Korean people pessimistic on social status, class mobility

Описание: 교육 형평성, 계층이동 가능성 점점 낮아져... "개천에서 용난다"는 옛말

Widening social and income inequality is a global issue.
As for Korea, public sentiment has worsened over the years in terms of social class mobility.
Oh Junghee looks beyond the numbers.
Korean people have become very pessimistic in terms of their social status and class mobility.
According to a Statistics Korea's report on Monday... in 2015, 20-percent of Koreans answered that they belong to the lowest socio-economic status considering income, job, education, and wealth,... a significant rise from only 12-percent back in 1994.
Those who think they belong to the middle class decreased from 60-percent down to 53-percent.

On whether one would be able to attain a higher social status through life-long efforts,... only 22-percent of people had a positive view... compared to 60-percent in 1994.
Negative views rose from five-percent to over 62-percent.
The lower income they earned, the more pessimistic they were on the possibility of class mobility.


"Especially, respondents in their thirties and forties saw that the possibility of them moving up in social class was very low. It appears that the older generations relatively beneffited from the economic development in the past,... but not for younger ones... leading them to have negative expectations about the future."

The results of the OECD's 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment... shows that social inequality in Korea has worsened over the last ten years.

The gap of academic performance between students with different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds... widened from 31 points to 44 from 2006 to 2015.
This is a gap 6 points higher than the OECD average of 38.
The United States was able to narrow this gap by 13 points.
The same with the United Kingdom and Denmark... by 8 and 7 points respectively.


"Parents think that, by cutting spending on education, their kids will suffer from inequality, lower income or even the inability of getting a job."

Experts also say that Korea's society needs to be further prudent in terms of maintaining its current education system, which is seen to aggravate the feeling of deprivation or ranking among students... as they are continuously compared to other peers.
Oh Jung-hee, Arirang News.

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