Why Go This Far? — the Culture Behind Korea's Major Choices, in MunSong, the Humanities Invasion, and Retakers (Part 2)

In Part 1 we looked at what happens. Contract departments at 48 to 1, AI departments up 60% in two years, 148 humanities departments gone. This piece asks the question behind those numbers: why do Korea’s eighteen-year-olds go this far?

Let me say upfront: the answer is not “Koreans are unusually competitive.” The system is designed a particular way, and students and families have responded rationally to that design. What makes it interesting is that the response then reshapes the system — a four-year game of cat and mouse that is still running.

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Munsonghamnida — a self-deprecating phrase that survived a decade

Munsonghamnida is short for “mungwa-yeo-seo joesong-hamnida” — literally, “sorry for being a humanities major.” It began spreading online around 2015. It has two uses. One is the light joke when you fail to follow some science-track common sense; the other is a serious self-deprecation about where a humanities degree sits in the job market.

The same era produced the word inguron — a pun that abbreviates “inmun (humanities) graduates, 90% are nonda (idle),” and which happens to sound exactly like the Korean title of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population.

The numbers back this up. For 2024 graduates, humanities employment was 61.1%, the lowest of any field — 18.3 percentage points behind medicine and health at 79.4%. That gap is not a one-year accident; it has held as a structure for more than ten years.

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From the humanities invasion to the satam-run — four years of cat and mouse

This passage is the single best way to understand the Korean admissions system, because it shows a policy producing the exact opposite of its intent — and the data traces the whole thing perfectly.

Step 1 — the unified CSAT (2022). The arts/science split was abolished and everyone sat the same exam. The stated aim was to soften the barrier between tracks.

Step 2 — the humanities invasion. But in math, science-track students who chose calculus and geometry earned structurally higher standardized scores than humanities students who chose probability and statistics. Science students began carrying those scores across into humanities departments. From a humanities student’s point of view, their seats were being taken — hence the label mungwa chim-gong, “the humanities invasion.”

📊 Science-track students as a share of regular-admission humanities applicants (Jinhaksa analysis)

Year	Nationwide (60 metro + regional national universities)	Top 14 Seoul universities
2022 (first unified CSAT)	25.9%	—
2023	27.0%	31.67%
2024	28.6%	44.19%
2025	29.97% (definition changed)	41.19%

In other words, there was a year when more than 4 in 10 humanities freshmen at top Seoul universities were science-track applicants. School by school, 57.9% of Sungkyunkwan University’s humanities applicants in 2024 were science students, and 59.3% of Korea University’s.

Step 3 — the universities fight back. Universities tried to block the invasion by giving bonus points to students who took the social-studies exam.

Step 4 — the satam-run. So science students simply switched to the social-studies exam (“satam” for short — hence “satam-run”). The 2026 CSAT registration results were dramatic.

Chemistry I registrants collapsed 45.3% year on year, and Earth Science I fell 25%. Meanwhile Society & Culture rose 42.2% to 263,047. In a country trying to raise STEM talent, high schoolers are abandoning the science subjects.

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At what age does Korean university admissions actually end?

The answer: it starts at eighteen, and can run until twenty-two.

The 554,174 applicants for the 2026 CSAT break down like this.

🎓 2026 CSAT applicant composition (Korea Institute for Curriculum and Evaluation)

Group	Count	Share
Current high-school seniors	371,897	67.1%
Graduates (re-takers and beyond)	159,922	28.9%
GED and others	22,355	4.0%
Total	554,174	100%

So far this is just “nearly one in three is a re-taker.” But break it down by grade band, and the picture changes completely.

🔥 2026 CSAT: current students vs. re-takers by grade band (Jinhaksa admission-prediction user analysis)

Average grade (Korean/math/electives)	Current students	Re-takers
Grade 1	34.35%	65.65%
Grade 2	42.31%	57.69%
Grade 3	49.78%	50.22%
Grade 5	65.58%	34.42%
Grade 8	85.37%	14.63%

Two out of three students in the very top grade band are re-takers — even though current students outnumber graduates 2.3 to 1 overall. The pattern holds across subjects: 65.02% in the electives, 61.02% in math, 56.07% in Korean.

What this table says is blunt. To get into a top Korean department, you effectively have to plan around re-taking the exam. Getting into medicine or a contract department on a single senior-year attempt is statistically close to an exception. This is the point that feels strangest to a Western reader: university admission is not a one-off exam at 18 but a multi-year project designed to stretch into the early twenties.

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The people who pass Seoul National University and don't go

This is the hardest phenomenon in Korean admissions culture to explain: students who get into the country’s best university and choose not to enroll.

Among 2026 regular-admission successful applicants to Seoul National University’s natural-science track, 180 declined to enroll — the most in five years. Across Seoul National, Yonsei, and Korea universities combined, 1,495 regular-admission acceptances were declined, with natural sciences accounting for 1,047 of them (70%). Twelve SNU departments could not fill their freshman class, leaving 13 seats unfilled.

And the people leaving after enrolling are also growing.

The reason is almost always one thing: another run at medicine. Attending SNU’s engineering school while preparing again for the CSAT — bansu, “half-re-taking” — is common. More than eight in ten recorded dropout reasons are “career change or transfer.”

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How much does it cost — the polarization of private tutoring

In 2025, Korea’s total elementary-to-high-school private-tutoring spending was 27.5 trillion won. That was down 1.7 trillion won (5.7%) year on year — the first decline in five years.

But reading that decline as “competition eased” would be a misread.

💸 2025 private-tutoring spending, elementary to high school (Statistics Korea & Ministry of Education, March 2026)

Indicator	2025	Year on year
Total spending	27.5 trillion won	−5.7% (first decline in five years)
Monthly per student (all students)	458,000 won	−3.5%
Monthly per participating student	604,000 won	+2.0%
Participating student, general subjects	595,000 won	+7.9%
Tutoring participation rate	75.7%	−4.3%p

The total shrank mainly because the school-age population shrank. The participation rate also fell 4.3 percentage points. Yet spending per student who actually receives tutoring rose — and for general academic subjects, it rose 7.9%.

By school level, the monthly per-participating-student figures are 512,000 won for elementary, 632,000 won for middle, and 793,000 won for high school. That is a structure in which a family spends close to 800,000 won a month on a single high-school child.

The market is shrinking, and the households that pay are paying more. That is the one-line summary of private tutoring in Korea in 2025.

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Was the drama exaggerated? — SKY Castle and reality

Of all the content about Korean admissions culture, the one best known abroad is JTBC’s drama SKY Castle (2018–2019). It depicted upper-class families hiring an “admissions coordinator” at a nine-figure salary to get their children into Seoul National University’s medical school.

It opened at a 1.7% rating and finished at 23.8% — at the time, the highest ever for a non-terrestrial drama.

When it aired, many viewers said “surely it’s not that bad.” What happened after was the opposite: inquiries to admissions-consulting firms rose. The drama was consumed not as a warning but as a how-to guide.

Set against the 2026 numbers, it looks like this.

🎬 Fiction vs. reality

The drama’s premise	2026 reality
Extreme competition for SNU medicine	2,498 applicants for 6 medical-school seats (416.3 to 1)
A culture that treats re-taking as normal	65.65% of the top CSAT grade are graduates (per Jinhaksa)
Pressure that continues after entering a top school	180 SNU science-track acceptances declined
Expensive private tutoring	793,000 won a month per participating high schooler

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SKY, in-Seoul, jigeokguk — the hierarchy vocabulary that unlocks Korean articles

Korean media and online communities use a distinctive vocabulary to rank universities in tiers. Without knowing it, admissions articles are literally unreadable.

🏫 Korea's university hierarchy vocabulary

Term	Meaning	Nuance
SKY	Initials of Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei	The top three. Used neutrally but is also a symbol of rank
in-Seoul	Universities in Seoul	”in + Seoul” Konglish. The tier below SKY and above regional schools
jigeokguk	Regional flagship national universities	Pusan National, Kyungpook National, Chonnam National, etc. Neutral
jijapdae	”Miscellaneous regional colleges”	An obvious slur — always flag it as derogatory when quoting
bansu	Preparing for the CSAT again while enrolled in university	”Half re-take.” Often done without taking a leave of absence
N-susaeng	Umbrella term for re-takers on their Nth attempt	Covers second, third, and further attempts

Parts of the hierarchy are backed by actual data. Employment for Seoul-area university graduates is 71.3% against 67.7% elsewhere — a 3.6-percentage-point gap — and retention is 83.1% versus 80.5%. However, no official wage comparison exists between SKY, in-Seoul, and regional schools. National statistics only break figures down as Seoul-area versus non-Seoul-area.

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How to read all of this

A foreigner’s first reaction to Korean admissions is usually “why go that far?” But tear the individual choices apart one by one, and none of them is strange.

• If humanities employment is 61% and medicine is 79%, chasing a medical license is rational.
• If two-thirds of the top grade are re-takers, planning a re-take into the schedule is rational.
• If you judge a medical license more stable than an SNU engineering degree, declining the seat is rational.
• If universities hand out bonus points for the social-studies exam, switching to it is rational.

Every individual acts rationally, and the collective result moves in a direction nobody wanted. A country where a quarter of the science-exam registrants have vanished, while it aims to become a top-three AI power, is the compressed version of that.

And quiet cracks are appearing in the system, too. The share of high schoolers hoping to enter university sat in the 70% band for nearly a decade before dropping to 64.9% in 2025. Those planning to work rose from 7.0% in 2023 to 15.6% in 2025 — more than double. Even as the competition intensifies, the number of people leaving the arena itself is growing.

Which of these becomes the face of 2030s Korea — there is no data yet.

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