South Korean tutor Kim Ki-Hoon earns $4 million a year, according to
South Korean tutor Kim Ki-Hoon earns $4 million a year, according to Amanda Ripley, writing in the Wall Street Journal. He earns the near equivalent of an average NBA player’s salary by teaching English – primarily via paid Internet video – in the nation’s omnipresent hagwons, or private, after-school tutoring academies.
This $17 billion after-school learning market has helped turn South Korea — a majority of whose citizens were illiterate sixty years ago — into the second top-performing country in the PISA global test of academic excellence (far outstripping the U.S.). Moreover, notes Ripley, South Korea’s 93% high-school graduation rate dramatically outpaces that of the U.S. (a lowly 77%).
Kim Ki-Hoon is a contributor to, and beneficiary of, South Korea’s high-tech, free-market approach to education.
Are gone the days of low-salary, non-tenured teachers? The internet seems to be changing all that!!
The first U.S.-based tutoring rock star was Salman Khan of the Khan Academy. However, Khan Academy operates as a non-profit. And there is no equivalent American tutoring peer with Khan’s reach and status.
However, what Mr. Kim uniquely provides – and is the key to his 30-person-strong publishing, tutoring, and lecturing empire – is a direct relationship to individual students.
All that is needed in the U.S. is a genuine free marketplace where such tutoring superstars can flourish. Mr. Kim, for instance, works for a publicly traded online hagwon called Megastudy . Hagwons, in this sense, are like professional sports teams, constantly on the prowl for top tutoring talent. The more highly-regarded the tutor – whose reputation is linked to how his or her students perform on standardized tests and whether they are accepted into top colleges — the more the hagwon can charge. Moreover, since students sign up for specific tutors, the better a tutor’s reputation, the more money that tutor makes.
Even American schools are not above the free market system and the power of the internet!
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