnight. The Korean concept of the student's "second school day" — the hagwon schedule that begins when the public school day ends — is not a metaphor. It is the literal daily structure of a significant portion of Korean adolescence.

The age at which this begins has been declining. Eighty-three percent of five-year-olds attend at least one hagwon, according to a 2017 report. A 2025 study found that nearly half of children under six — and a quarter of those under two — were already attending some form of private educational institution. In certain neighborhoods of Seoul, four-year-olds sit entrance examinations for English-language preschools. In others, parents enroll elementary-school students in medical school preparation tracks. South Korea's National Human Rights Commission has described subjecting preschoolers to high-stakes testing as a violation of their rights. The statement has not measurably changed the behavior it addressed.

What Happens Inside

A Korean student sitting alone at a desk in a small well-lit study room late in the evening with textbooks open in warm desk lamp light

A high school student attending four hagwon per week — Korean, English, math, science — is unremarkable. It is the expected configuration.

The hagwon's business model is organized around a simple and coherent premise: the public school system teaches the curriculum, and the hagwon teaches how to perform on the tests that determine outcomes. The distinction matters. Korean public schools are designed to cover knowledge broadly and provide a general education. The suneung — the College Scholastic Ability Test, Korea's national university entrance examination, administered once per year on a single day in November — tests something more specific: the ability to perform at maximum capacity under extreme time pressure on questions designed to be difficult. Preparing for this test is a specialized skill that the public school curriculum does not particularly develop, and the hagwon exists to fill that gap.

The best hagwon hire and retain teachers who have demonstrated an ability to improve student scores, who develop proprietary methods for approaching specific question types, and who build reputations that function as competitive advantages. The most successful hagwon teachers in Korea are known figures — celebrities within the education industry — who command high fees and whose association with a hagwon is a marketing asset. When the curriculum changes, or when the test design shifts, the hagwon's value proposition is precisely that its teachers track the changes, analyze their implications for preparation strategy, and update their methods faster than any public school system can. "When the curriculum changes, my hagwon teachers always analyze what the change means and predict how it will affect the test," one high school student in Daegu described. This adaptive intelligence — the ability to decode and respond to policy shifts in real time — is what parents are paying for, and why the system persists through every regulatory intervention.

The boarding hagwon represents the extreme version of this model. These are residential facilities — typically targeting students retaking the suneung after an unsatisfactory first result — where students live on-site in structured environments with minimal distraction and maximized study time. Elite boarding hagwon now charge 3.5 million won per month or more, meals included. Parents are willing to pay over 4 million won monthly for these environments, according to the CEO of Jongno Hagwon, Korea's oldest institution of this type. The demand for boarding programs has grown as more students opt to retake the suneung multiple times — a practice that has increased as the government expanded medical school quotas, making the prize for a high enough score correspondingly greater. The retaker market — students who graduated from high school and are spending additional months or years in intensive preparation — is now a major revenue driver for premium hagwon, its growth continuing even as the overall student population declines.

The Parent Waiting in the Cafe

A Korean mother sitting alone in a cafe at night with coffee on the table and a phone in hand in warm amber light with a dark street visible through the window

The cafes near Daechi-dong fill every evening with parents waiting for their children's last class to end. Some are there seven days a week.

The most common reason Korean parents give for enrolling their children in hagwon, according to a 2021 survey by the Korean Educational Development Institute, is "to get ahead of others." Not to catch up, not to address a specific weakness, not because the child is struggling — to get ahead. This is the anxiety that the hagwon system runs on. It is not primarily the fear that one's child is falling behind. It is the fear that while one's child is resting, the other children are not — that the relative position that determines university outcomes is shifting every evening in classrooms that do not close until 10 p.m., and that the only rational response to this is to also be in one of those classrooms.

The logic is individually coherent even when collectively destructive. If every student in a cohort attends hagwon, the student who does not is at a disadvantage. If every student in a cohort doubles their hagwon attendance, the student who maintains the previous level is now relatively behind. The competitive dynamic that drives hagwon demand operates on relative position, not absolute attainment — which means that the relevant question is never "will this hagwon improve my child's knowledge?" but "will not attending this hagwon put my child behind the students who are attending?" That question has a clear answer that almost always points in the same direction, regardless of what any individual family's finances or preferences are.

The cafes near Daechi-dong — the neighborhood in Gangnam that has become synonymous with Korea's private education industry, its streets lined with hagwon signboards stacked six and seven stories high on commercial buildings — fill every evening with parents waiting for their children to finish class. Some parents wait seven days a week. They know what the hagwon schedule demands. They are there anyway. One mother, whose doctoral thesis subsequently examined the mental health effects on Korean women of this specific role, described spending years waiting in those cafes while her daughters attended multiple classes per evening, building the record that would qualify them for the universities their parents had determined they needed to attend. She eventually pulled her daughters from the hagwon pipeline and enrolled them in a private boarding school in the United States — a solution she acknowledged was available only because she could afford it, and one that she found uncomfortably similar to opting out of a system she had spent years criticizing from inside.

The structural position of Korean mothers in this system deserves specific attention. Research on Korean parenting culture consistently finds that educational management — the selection of hagwon, the scheduling of classes, the monitoring of performance, the maintenance of relationships with teachers — falls primarily on mothers. Korean fathers are present in the household but are typically positioned at a distance from the day-to-day logistics of their children's education. This division of labor means that the demand Korean workplace culture makes on fathers' time is, in effect, subsidized by the unpaid educational management work done by mothers — work that is intense, socially required, and professionally invisible. The connection between the hagwon system's demands on mothers and the structural conditions that have led Korean women to reconsider marriage and childbearing is direct, as examined in the context of why Korean women are pushing back against marriage. The education pipeline is one of the concrete institutional forms through which the asymmetric costs of family formation in Korea manifest.

What the Government Has Tried

Korean governments have been attempting to reduce dependence on private education for more than four decades. The interventions have taken several forms, none of which has significantly altered the underlying dynamic. In the 1980s, there was an outright ban on private tutoring — a legally ambitious policy that produced exactly the outcome that subsequent research has documented as the consistent result of demand suppression in a market driven by anxiety: the tutoring went underground, became more expensive, and continued. The ban was lifted in 2000 after a Constitutional Court ruling found it violated educational freedom.

The 10 p.m. hagwon curfew — introduced in various forms beginning in 2006 and formalized in 2008 — is the most sustained regulatory intervention. The curfew prohibits hagwon from operating after 10 p.m. in most jurisdictions, with the intent of reducing the total hours students spend in private education and the associated burden on families. Academic research evaluating the curfew's effects found that enforcing it did not generate a significant reduction in the hours and resources spent on private tutoring. High school students, whose demand for private education is particularly inelastic — because the suneung is a fixed deadline with fixed consequences — responded to the curfew by increasing their consumption of alternative forms of private tutoring, specifically the more expensive options: individual tutors, small-group sessions, and online lecture platforms that the curfew did not reach. The curfew's main measurable effect was to increase educational inequality by shifting demand toward alternatives that higher-income families could access and lower-income families could not afford.

In 2023, the government announced a new approach: eliminating "killer questions" from the suneung, the deliberately extreme questions that disproportionately reward intensive preparation. The intent was to reduce the premium on hagwon preparation by making the test more manageable through genuine academic understanding rather than specialized technique. The response of the hagwon industry was characteristic: teachers began analyzing the new parameters, developing strategies for the changed test design, and marketing themselves as the most effective resource for navigating the uncertainty the change had produced. "When the curriculum changes, my hagwon teachers always analyze what the change means and predict how it will affect the test," the Daegu student noted — the same dynamic that makes the system so durable. Policy changes create uncertainty, and uncertainty drives demand for the institutions that promise to resolve it.

Why It Won't Stop

The hagwon system persists because it is a rational response to a real condition, and the real condition is not primarily about education. It is about the structure of Korean society as described in the context of Korean education pressure and the suneung: a society in which where you go to university has documented and durable effects on your career trajectory, income, social network, and marriage prospects, and in which the gate to elite universities is a single high-stakes examination taken on a single day. In that structure, the preparation for the examination is not supplementary to education — it is the primary educational project of a Korean adolescent's life, and the hagwon is the most effective institutional vehicle for that preparation that the market has produced.

Until the relationship between university prestige and life outcomes changes materially — until a degree from a non-SKY university reliably produces comparable career outcomes, until the evaluation systems used by Korean employers shift away from educational credential as a primary selection criterion, until the suneung is replaced by a system that distributes its decisive pressure differently — the demand for hagwon preparation will remain structurally intact. Parents who describe themselves as fully aware of the system's costs, who acknowledge that their children are under unsustainable pressure, who genuinely want to opt out, consistently report that they cannot identify a path to doing so that does not feel like unilateral disarmament in a collective action problem. "I always realize there is just no other alternative in South Korea," one Seoul mother said. She is correct in the terms the system presents. The alternative exists only collectively, and the collective has not yet chosen it.

The low-income dimension makes the system's persistence particularly difficult. The monthly educational expenditure of low-income Korean families with secondary school children — 482,000 won — is almost exactly equal to what they spend on food. These families are not spending this money because they believe it will produce a dramatically different outcome. They are spending it because the cost of not spending it — the cost of falling further behind the families who can spend more — is, in their calculation, higher. The hagwon industry has been described, accurately, as a market that thrives on anxiety. But the anxiety it thrives on is not manufactured. It is the reasonable response of rational people to the actual terms of the competition they are enrolled in.

If you were a parent in this system — knowing what it costs, knowing what the research says about its effects on children's mental health, knowing that the policy interventions have not worked — what would you actually do differently?

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