Heterogeneous relationships between family private education spending and youth academic performance in Korea

Private education in Korea, a country with one of the largest private education systems in the world, is a double-edged sword: it is culturally and socioeconomically indispensable to the youth, but financially onerous to the family. An in-depth examination of this topic is warranted due to inconsistency in the relationship between informal education and youth academic outcomes. The current exploratory study attempted to clarify this ambiguous relationship between family spending on private education and self-reported academic performance scores using quantile regression techniques and a nationally representative sample of Korean youth (N = 2,120). The methodological advantage of using quantile regression is that it allows exploration of whether the magnitude of the association between family spending on private education and academic scores differs across quantiles of academic performance. The concave representation of relationship sizes across the distribution of academic scores indicated that the magnitude is greatest around the median of the academic performance distribution, whereas the size of the coefficient is smallest at the extreme ends. In other words, reliance on mean-based results may have masked the full picture of the heterogeneous association between family spending in private education and youth academic performance. Our findings may help direct targeted strategies for improving youth academic outcomes.