College Prep - the Korean way
A fascinating report in the Sunday New York Times details life inside an elite Korean prep school where literally dozens of the seniors are accepted to Ivy League colleges each year. As in the American Ivy League. As in Harvard, Princeton and Yale - which host over 100 Korean undergraduates between them.
You might not have heard of the Daewon Prep School or the Minjok Leadership Academy, but these two Korean schools are training Korean kids to gain admission to US Universities by ensuring they get high GPA’s, often perfect SAT or ACT scores and up to a boat-load of AP’s.
How do they do this?
They do it the old-fashioned way. They work at it. These kids are in school a full month longer than any American high school. And they study for 15 hours a day. An American tutor who teaches writing marvels:
“Even my worst students are great . . . They’re professionals; if I teach them, they’ll learn it. I get e-mails at 2 a.m. I’ll respond and go to bed. When I get up, I’ll find a follow-up question mailed at 5 a.m.”
The lesson for American high school students aiming for a place at a selective college is that, as has been noted, the world is flat. Meaning that not only can they look at colleges outside the US for a quality education at a lower price, but the best and brightest from around the world look to the US for their education. They are competing in a shrinking world.
It also means that their roommate might prefer kimchee to ketchup and they’ll be exposed to different cultures as an undergraduate which will better prepare them for life after college. ‘Cos four years from now, they’ll not be competing for college places, they’ll be competing for jobs.
