Why Education is Destroying East Asia

Every year on the 2nd Thursday of November, South Korea shuts down the country for an exam. 140 flights are grounded. Construction sites are ordered to stop working. And thousands of police officers are deployed to the streets to combat the mass hysteria. Inside schools across the country, thousands of teenagers are sitting an exam which will quite literally determine the outcomes of their lives. It decides what university they go to, and therefore what job they can get, their status in society, and who they can marry. It all comes down to this one moment.

South Korea is one of the most educated societies in the world. And yet, it's this education that is starting to tear the country apart. This is a nation where cram schools run every day until midnight. Math tutors get paid more than star footballers, but most importantly, it's one where society is running out of young people. South Korea has one of the lowest birth rates on the planet. And in 2024, each woman had just 0.72 children.

But this phenomenon isn't unique to South Korea. Taiwan, China, Japan, many countries across Asia consistently rank as some of the highest educationally performing countries in the world and all ones with some of the lowest birth rates on the planet. For a time, education was seen as a kind of magic bullet, a surefire way to lift your country out of poverty. But what about when it goes a step too far? What about if there comes a point where education can start doing more harm than good? This video isn't just about East Asia. They are just the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the Western world. This is how education is destroying East Asia and what can be done to fix it.

To understand how these countries became so consumed by education, you need to go back to 1977 in the central leadership compound in Beijing. Chairman Mao had just died and his successor, Deng Xiaoping, was faced with a difficult situation, needing to massively modernize and improve the lives of over a billion people who had just gone through a series of detrimental economic policies both under the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. So that year, Deng decided to bring back the Gao. This was China's National University entrance exam, but it had been banned for 11 years under MAL. The exam was a one-shot standardized test which would determine your entire future. And in that year alone, around 5.7 million candidates from 16 to all the way to as old as 40 sat down to be in with a chance of altering their future. Only 5.4% of candidates passed. But those students of the 1977 cohort have gone on to become pillars of China's economy across politics, technology, science. Pretty much every field worth being in. Even their former premier was a student of this exam.

This specific exam is a modern invention. But the roots of the idea are buried much deeper in the country's history. Back in 605 AD, the Shu dynasty created the KU, an exam system that, at least in theory, let any man in the empire test his way into the imperial bureaucracy regardless of his birth status. This set a precedent which has continued in one form or another ever since. And layer onto this strong values shaped by Confucian principles with a high emphasis placed on education as the primary vehicle for social mobility, family honor, and success. And you can see where this goes. In fact, Chinese poets nearly a thousand years ago writing texts like this which contained lines saying, "All pursuits are lowly, only studying is noble. A peasant at dawn, a guest at the throne by night." So for well over two centuries, people have been told a version of reality where studying is the only path to provide success and dignity for your family.

At the time in 1977, reintroducing this exam looked like anything but an issue. And China repeated it the next year and the year after that. And this model was later copied by South Korea with the Seesat and Japan with the National Center Test for University Admissions. At its core, the basic idea worked, forcing everyone regardless of background to compete in the same test and therefore only selecting the brightest and best to occupy your highest positions. It was meritocracy on a scale which had never been done before. And realizing the importance that these exams could have on their children's lives, more and more focus began to shift on performing well in these tests. Across many Asian nations, spending on education since the 1970s has more than doubled, and whole sectors in many economies have popped up around these tests and exams.

Now, education in itself clearly isn't a bad thing. In fact, it's quite the opposite. If you were to plot years of schooling against GDP on a graph, you can see that the correlation is overwhelming and more education has meant richer, healthier, and more mobile societies. East Asia is also living proof of this. In a single generation, it turned war flattened farming economies into some of the wealthiest on Earth. However, there does reach a point where it can start to do more bad than good.

This is the chills co which in English roughly translates to the 7-year-old exam. It's a hyperco competitive test taken by six to sevenyear-olds in order to gain access to a hug one Korea's infamous elite cramm. So to be clear, this is an exam to gain entry to a study school which will then help you to study more in order to pass another exam. However, if you're only starting to consider your child's educational future at the age of six, then you may have already left it too late. Instead, Korea's most caring parents have already started preparing them for the country's cut-throat education system, hence leading to the emergence of the even earlier 4-year-old exam for parents who really want the best for their children. Nearly 50% of South Korean children under the age of six are now enrolled into these private cramm schools with one in four toddlers under the age of two already attending a hug one. And this is something which not only makes parents stress, it also makes the life of a child or teenager completely miserable.

However, with all of this, it's also led to the emergence of a new career. In 2022, job posts for a new kind of profession started to pop up around wealthier areas of soul. Mothers and fathers were looking for people to sit next to their children whilst they studied well into the night to make sure they didn't fall asleep, paying as much as $2.50 an hour. In fact, in some of Soul's most prestigious neighborhoods like Southern Gangnam, a few blocks can contain over 950 hugwans. And real estate prices in this small area run at 300% of comparable areas in the city. Parents in effect are paying specifically to live near these tutors. And the buildings themselves are something from a sci-fi film. Small soulless facilities with room after room divided by thin walls lit by long fluorescent bulbs, even fitted with dedicated screen pods where students frustrated after spending 13 hours a day studying can go and let off steam by yelling into the abyss.

Now, you might be wondering why any rational and normal parent would want to put their kid through this. However, the weird thing about this is that this is the rational move. Because university admission is positional, your kid isn't graded against a standard. They're graded against every other kid. And any spending by one family forces spending by all the others just to stay in place. Sure, every parent individually would be better off if everyone else stopped. for any individual parent who stops sacrifices their own child. So the rational move for each individual family produces a ruinous outcome for everyone else. This is what economists call an arms race. And it's a force so powerful that it's become nearly impossible to stop.

Back in the 1980s, South Korea's leader was a guy named Chundu Jan. And he was pretty much a dictator. So not exactly someone who's short on power. And back then he could see the damage already that these hagwans were starting to cause. So he decided to outright ban private tutoring. However, even the will of a dictator wasn't enough to stop it. Instead of disappearing, it simply went underground. Tutors disguised as housekeepers. Lessons went on in cars and parents risked criminal penalties all to make their kids continue studying.

Now, these hug ones are filled with enough material for an entire separate video. But the main takeaway here is that they not only make having children depressing, they have also made it extremely expensive. The UAE Population Research Institute calculates that Korea ranks the highest in the world for the cost of raising a child. The number is roughly $275,000 to the age of 18, or roughly 7.8 times the country's GDP per capita. In the US, by comparison, it's 4.1 times. And about a third of that Korean cost goes to a single industry of hugwans.

But this cost alone doesn't explain a birth rate of 72. Plenty of countries are expensive places to raise their children. What makes Korea and many other places in Asia different is what kind of cost this is. It's an arms race. A child is more like a campaign than a cost item on a spreadsheet. And in a place like Korea, a campaign can't be halfass. If you want your kid to succeed, it becomes all or nothing. And the maths gives a brutally clear answer. One child done properly beats two done cheaply. This maps in the data.

Also, Korea's birth rate isn't collapsing because Koreans have stopped becoming parents, but because almost nobody goes back for a second child. By the end of the century, South Korea's population is projected to have more than halfd, collapsing from around 52 million today to just 22 million by 2100. And their population pyramid would end up looking something like this. Massively topheavy, dominated by people in their 60s and 70s, making life for the dwindling number of young people left to support them a bit of a nightmare.

Okay, so remember that exam that we mentioned earlier, the Galcow. This was the standardized test introduced by Den Xiaoing which in theory opened the door to anyone in the country to have the opportunity to better their life. It was perhaps the ultimate expression of meritocracy. However, there is just one issue with this. The system which has developed from it has pretty much eroded its original main advantage, improving social mobility. And the answer is to do with two self-reinforcing loops running at the same time which make the system get worse and worse with each passing year.

The first is that rather than leveling the playing field, the existing system only serves to further reinforce its inequalities. One study found that among South Korea's richest students, 36% make it into the top universities, whilst amongst the poorest, that figure is just 9%. And Korea, much like in China, Japan, or even Taiwan, the university that you go to really matters. This is the college scholastic ability test, also known as the Senong. And it's a brutal 10-hour long South Korean exam, which effectively goes on to determine the rest of your life. And if you're serious about you or your child making it in Korea, then you'll want them to go to one of these three universities. Collectively, they're known as the sky, and they basically serve as the gateway into the country's political and corporate elite. Despite only around 2% of South Korean students ever getting into these universities, that 2% goes on to fill nearly half of the country's top CEO positions, nearly half of its senior government roles, and the vast majority of its senior judiciary.

Because the stakes are so high, rich families can pay for people like this, Hyan Wu Jinn. He's a Stanford trained math tutor who graduated from this elite school in just 3 years. However, what really makes him special is that in 20124 he was reported to earn around $15 million a year, making him richer than most of the country's top athletes. And it's all because he is considered the best in the country at prepping kids for this specific exam. Inside that exam, the most consequential questions are the ones called killers. These are deliberately designed to fall outside the public school curriculum and they exist to separate the top 1% from everyone else. They are notoriously tough to predict. So people borrow Han Wu Jin's judgment and access to some of his programs is seen as the best way to prepare your child for the test. However, what this all means is that over 3/4 of students at Sky Law Schools come from highincome families. In fact, the country's top income households spend nearly seven times more on private tutoring than the poorest. As one researcher put it, elite universities function less like a ladder and more like a glass floor, protecting the already privileged rather than lifting anyone up. And this happens across the continent. In China, urban students are five times more likely to be admitted to top tier universities than rural students.

Okay, so let's say for the sake of it that your child managed after battling the system and studying pretty much non-stop since they were three to get into one of these schools. Now, in theory, they should be set, right? Well, not quite. And this is where the second cycle comes into play, and it's potentially even more damaging than the first.

In China, the phrase nuang has become one of the most popular across the nation. The two words together simply translate to involution. And yet their meaning has come to define the feelings of China's youth. The realization that everyone is working harder for the same fixed reward. Back in 2022, a young creator from Eastern China posted a vlog showing her normal day. And her routine went like this. After waking up around noon, she stays in bed doom scrolling on her phone until 3:00 p.m. She then slowly migrates from bed to sofa. not bothered to go outside. She orders delivery for all three meals. She works remotely for an e-commerce company. So technically, she's not unemployed at all. Instead, she just plays life on ultra low power saving mode. She basically avoids all unnecessary communication with co-workers and anyone else for that matter. When work is done, she crawls back under the covers by 8:00 p.m. and spends the rest of the night napping, scrolling, and then the cycle repeats again. Remember, this person isn't unemployed either, but they have pretty much given up on life. And believe it or not, this is actually a product of education or at least overeducation of a society.

Back in 2010, Peter Turchin caused a stir by suggesting that societies collapse for a surprisingly consistent reason. They train more elites than they have room for. And he calls this particular effect elite overproduction. The idea itself is simple. Every society only has so many genuinely elite positions. And when the number of people qualified for those positions grows faster than the positions themselves, it's not that more and more people become elites. Instead, you get a growing pool of capable, qualified people with just nowhere to put them. And China, as well as other Asian nations, have built that surplus at a scale the world has never seen.

In 2026, a record 12.7 million students graduated from Chinese universities, 500,000 more than the year before, which was also a record. The issue is that there's simply nowhere to put them. So, statistics coming from China should always be taken with a little pinch of salt, but this one around youth employment is particularly interesting. A few years ago, youth unemployment for 16 to 24 year olds was hovering at around 20 to 21%. But then in August 2023, they just stopped publishing the youth unemployment figures altogether. The interesting thing here is that on the whole, China's unemployment rate isn't really an issue. Unemployment for 25 to 29 year olds sits at around 7.2%. And for 30 to 60 year olds, it's just 4.1%. Which tells you what you need to know about the wider economy. It isn't broken at all. The problem is a bottleneck exactly where graduates are.

So, where do all of these people actually go? Education is now so deeply rooted in Chinese and East Asian Confucian morals that people aren't simply going to stop going to university, even if they know deep down it can't really provide for them. Instead, they just do whatever they can. More than a fifth of delivery drivers working on Maidan and Elie. Me, China's two largest platforms, now hold a university degree, and at least 70,000 of these delivery drivers have a masters. However, a lot of people are now simply not working at all.

If we go back to this word here, this was just the first in the chain. In 2021, the new word was tanging to lie flat. Then in 2022, it changed again to ban, let it rot. This is the darker sequence which is developing from diagnosis to opting out to now nihilism. But of all the phrases China's youth reached for, the one that cuts deepest wasn't new at all. It was over a hundred years old. In 2023, thousands of young graduates across the country started developing a more unique cultural icon. Kong Yi Ji, a character from a 1919 short story by Lu Shung. Kong is a failed scholar. He studied the classics, sat the imperial exams, but never passed. But he spent so long as a man of academia that it became his identity, and he couldn't bring himself to do manual work. It would be beneath him. So, he keeps wearing his scholars gown. the mark of an educated man. Even as he slides further and further into poverty, too learned to labor, too poor to be a scholar, he dies destitute in the gown. And more than a century later, millions of Chinese graduates looked at their own degrees and saw the same garment, educated for jobs that don't exist and too invested to take the ones that do.

Remember the poem from the start of this video, the one written nearly a thousand years ago. All pursuits are lonely. Only studying is noble. For a thousand years, that was the promise. Study and you rise. Study and you earn dignity. It is built the exams, the hagwans, the whole machine. Gongi is what happens when the promise breaks. But the belief doesn't. Millions more Chinese students have and will keep going to university even if it serves them no benefit. Simply as to keep their families proud. They would rather starve as a scholar than eat as anything else.

The interesting thing about Turin's work on elite overp production back in 2010 is that he wasn't writing about China at all. Sure, it checks out, but his analysis was meant for America and the 2020s that lay ahead. And this pattern pops up everywhere in the West. In places like the UK, the number of people graduating and getting undergraduate degrees has skyrocketed. Not necessarily because the economy needs more people with degrees, but because people have been fed this lie that all that stands between them and a successful life is a bachelor's degree. And it's the reason that protests are happening in India right now. At its core, it's really just basic economics of supply and demand. The demand for graduates has more or less stayed the same. whilst the supply has exploded, which pushes the price or the premium of your graduate degree further down and down and down, which is exactly the machine you've just watched running in East Asia. The same growing pile of qualified people with nowhere to go.

For years, Asia's obsession with education has been linked to stereotypes. And it's been easy to tell ourselves in the West a comforting story that this was something just culturally different about Asia, something specific about Confucian philosophy or even tiger parenting. However, this is not a Korean problem or even a Chinese problem. It's really just supply and demand and a cautionary tale running just a few years ahead of the West.

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