Total Private Education Expenses Reach 39.1945 Trillion Won Last Year
Gap by Income Level Widens Even Further
Comedian Lee Su-ji's parody of Daechi-dong moms, released through her YouTube channel 'HotIssueJi,' has been a hot topic for days, while a recent survey revealed that the total private education expenses in 2024 have reached an all-time high.
On the 5th, the civic group 'Anti-Corruption Special Investigation Committee on Private Education Cartel' (Anti-Corruption Committee), the Educational Data Analysis Society, and Sungkyunkwan University Next 365 analyzed raw data from the Statistics Korea Household Trends Survey. According to their findings, last year's total private education expenses for kindergarten, elementary, middle, and high school students amounted to 39.1945 trillion won. The total private education expenses decreased from 30.5 trillion won in 2019 to 24.6 trillion won during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, then steadily increased to 30 trillion won in 2021, 35.5 trillion won in 2022, and 37.8 trillion won in 2023. The 39.2 trillion won recorded last year represents an increase of about 1.4 trillion won compared to the previous year.
Statistics Korea annually surveys about 10,000 households, targeting preschoolers, elementary to high school students, university students, and the general public to investigate household trends in public and private education expenses. Based on this data, the research team analyzed the total private education expenses by excluding adult academy fees from the annual household education expenses spent on academies and tutoring for students.
The results excluding preschoolers and university students show a similar pattern. When narrowing the scope to elementary, middle, and high school students, the total private education expenses predicted using artificial intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT amounted to 27.8123 trillion won, also an all-time high. The total private education expenses for elementary, middle, and high school students have increased from 19.04 trillion won in 2020 to 23.4 trillion won in 2021, 26 trillion won in 2022, and 27.1 trillion won in 2023, continuously setting new records each year since 2020.
Despite the steady decline in the school-age population due to low birth rates, private education expenses are skyrocketing. The fact that private education expenses have increased even as the school-age population has decreased indicates that per capita education spending has grown. Although the number of children per household has decreased, this has led to a stronger tendency to 'go all-in' on a single child. Additionally, the preference for metropolitan area universities not only among medical school aspirants but also among middle-tier students, combined with the increase in repeat test-takers (N-su students), is believed to have influenced this trend.
Income Decile 10 Spends 134 Times More Than Income Decile 1
The gap in private education expenses by income has further widened. In 2024, the average monthly private education expense for households in the 1st income decile (bottom 10%) was 3,042 won, whereas households in the 10th income decile (top 10%) spent 406,986 won, which is 134 times that of the 1st decile. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, private education expenses for households in the 1st income decile decreased from 8,281 won in 2021 to 3,042 won in 2024, while those for households in the 10th income decile increased from 364,937 won to 406,986 won during the same period, indicating that the educational spending gap between social classes has deepened further.
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