Alumnus and Adjunct Professor Credits St. John’s upon Book Release

Minkyu Kim ’24Ph.D. earned his doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from The School of Education at St. John’s University. He currently teaches English at Stuyvesant High School and serves as an Adjunct Professor at St. John’s University. Dr. Kim recently published his book, Voices of Hagwon.

What was the inspiration behind your book? 

I was doing some preliminary research on the extracurricular literacies of the high-achieving high school students I teach, trying to figure out what contributed to them coming to school so engaged and motivated. Initial results were so varied (they consume everything!), but the one common thread I found was that they all did some version of private tutoring, test prep, and/or preview learning at community-based, after-school learning centers (which, in Korean, are called “hagwon”). When I looked, there was very little research on this topic based in the US, and if there was, it mostly looked at numbers. I wanted to go into the actual buildings and tell the stories of the people there. 

Hagwons are described as for-profit private, after-school academies in South Korea, acting as cram schools. How is that culture aligned with hagwons in the New York/New Jersey area schools?

Hagwons in the US are a direct import from the hagwon system in South Korea. That said, the college admission test in South Korea is a lot more all-or-nothing than the SAT or ACT are here, so South Korean hagwons are much more intensive. We in the US are lucky in that the college application process allows students to write essays, include teacher recommendations, and detail their extracurricular activities and interests.

In Korea, the test is everything. But the importance of getting into an elite college is still a top priority for Korean American families, since, as I write about in the book, culture travels. The importance of optimizing for financial security is just as important here as it is there. 

Would you say that hagwons optimize a student’s odds for achievement?

The short answer is yes. Their very existence is contingent on it—people would not continue to pay these tuitions (some of which can be very expensive) without a continued track record of success. But to add a bit of nuance, the students who benefit most from these places are still the ones who are willing to work at it.

One of the things that a hagwon owner said to me that stayed with me is that there is no magic sauce to what she does. Hagwons provide some strategies, but really it’s about providing materials and structured practice time that effectively force students to become familiar with the test. Beyond that, the students who want to really get better not only have to show up after school or on Saturdays; they have to practice at home.

To add yet another layer, what we see now is that hagwons here in the US are evolving to meet the new demands of college admission. So, you’re seeing more application consultation and specialized academies helping students optimize their hobbies to make them more marketable: e.g., art academies that help students win awards. It’s comparable to what has already happened with organized sports, with many of the same benefits and concerns. 

What kind of research did you conduct for your book,and how did your personal experiences shape it?

I sat in on three test prep centers in the New York/New Jersey area for a period of six months and tracked seven high school students preparing for the SAT throughout that period. I often found myself portaled back to my youth when I was preparing for the SAT and taking these exact classes, trying to answer these exact-type questions. Even the conversations the students were having, I recognized. Some of the actual content, though—especially the math—was beyond recovery.

How did The School of Education prepare you for writing this book and was there a professor who made an impact on your life or inspired you?

The book is derived from my dissertation research, which I did while I was a Ph.D. student in the Curriculum and Instruction program. Studying the results of the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam in Donald R. McClure, Ph.D.,’s Comparative Education course was instrumental in pinpointing the hagwon system as a confounding variable in the success of the East Asian education systems.

Sandra Abrams, Ph.D., who was my dissertation adviser, is still a treasured mentor. She believed in the book enough to connect me with an editor she knows at Brill (the publisher). So, the book would not have seen the light of day without my time and relationships at St. John’s. 

What is your hope for this book? Why?

My hope is that it is acknowledged as a contribution to the field of research and that it might add these students’ stories in complicating the discourse around Asian achievement and the Asian community in general. We have dreams and aspirations just like everybody else. And here, we’ve built an infrastructure to overcome several obstacles that face our young people—e.g., the language barrier, the lack of information regarding the college admission process—and placed these institutions, and the values inscribed there, at the center of our communities. I think this is a compelling story. In the literature, hagwon is often referred to as “shadow education.” My main goal was to bring it out of the shadows.

Dr. Kim’s book is available via Brill.