Educational equality of Korea in 1990s

Abstract

This paper studies the educational equality of Korea in 1990s, by observing higher education advancement of high school students in accordance with 25 administrative districts of Seoul, with method of Gini index, equality measure for a society. The increasing number of higher education institutions, plus stagnant number of students or population has promoted educational equity, and universalized higher education. However, given the equalization policy for General Humanity high school since early 70s, the schools in the area still has shown seriously heterogeneous outcome in term of entering prestigious universities, which generates ''signaling effect'' in employment market and positively influences their future income level. To identifY factors affecting pupils'' performance, a regression is done: with admission situation of Seoul National University, and other two famed universities in 1999 as dependent variables, and income proxy variables and education level of the districts etc. as explanatory variables. The average schooling year of residents has strongly positive relation with admission of the famed and four-year universities. Moreover, private educational spending or guaweibi also positively influences pupils'' entering only top three universities, not other types of institutions. In sum, advancement to higher education after secondary schooling has been distributed comparatively equally, which is resulted from the increased junior colleges. Based on this observation of disparity of education performance, heavily influenced by parents'' scocio-economic status, the Korean education system can be hardly regarded as egalitarian.