Professors who move to new countries often forget one important factor that is impossible to put into their contracts: the nature of the students. My experience in South Korea shows why professors should ask many questions about students and keep their eyes wide open before taking on an expatriate job.
Two classroom behaviors are obvious at most South Korean universities: The students openly sleep in class, and students rarely speak up voluntarily. Both of those traits are tiny signals of larger cultural influences.
Every year that a student goes to college represents a substantial portion of a Korean family’s annual income.
As a result, there is enormous pressure within the culture for students to succeed, for the sake of their own reputation, to get a good job, and to win scarce scholarships to cover mounting tuition costs.
During elementary- and secondary-school years, a family will invest heavily in supplemental schooling so their children gain an academic advantage. That investment goes into private coaching academies, consultants who advise the parents about strategies to get into the best schools and universities, and tutoring schools known as hagwons that feature extensive cramming sessions.
Once students reach universities, costs multiply significantly. A full year of tuition and living expenses for a midranked public university consumes, on average, more than 45 percent of a family’s annual income. The costs are higher if the institution is private and is considered the equivalent of an Ivy League institution. Over the last three decades, tuition costs borne by South Korean families have increased by a factor of almost 30 with an especially sharp jump in the last decade. Household incomes have not increased at the same rate.
Unlike in the United States, it would be impossible for a Korean student to rack up a five- or six-figure debt while in school. Some limited options for small loans exist, but bureaucratic barriers prevent those loans from being awarded very often. The reality is that if the family does not have enough money, the student cannot go to a university.
Within the countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, Korea has one of the lowest rates of government spending on education. Consequently, the costs of higher education are pushed down on individual households. South Korean students tend to know what their education is likely to cost their families down to the last Korean won. In the subtle yet widespread global argument over whether higher education is a public good that should be supported by government, versus a private good that benefits students and not society, the conviction that it’s a private benefit dominates the policies of South Korea.
While education is intended to prepare students for the work force, professors might not realize that the students sitting in front of them have reached university age without getting any employment experience or skills, unlike their peers in many other economies. During high school, Korean students do not have time to hold down part-time jobs, and any nonacademic activity is generally regarded as a waste of study time. At universities, breaks between semesters are meant for doing extra studying and taking short-term courses for credit, not taking jobs to earn income to help pay the next tuition bill. For male students, the only early experience in a work-oriented environment is compulsory military service, often taken after their sophomore year. Korean female students will have to wait until they graduate to learn what employment is like.
While academic work is real work, the emotional maturity and professional responsibility that can come from workplace experience are absent in many Korean students. That lack of development emerges frequently in a semester when hard choices have to be made and many tasks juggled. The students are very good under close supervision, but they have few skills for negotiation, conflict resolution, managing time and resources efficiently, or asking their professors questions outside of what pages to read or what questions will be asked in a quiz.
If the workplace experience is absent from students’ lives, long hours are not. Students’ high-school days begin as early as 7 a.m., and, in many cases, finish around 11 p.m. or midnight, with mandatory attendance at Saturday classes. After elementary school, most students attend at least 10 hours of extra study sessions each week.
South Korean high-school students complete up to 30 percent more hours of education each year than do their counterparts from other industrialized countries. Ironically, that pattern of behavior foreshadows the professional lifestyles awaiting the students. Korea has the longest work week and is the least-efficient country for hours worked and productivity gained among the members of the OECD. A common observation in the workplace is that as long as you show up, it doesn’t matter what you are doing—just be seen and be prepared to stay for unpaid overtime doing more of nothing.
The curriculum and the pedagogical approach familiar to Korean students are also significant factors in developing their behavior. Each year 12-million students are schooled within a powerful tradition of memorization and “teaching to the test.” Those tests include various exams, which function as a surrogate national curriculum.
One of the most competitive experiences occurs during the students’ final high-school year, when they apply for university admission. Professors who sit on the admissions panel at their universities will note the rote, coached answers spewing forth, with little opinion, critical thinking, or independent thought. The professor’s role on the panel is to ask standard questions, to which the student gives standard answers. No one is supposed to depart from the script.
When some students reach universities, their expectations are clear: They will be partying and drinking for the first two years because they have earned that right. The students have dedicated activities, called “MT” for Management Training, to foster the drinking culture. Those events occur early in the semester and usually involve travel to favorite locations for drinking games and socializing. That behavior is a reaction to the grind of secondary schooling and cultural expectations, and also mimics an element of the professional work culture in Korea: heavy social drinking under equally heavy social expectations.
The symptoms of the academic grind are reflected in high suicide rates. Sadly, Korea is the leading country among OECD members for university-age students’ committing suicide. If much of their work is done, the cultural pressure does not let up. Korea also ranks near the top for high-school students committing suicide, and its students may well be the world’s unhappiest.
Once the students are at universities, they can qualify for scholarships or tuition discounts, which are based on their grade-point averages. If a professor grades students down based on their performance, many of them will challenge this result. Their justification is often framed in a cultural logic that “they need a higher grade to keep their scholarship,” with little effort to take responsibility for their performance. When students are educated through memorization with little critical thinking, that request has a valid logic to them.
Often professors will honor those requests to change grades, which leads to grade inflation. Foreigners may feel that behavior contradicts the ethical values that they were raised on. Within the cultural context of Korea, professors see grade inflation as “helping to open the door for students’ working life.” Such behavior also mimics the professional world in Korea, where promotion is often gained on criteria not connected to results but given in return for loyalty and connections.
Professors who try to introduce concepts of merit based on Western values into a Korean classroom create disadvantages for some students, who will react negatively. If a course emphasizes teamwork and collaboration, they will leave the class, rather than jeopardize their grade-point average through a process that they can’t control.
Understanding the professional environment in Korea that students aspire to can help in understanding classroom behavior. The students might be in a foreign professor’s class precisely because he or she is foreign and the students think the experience can give them a competitive advantage among their peers in Korea. Their attendance does not guarantee that they want to adapt to a foreigner’s ways or learn by Western methods, though.
Sleeping in class is an accepted behavior that is considered normal, especially given the rigorous schedules the students endured through high school. The students’ priority is to show up and be seen, believing that it is all right to do nothing once they have arrived.
Those students are highly skilled, expert, and thoroughly trained in cramming and memorization techniques that they put to use two or three times a semester. With that skill set as the means by which they usually get their grades, they might not see the value in cumulative weekly learning or frequent class participation.
Korean students expect higher education to give them automatic entree into the professional work world. What expatriate professors might not realize is what that work world entails and how students’ education and behavior have been modeled in alignment with that world for more than a decade before the students enter a university classroom. As new professors navigate the world of South Korean higher education, they can’t always see below the surface, where the biggest dangers to real teaching lie.
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