Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills

[Harold F. Schiffman]

April 27, 2008

Elite Korean Schools, Forging Ivy League Skills
By SAM DILLON

SEOUL, South Korea It is 10:30 p.m. and students at the elite Daewon prep
school here are cramming in a study hall that ends a 15-hour school day. A
window is propped open so the evening chill can keep them awake. One
teenager studies standing upright at his desk to keep from dozing. Kim
Hyun-kyung, who has accumulated nearly perfect scores on her SATs, is
multitasking to prepare for physics, chemistry and history exams.

I can't let myself waste even a second, said Ms. Kim, who dreams of
attending Harvard, Yale or another brand-name American college. And she
has a good shot. This spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the
133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who applied to
selective American universities won admission. It is a success rate that
American parents may well envy, especially now, as many students are
swallowing rejection from favorite universities at the close of an
insanely selective college application season. Going to U.S. universities
has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names
Harvard, Yale, Princeton have really struck a nerve, said Victoria Kim,
who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June.

Daewon has one major Korean rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, three
hours drive east of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of
admission to Ivy League colleges. How do they do it? Their formula is
relatively simple. They take South Koreas top-scoring middle school
students, put those who aspire to an American university in
English-language classes, taught by Korean and highly paid American and
other foreign teachers, emphasize composition and other skills crucial to
success on the SATs and college admissions essays, and especially this
urge them on to unceasing study.

Both schools seem to be rethinking their grueling regimen, at least a bit.
Minjok, a boarding school, has turned off dormitory surveillance cameras
previously used to ensure that students did not doze in late-night study
sessions. Daewon is ending its school day earlier for freshmen. Its
founder, Lee Won-hee, worried in an interview that while Daewon was
turning out high-scoring students, it might be falling short in educating
them as responsible citizens. American schools may do a better job at
that, Dr. Lee said.

Still, the schools are highly rigorous. Both supplement South Koreas
required, lecture-based national curriculum with Western-style discussion
classes. Their academic year is more than a month longer than at American
high schools. Daewon, which costs about $5,000 per year to attend,
requires two foreign languages besides English. Minjok, where tuition,
board and other expenses top $15,000, offers Advanced Placement courses
and research projects. And, oh yes. Both schools suppress teenage romance
as a waste of time. What are you doing holding hands? a Daewon
administrator scolded an adolescent couple recently, according to his
aides. You should be studying!

Students do not seem to complain. Park Yeshong, one of Kim Hyun-kyung's
classmates, said attractions tended to fade during hundreds of hours of
close-quarters study. We know each other too well to fall in love, she
said. Many American educators would kill to have such disciplined pupils.
Both schools reserve admission for highly motivated students; the
application process resembles that at many American colleges, where
students are judged on their grade-point averages, as well as their
performance on special tests and in interviews.

Even my worst students are great, said Joseph Foster, a Williams College
graduate who teaches writing at Daewon. Theyre professionals; if I teach
them, theyll learn it. I get e-mails at 2 a.m. Ill respond and go to bed.
When I get up, Ill find a follow-up question mailed at 5 a.m. South Korea
is not the only country sending more students to the United States, but it
seems to be a special case. Some 103,000 Korean students study at American
schools of all levels, more than from any other country, according to
American government statistics. In higher education, only India and China,
with populations more than 20 times that of South Koreas, send more
students.

Preparing to get to the best American universities has become something of
a national obsession in Korea, said Alexander Vershbow, the American
ambassador to South Korea. Korean applications to Harvard alone have
tripled, to 213 this spring, up from 66 in 2003, said William R.
Fitzsimmons, Harvards dean of admissions.  Harvard has 37 Korean
undergraduates, more than from any foreign country except Canada and
Britain. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have a total of 103 Korean
undergraduates; 34 graduated from Daewon or Minjok.

This year, Daewon and Minjok graduates are heading to universities like
Stanford, Chicago, Duke and seven of the eight Ivy League universities but
not to Harvard. Instead, Harvard accepted four Korean students from three
other prep schools. That was certainly not any statement about the Daewon
and Minjok schools, Mr. Fitzsimmons said. Were alert to getting kids from
schools where we havent had them before, but wed never reject an applicant
simply because he or she came from a school with a history of sending
students to Harvard.

South Korea's academic year starts in March, so the 2008 class of Daewons
Global Leadership Program, which prepares students for study at foreign
universities, graduated in February. One graduate was Kim Soo-yeon, 19,
who was accepted by Princeton this month. Daewon parents tend to be
wealthy doctors, lawyers or university professors. Ms. Kims father is a
top official in the Korean Olympic Committee. Ms. Kim developed fierce
study habits early, watching her mother scold her older sister for
receiving any score less than 100 on tests. Even a 98 or a 99 brought a
tongue-lashing.

Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all
the subjects, Ms. Kim's mother said. Ms. Kims highest aspiration was to
attend a top Korean university, until she read a book by a Korean student
at Harvard about American universities. Immediately she put up a sign in
her bedroom: Im going to an Ivy League! Even while at Daewon, Ms. Kim,
like thousands of Korean students, took weekend classes in English,
physics and other subjects at private academies, raising her SAT scores by
hundreds of points. I just love to do well on the tests, she said.

As bright as she is, she was just one great student among many, said Eric
Cho, Daewons college counselor. Sitting at his computer terminal at the
school, perched on a craggy eastern hilltop overlooking the Seoul skyline,
Mr. Cho scrolled through the class of 2008s academic records. Their
average combined SAT score was 2203 out of 2400. By comparison, the
average combined score at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire boarding
school, is 2085. Sixty-seven Daewon graduates had perfect 800 math scores.
Kim Hyun-kyung, 17, scored perfect 800s on the SAT verbal and math tests,
and 790 in writing. She is scheduled to take nine Advanced Placement tests
next month, in calculus, physics, chemistry, European history and five
other subjects. One challenge: she has taken none of these courses.
Instead, she is teaching herself in between classes at Daewon, buying and
devouring textbooks.

So she is busy. She rises at 6 a.m. and heads for her school bus at 6:50.
Arriving at Daewon, she grabs a broom to help classmates clean her
classroom. Between 8 and noon, she hears Korean instructors teach supply
and demand in economics, Korean soils in geography and classical poets in
Korean literature. At lunch she joins other raucous students, all, like
her, wearing blue blazers, in a chow line serving beans and rice, fried
dumpling and pickled turnip, which she eats with girlfriends. Boys, who
sit elsewhere, wolf their food and race to a dirt lot for a 10-minute
pickup soccer game before afternoon classes.

Kim Hyun-kyung joins other girls at a hallway sink to brush her teeth
before reporting to French literature, French culture and English grammar
classes, taught by Korean instructors. At 3:20, her English language
classes begin. This day, they include English literature, taught by Mani
Tadayon, a polyglot graduate of the University of California at Berkeley
who was born in Iran, and government and politics, taught by Hugh Quigley,
a former Wall Street lawyer. Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She piles
up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare at her like a to-do
list. Classmates sling backpacks over seats, prop a window open and start
cramming. Three hours later, the floor is littered with empty juice
cartons and water bottles.  One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At
10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus that will wend its way
through Seouls towering high-rise canyons to her home, south of the Han
River. I feel proud that Ive endured another day, she said.

The schedule at the Minjok academy, on a rural campus of tile-roofed
buildings in forested hills, appears even more daunting. Students rise at
6 for martial arts, and thereafter, wearing full-sleeved, gray-and-black
robes, plunge into a day of relentless study that ends just before
midnight, when they may sleep. But most keep cramming until 2 a.m., when
dorm lights are switched off, said Gang Min-ho, a senior. Even then some
students turn on lanterns and keep going, Mr. Gang said. Basically we lead
very tired lives, he said. Students sometimes report for classes so
exhausted that Alexander Ganse, a German who teaches European history,
said he asked, Did you go to bed at all last night? But we're not only
nerds! interrupted Choi Jung-yun, who grew up in San Diego. Minjok
students play sports, take part in many clubs and even have a rock band,
she said. Ambassador Vershbow, who plays the drums, confirmed that with
photographs that showed him jamming with Minjok's rockers during a visit
to the school last year.

There are other hints of slackening. A banner once hung on a Minjok
building. This school is a paradise for those who want to study and a hell
for those who do not, it read. But it was taken down after faculty members
deemed it too harsh, said Son Eun-ju, director of counseling.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/world/asia/27seoul.html?em&ex=1209528000&en=bbfb1646d3b2b2bb&ei=5087%0A