However, Lee said her heart sank when Min-joo began forgetting her Korean grammar and stopped calling home.
Still, she did not want to leave her husband behind to join her daughter, because she had witnessed in her own neighborhood how often the loneliness of “goose” fathers led to broken marriages.
“Our family was losing its bonds, becoming just a shell,” she said.
In June, they brought Min-joo home, and they plan to enroll her in one of the international boarding schools in Jeju, often Romanized as Cheju.
“There is an expressed desire in Korea to seek the benefits of a ‘Western’ or ‘American’ approach to precollegiate education,” said Ted Hill, headmaster of the Chadwick School, whose Songdo campus has been deluged with applicants to fill the 30 percent of slots reserved for Koreans.
Other students will be recruited from expatriate families in South Korea and China.
English proficiency and a diploma from a top US university are important status markers in South Korea. The country sends more nonimmigrant students — 113,519 in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 last year — to the US than any other country except China, according to the US Office of Immigration Statistics.
In a 2008 survey by South Korea’s National Statistical Office, 48.3 percent of South Korean parents said they wanted to send their children abroad to “develop global perspectives,” avoid the rigid domestic school system or learn English. More than 12 percent wanted it for their children as early as elementary school.
Critics say that the Jeju schools — with annual tuitions of US$17,000 to US$25,800 and their English-language curriculum, aside from the Korean-language and history classes for Korean students — will create “schools for the rich.”
However, Kwon Do-yeop, a vice minister of land, transport and maritime affairs whose department oversees the project, said it could save South Korea US$500 million annually in what is now being spent to educate children overseas.
Jimmy Hong, a graduate of Middlesex University in London and now a marketing official at LG Electronics in Seoul, said that when he returned in 2008, he enrolled in a business master’s degree program at Yonsei University in Seoul to help compensate for his lack of local school connections.
“I feared I might be ostracized for studying abroad,” he said.
RSS