Ecuador and Mali are the nationalities of choice for Koreans trying to get their kids into Seoul foreigner schools, reports the Hanguk Ilbo (via the Chosun Ilbo).
It seems middle-class and wealthy Koreans living in Gangnam who want their kids to get the overseas educational experience — without spending to actually send them overseas — are keen to get their kids into foreigner schools. Since you usually need to be an actual foreigner (or a virtual foreigner owing to significant experience overseas) to get into these schools, however, many are turning to overseas studies hagwon and the ubiquitous brokers to get permanent residency in certain South American and African countries — namely Ecuador and Mali — where getting permanent residency is quite easy.
In the case of Ecuador, all you need do is visit for a week to qualify, while Mali’s embassy in Japan can issue permanent residency visas. Both options will usually cost you about 30 million won.
According to the Ministry of Education, 13% of the 9,500 total students enrolled in Korea’s 41 foreigner schools last year were Korean, but the actual ratio is believed to be much more, since the statistics count dual citizens and overseas permanent residents as foreigners. Among overseas study hagwon and parents, it’s said 80% of the kids enrolled in foreigner schools are ethnic Korean, and many of these are Koreans who purchased foreign citizenships. In fact, the children of actual “foreigners” are taking a back seat, with the children of no less a foreign figure as honorary chairman of AMCHAM Jeffrey Jones being told by one Seoul foreigner school that the school was full and they’d have to wait for a spot.
The reason the schools have been taken over by Koreans is that while Korean kids need to have lived for five years or more overseas to get in, those with overseas residency are immediately eligible for entry.
An Education Ministry official said since foreigner schools are granted autonomy, there are currently no laws to stop Koreans from taking such expediencies.
Marmot’s Note: Did you know Ecuador has trained an astronaut? Whodathunkit?
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Two countries that one would not normally associate with a large Korean student population, but one can well imagine this is another example of Korea Sparkling in the international, multihemispherical realm.
I had an Ecudorean classmate (I remember she was from Quito) in fourth grade – I bet she became the astronaut!
I just don’t understand this. But then, I know next to nothing about primary school education here. It seems as if the foreign schools are functioning in the same way that private schools in the United States do, in that parents dissatisfied with publicly-funded schools and wealthy enough to pay the tuition send their kids, instead.
Is this not an option in Korea (i.e., no “private” schools)? I really cannot understand why Korean parents living in Korea want to send their children to schools ostensibly designed to teach international students.
I don’t understand why so many parents go to all the effort and subterfuge instead of trying to find an above-board solution—i.e. a grassroots effort to reform the public schools or sending their kids to a private school. There are tons of hagwons and private institutes for all kinds of study, it seems strange to me that there isn’t something already addressing this in the Korean educational “market” for lack of a better term.
I’m not saying a two-tier system is good, but I don’t understand why there’s a de facto situation that everyone knows about but isn’t willing to acknowledge.
Being a Korean child of Ecuadorian residency and two parents of Korean citizenship would put the ersatz “foreign” kid in the lowest-priority category for admission to a wait-listed school like Seoul Foreign School or Yongsan International School. It would be pretty lucky for such a kid to get the nod for enrollment.
However, as Marmot notes, there are 41 “international” schools in Korea. There must be close to a dozen in and around the Seoul area which “real” foreigner parents (i.e., white folks) consider to be beneath their notice, because all the other students are ethnic Koreans. But the Korean parents love these foreign schools. They almost always have places available for any kid authorized by law to attend an international school, and the Ecuador and Mali residents can waltz right in.
PS, the ethnic-Korean argument — that’s they’re not “real” foreigners — is ridiculous. You either are or are not a citizen of the foreign country.
Disgusting.
So after the schools are filled with these Korean “foreigners” parents will complain that the standards have slipped and that they aren’t real international schools. And a new batch of schools will open for actual foreigners, and the wealthy will find some other back entrance.
If I were a businessman, diplomat, or otherwise wealthy enough to have my kid in an international school in Seoul, I wouldn’t be happy about it turning into an ESL academy.
I’m a businessman wealthy enough to have my kid in an international school in Seoul, and I haven’t noticed the school has turned into an ESL academy.
Likewise, pregnant mothers either are or are not engaging in birth tourism when travelling to the US and and giving birth, before returning to Korea with their now dual-citizen infant.
And such children either are or are not attending foreign schools in Korea under the pretense that, as American citizens, they have the same academic and linguistic abilities as other American schoolkids.
Yet.
I happen to be opposed to the United States granting citizenship to such children, but that’s our law. If you’re born in the US, you’re an American citizen even if you no speakee.
My own kids started their lives as Korean speakers, as their Mom is Korean and we live in a Korean neighborhood. After a few weeks of English-medium school, there was no notable difference.
This is what my cousin is doing for his son. My cousin, born and raised in the United States, is still an US citizen despite living in Korea for a very long time. As a result, his son qualifies for US citizenship and has it. My cousin is sending him to a foreign school, not necessarily to learn English, but to avoid the grind of the Korean educational system. He says that he wants his son to avoid the system and hopefully enjoy life being a student.
I wonder if any of those “foreign” kids’ parents have that in mind. Possibly not, but I wonder.
Anyways, in San Francisco, there’s a growing number of non-Chinese parents sending their kids to the Chinese international school, where the curriculum is taught both in Chinese and English, so that their kids will speak Chinese.
I guess it’s not that bad to want to send your kid to a foreign school, but it’s terrible that they can purchase foreign nationality. I’m more disturbed about being able to purchase foreign nationality than parents willing to pay anything to get their kids an edge.
Or even further, if you no stayee. No law has been broken – precisely the opposite, which is why it occurs – but that does not confer any merit on the practice of birth tourism, especially with respect to its effects in the foreign-school classroom.
Brendon, while I of course don’t know you or your family personally, I’d hazard the guess that you and your wife spoke to your children in both English and Korean before they began school. In this respect, your children, and the linguistic development they achieved after just a few weeks in an international school, was and is different from the children of parents who do not regularly and earnestly communicate with their kids in English, or who cannot speak English at all. There are, as I’m sure you’ll agree, many such parents among those who travel to the US for reasons of obtaining citizenship for their newborns.
These kids, who do not have natural reasons to speak English, are many times provided with an unnatural one: the native-speaker English teacher. Procured privately or through an institute, the English teacher – most typically, a North American male in his mid-twenties – is paired with these young children for one or a few hours a week. There are no extra hours of practice with Mom and Dad later for the vast majority of these kids. The teacher may care for the child, but the teacher’s real motivation is monetary rather than altruistic, and when the time is up, it’s up. This is quite different from the relationship and level of contact that you and your children have.
So, when they arrived at the international school, if you and your wife had spnet those years speaking to them in English, your children already had years’ of naturally-based English communication upon which to develop their skills in the classroom.
I’m not discounting the hard work and progress made by students who work with native-speaker teachers, nor the work of the teachers or the teachers themselves. But it hardly compares to your family life, or that of others who’ve grown up with a natural need to speak English in order to communicate.
And that’s the problem. Some teachers whom I know who work at international schools complain about this very problem and its effect in their classrooms. In essence, these teachers need to spend class time, which ought to be devoted to the increased and added development of all students, on the students with poor English skills who have yet to grasp the material others have already mastered.
To be frank, I’m not surprised if parents know little or nothing about this problem. First, parents are not present on a daily basis to see what happens in their children’s classrooms. Further, their children have no metric with which to assess if the classd is progressing as it ought to, or is slowing down, so they can hardly be expected to comment on this effect. Lastly, schools certainly don’t want to advertise this problem, and teachers do not mention this sort of thing to the parents of other kids. (They do mention it to the the slower kids’ parents, which usually incites greater levels of practice and study.)
Hmm finally I see this issue on the web…
I happen to be a student of one of these “foreign” schools and well, I’m a special case. I was born in Seoul, live in the States for nine years of my life and I can’t speak Korean nor do I want to (don’t ask for the latter). So far, I have been attending one of these “foreign” school since January.
Now a lot of the stuff stated above DOES indeed happen. Although I haven’t seen an Ecuadorian or a Malian citizen in my school but the whole ethnic Korean can be observed at my school.
To give you an example, my class (as a whole grade) has only eight kids, all ethnic and most culturally Korean. Come to think of it, I think 10th to 12th grade are all ethnic Koreans…
If the educational zeal of Korean parents were an alternative energy source, it would solve all our problems.
I know some international schools allowed a certain % of their enrollment for Koreans, I seem to recall it’s around 20-ish% (for the school my ex’s niece went to).
Now that exception is not enough and they have to take away “genuine” foreigners’ places by buying a nationality? I want to say I’m surprised, but I can’t.
It should be easy to shut these “foreign children” out: simply ask them how long they lived in their country before coming to Korea. “One week? Get the fuck out of this office.”
This is interesting stuff. On one hand, I admire the tenacity and creativity of Korean parents who will stop at nothing to get their kids into foreign schools. As usual I despise their utter lack of ethics in another shining case of total Korean Amorality.
If Amorality isn’t a real word, some of you will perhaps suggest that I return to foreign school.
I’m surprised to hear that there are 41 schools. Bangkok has, apparently, around 75.
I wonder how many key expats have turned down jobs and restrained major economic growth and development for Korea in the process. I suspect the impact is less than is made of it.
I don’t think there is public school system in the world that would satisfy Korean parents. A Kiwi friend tells me that there are many Koreans living there (no big news) and that they’ve replicated the whole hagwon structure with all the positives and negatives that come with it. They want Harvard and Princeton MIT and they’re getting it.
The worst aspect of this whole thing is that American, European, Aussie, Kiwi and etc. kids have to work slavishly to get into their own top tier educational institutions. The competitive bar has been raised. Healthy competition is good. But having to study for the kind of long hours that Korean kids do, which precludes having any normal, balanced life, is destructive and unhealthy.
But since you WILL have success in many cases in terms of purely academic achievements, this destructiveness is being exported to our western countries. There should be a cap on foreign students, one might think.
This doesn’t happen because of the financial motivation of foreign schools to take that Korean money. And because it’s politically risky.
In the US, last I checked, if you’re from Idaho (for example) and you go to school in Illinois, you pay out of state tuition for the 1st year, and then you get instate status. The fees drop about 75%.
But if you’re a foreign student, you never get in-state tuition. 4 or 5 years of that kind of money is hard for American U’s to say no to.
Unless you work for a multinational, a Korean law firm, or are independently wealthy, as a non-Korean, the educational options for your kids in Korea are severely limited: a position on a waiting list and a 20 million won per year tuition for elementary school. Which is why I left the place. The Korean govt doesn’t have the least bit of interest in solving this problem, which gives me the feeling that they are just as happy to see middle class foreigners leave the country after a while.
I’d rather see exceptionally hard-working, brilliant students regardless of nationality, rather than underachieving, mostly WASP legacies, reaping the benefits of an Ivy League education. The intense competition prepares these top tier kids for the real world, where people in the highest income brackets work longer hours than the middle-class and upper middle-class.
That must have been several decades ago. Public universities are quite strict about residency requirements and state clearly that once a student is admitted as a non-resident, it is very difficult to change status. One must demonstrate a permanent domicile either by buying property, getting a full-time job in state, marrying a resident, or performing some other act which shows a long-term commitment. The student body of the Harvard of the West is about 35% out of state, a statistic that rankles Michigan taxpayers, who think that the University of Michigan wants to have its cake and eat it, too, getting state money and lots of out-of-state tuition.
One of the educational benefits of working for a law firm, as a lawyer, is that Daddy can bring home a nice big fat paycheck. So, that 20 million won can be considered “fairly standard.” But try working in academia, and you’ll see educational expenses consume almost half of your paycheck, for one child! Have another kid and face starvation, no thanks. International school is fine if you are wealthy, but not an option otherwise.
Send your kids to Korean public school. Big deal. They get teased. So what? You never get teased? Big deal. They get lonely? For how long? School is school. You’re going to international school for one reason. You want them a shot at US Universities as US citizens. They’re taking the SAT’s, not no sabupgoshi’s. Yale, not Koryo. US citizen, not ROK citizen.
International schools in Seoul are ways for the high class Koreans to do some shady stuff with their kids. If Lee Myungbak was honest, he’d bar kids who have Korean dad and mom from entering such schools. Sort of achieves the dual effect of educated in Migook effect, but come home to mommy and daddy everyday. I think New York Tom is one of these. It’s a slap in the face of Korean education, good enough for plebeians, but not good enough for Jangkwan and chaebol’s children.
But, alas, is Lee Myungbak honest?
Lawyers at Korean law firms are generally expected to remain in the office until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. regardless of workload. Most firms haven’t yet figured out either work-life balance or the power of information technology to release lawyers from the shackles of time and space. Korean law firms are at least 15 years behind North American firms in the use of technology — we don’t even have Blackberries, for crying out loud.
My perception is that large elements of Korean law firms’ partnerships resist investments in technology because they reduce inefficiency (it pays to be inefficient, if you bill by the hour) and also because such investments raise the spectre of liberating the hired help from the grip of the firm.
Korean culture has such a strong totalitarian streak — every Korean organization wants total devotion from its members. “Face time” in the office, and compulsory socialization (why have lunch with a client when you can eat lunch with co-workers?) are important components of Korean law firms’ social control over the lives of their staff.
With respect to cost, remember that the W20 million comes out of the after-tax portion of the income — which increases the bite. Send two of your little twiddles to school and it really starts to hurt. I can’t even imagine a family with five chillun.
WJK, sounds as if you don’t have kids. Not many parents would want their kids to be subject to an extra amount of teasing and isolation, and also deprive them of the chance to learn English as well. It can’t be that healthy for a kid to be the only non-Korean in school in a country where race is considered as the main definer of nationality and you are always the outsider.
Compared to the US, the workplace culture at Korean universities also places more importance on spending time in the office, even when your work could be done just as effectively somewhere else. That didn’t bother me the least when I was single, it was fine to stay in the office until midnight, but in this day and age, there’s a lot of pressure on men to be home and help out with the kid as well.
I agree with Dokdoforever, Korean school is not the place to be if you stand out from the crowd. My little sister goes to a public school, since we can’t afford have two kids attending my school, and I’m amazed how most of the kids try make her feel isolated. She and this boy from England, also Korean, are the only two kids in their class that are “foreign” and can’t speak Korean and the kids try and make the teacher prevent them from hanging out together. Granted she doesn’t get as much beef as would if she looked foreign as well but I can only imagine what a non-Korean would go through in a Korean public school.
As for sending kids to foreign schools to make them feel less isolated and give them a better opportunity, it’s a good idea, if you can afford the tuition. However, the irony is that my school is a place where the culturally Korean kids out-number the “foreign” kids. So the foreign kids usually stick together and if not , end up isolated. But that’s just my school, I’m not sure how SFS, SIS, etc are.
Actually, the kids might cut her some slack if she were a ‘real’ foreigner rather than a ‘foreign’ Korean.
The kids still have to pass an English proficiency exam as one of the requirements for admission, but the standards for passing it can be low if the school is under-enrolled.
BTW, it’s freaking expensive! It costs about $22,000 a year to send my kid to middle school, and Samsung only reimburses half of it!
I second this assertion. One of my coworkers has a now-teenaged non-Korean daughter who has spent all of her schoolyears in Korean classrooms. She’s popular among her classmates, and reports no real sense of negativism from others regarding her being non-Korean.
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