Is Korea Number One in Human Capital Accumulation?: Education Bubble Formation and Its Labor Market Evidence

Ju-Ho Lee, Hyeok Jeong, S. Hong
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引用次数: 20

Abstract

This paper proposes a new conceptual framework of “education bubble” in analyzing the human capital investment and formation. We apply this concept to the Korean experience. Sixty years ago Korea was destitute not only of income but also of all sorts of education, but now it is one of the leading countries in educational attainment as well as in other conventional measures of human capital investment indices such as the PISA tests and the number of researchers. We argue, however, that such phenomenal expansion of these quantitative measures involved the problems of enormous burden of private tutoring and the mass production of low-quality higher education institutions, which did not contribute to increasing the effective unit of human capital particularly since the 1990s. We find that despite rapid increase in private educational expenditure for college entrance, the college wage premiums for the bottom two decile groups of 4-year college graduates and the bottom half of 2-year college graduates are both negative. This striking evidence from the microeconomic data suggests that such phenomenal expansion in aggregate quantity of human capital indices of Korea could be a bubble. We learn from this evidence that the quantitative expansion of education may not be good enough for sustainable development, which would guide the design of human capital policy not only for Korea but also for other developing countries.
韩国是人力资本积累第一大国吗?教育泡沫的形成及其劳动力市场证据
本文在分析人力资本投资与形成的过程中,提出了一个新的“教育泡沫”概念框架。我们把这个概念应用到韩国的经验中。60年前,韩国不仅在收入方面,而且在各种教育方面都处于贫困状态,但现在,韩国在教育程度、国际学生评估项目(PISA)等人力资本投资指标、研究人员数量等传统指标上都处于领先地位。然而,我们认为,这些量化措施的惊人扩张涉及私人辅导的巨大负担和低质量高等教育机构的大量生产等问题,特别是自20世纪90年代以来,这并没有有助于增加人力资本的有效单位。我们发现,尽管大学入学的私人教育支出迅速增加,但大学工资溢价的底部两个十分之一群体的四年制大学毕业生和底部一半的两年制大学毕业生都是负的。从微观经济数据中可以看出,韩国人力资本指数总量如此惊人的增长可能是泡沫。我们从这一证据中了解到,教育的数量扩张可能不足以促进可持续发展,而可持续发展不仅将指导韩国,也将指导其他发展中国家的人力资本政策设计。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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