Transcription
South Korea's highest paid math tutor makes $14 million a year, more than Se Hun Min, their most famous soccer player. His name is Hyan Wu Jin. He graduated from Stanford's math department in 3 years and 3 months. His textbook series, Neuron, sells over a million copies a year.
Every November, South Korea pauses for a single 9-hour exam called the Tsunam. The Air Force halts training flights for 35 minutes during the English listening section. No commercial flights can take off or land at Enchen, one of Asia's busiest airports. About 8,000 police officers escort late students on motorcycles with sirens running.
Inside that exam, the most consequential questions are called killer questions. They're deliberately designed to fall outside the public school curriculum. They exist to separate the top 1% from everyone else because that 1% gets into Soul National Korea and Jon the Sky universities as they're called that produce around 30% of Korea's top 1,00 company CEOs.
Parents can't evaluate the curriculum themselves. They can't reverse engineer the killer questions. So they borrow Hyan Wu Jyn's judgment. If your child went through Neuron and still failed, you did everything you could. The fault is your child's or the weather or something else but not yours. That's what's actually being sold. Certainty, not math skills.
Korean households spent 29.2 trillion Won on private tutoring in 2024, an all-time record even as the school-age population dropped another 1.5% as their fertility rate hit record lows. This country is in a measurable sense choosing not to exist in order to keep paying for this.