Traveling overseas in pursuit of advanced knowledge has a long history from ancient times onward. Over time the option to study abroad has become more generally accessible, so that it is no longer a privilege of the upper classes and has been undertaken by younger and younger students. The case of South Korea most dramatically reflects this trend, and is the main focus of South Korea's Education Exodus. South Korea has been among the top five sending countries to US institutions of higher education for decades. Until the late 1980s, the vast majority were students enrolled in graduate programs; however, the demographic profile of South Koreans studying overseas changed rapidly starting in the 1990s with the advent of Early Study Abroad (ESA), referring to children going overseas for pre-college education. The number of ESA students increased exponentially from 1,562 in 1998 to 27,349 in 2008. As the editors of the book put it, “The demographic extent of the exit of pre-college children from South Korea for Early Study Abroad (ESA) is perhaps unparalleled in world history” (p. 1).
This volume is the first book-length collection of research studies to offer in-depth analyses of the recent phenomenon of ESA in South Korea. It is composed of thirteen chapters that are organized along five themes. Part one provides a broader demographic portrait of South Korean ESA students and examines the discourse on ESA in the South Korean media. Part two examines the stratification of ESA markets with case studies of popular “semi-periphery” destinations in New Zealand and Singapore. Part three complicates the notion of “global citizenship,” looking into “going global in comfort” in Singapore, “Korean cool” in Toronto, and the struggles returnees go through when their investment in ESA does not have the desired outcome. Part four focuses on day-to-day challenges that ESA students and their families face, touching on gendered prejudice, racial politics, and psychological adjustments. Part five offers personal reflections, including the impressions of an American private school educator with intimate knowledge of Korean ESA students and artwork by a former student illustrating his own journey as an ESA student in the United States. Each chapter offers fascinating insights into ESA, challenging commonly held assumptions, revealing realities, and most prominently, laying bare the intense desire for success in education and life and deep anxiety about failure in contemporary South Korea.
South Korea's Education Exodus is filled with acute analyses and rich narratives. One provocative claim is that ESA is “an extension of South Korean schooling and social stratification” (p. 40). The authors of chapter 2 refer to the “domestication” of South Korean ESA, suggesting that ESA is pursued to strengthen children's chances to succeed in the highly competitive South Korean educational system. To succeed, a trio of capitals—education/knowledge capital, characterological capital, and parental capital—is required.
Another claim is that ESA is not simply for children from the upper or upper-middle classes; rather, it has extended to lower-middle-class families. The United States, one of the most desirable countries to send children, is beyond the means of less affluent families, and thus more affordable “semi-periphery” countries, such as New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, have become alternative destinations for ESA. In particular, Singapore figures prominently in this book with three chapters (4, 5, and 6) devoted to case studies of ESA there. Singapore is especially interesting in that it has become a favored destination for primary school students because of its affordability, geographical proximity, and rigorous and discipline-oriented schooling, as well as the central role of English and Mandarin in instruction and daily life and the Singaporean government's proactive marketing to recruit foreign students to this “world-class educational hub” (p. 87).
The book's discussion of intra-Asian student mobility and ESA students' strategies in constructing “Koreanness” in white-dominant societies advances our understanding of what constitutes “cosmopolitanism” or “global citizenship.” In popular perceptions, adjectives like “global” and “cosmopolitan” have long been associated with European and North American countries, but various chapters in the book demonstrate how “Asian global” (chapter 6), “Korean cool” (chapter 7), and other such concepts are playing out against the assumption of Western-centered global citizenship. At the same time, those authors explicate how the construction of Asian global or Asian cool is heavily intertwined with social class, racial dynamics, and specific localities.
Collectively, South Korea's Education Exodus provides readers with rich narratives centering on ESA as a lens through which one can understand not only the inner workings of ESA but its intimate connections with broader structural factors, including globalization, the neoliberal economic and cultural environment, the widening disparity of social classes, gender and racial discrimination, multiculturalism, and the idea of global citizenship not centered on a Euro-American outlook.
The latest statistics show a dramatic decline in the number of South Korean students undertaking ESA, from 29,511 in 2006 to 10,907 in 2014.Footnote 17 That precipitous reduction in ESA raises the question of why it has tapered off so significantly. Some chapters offer hints at possible reasons for the decline, but that point will need to be addressed by follow-up research. Overall, South Korea's Education Exodus is rich in data and comprehensive in scope, and it would be a useful resource in undergraduate courses on modern and contemporary Korea, international education, inter-Asia cultural studies, multiculturalism, and globalization.
