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The $14 Million Math Teacher

Every November, South Korea stops. Planes are grounded during the English listening section. Military training is suspended. Construction sites

By Conor Healy

June 9, 2026

$The $14 Million Math Teacher$

Every November, South Korea stops. Planes are grounded during the English listening section. Military training is suspended. Construction sites go quiet. Police cars escort students running late to exam halls. The entire country reorganises itself around a single nine-hour test.

The Suneung, officially the College Scholastic Ability Test, is how South Korea decides who gets into the top universities. Seoul National, Korea University, Yonsei: the SKY schools. Get in, and you’re on track for the chaebol jobs that define success. Miss by a few points, and you’re not.

The exam is meant to be the great equaliser. Work hard, study hard, succeed. A meritocracy machine.

Hyun Woo-jin earns $14 million a year teaching math. He just got indicted for bribery.

The Market the Exam Created

Hyun teaches at a hagwon, one of the private cram schools that run parallel to South Korea’s public education system. Students attend regular school during the day, hagwon in the evening, then self-study until midnight. Some start at age four.

The Suneung includes what teachers call “killer questions,” problems deliberately designed to fall outside the public school curriculum. These questions cannot be solved with classroom knowledge alone, which means the only way to learn how to answer them is to pay for private instruction. Hagwons exist to fill that gap.

A top hagwon instructor like Hyun commands celebrity status. He has fans, merchandise, waiting lists that fill within minutes. His annual earnings exceed those of Son Heung-min, the Premier League striker who is arguably South Korea’s most famous athlete. A math teacher out-earns a global football star because the market decided his knowledge is worth more.

That market created its own corruption. According to prosecutors, Hyun paid approximately 400 million won (~$290,000) to three public school teachers between 2020 and 2023 in exchange for exam questions. Forty-six people were indicted in the scandal. Some payments were routed through spouses’ bank accounts to avoid detection.

The system that made a math tutor worth $14 million is the same system that made bribing teachers a rational investment.

Killer Questions

The killer questions are why the hagwon market exists at the scale it does.

A typical killer question combines multiple advanced concepts in ways public schools do not teach. One recent example required students to understand the mathematical modelling of evolution to solve a problem about sequences. Another involved differential equations applied to graph theory. Teachers interviewed by the Korea Herald described them as “arduously difficult” and requiring “university-level knowledge.”

The government knows this is a problem. In 2023, Education Minister Lee Ju-ho announced the removal of killer questions from the Suneung, arguing they gave unfair advantage to students who could afford private tutoring. The logic was explicit: the exam included material not taught in public schools, which meant success required money, not just merit.

The announcement did not hold. By 2025, the exam was so difficult that the official in charge of administering it resigned. “We sincerely accept the criticism that the difficulty of questions was inappropriate,” said Suneung chief Oh Seung-geol before stepping down. Only four of the twelve Suneung chiefs since 1993 have served their full three-year terms. Most resign over question errors or difficulty controversies.

The cycle has repeated for years: government announces reform, exam difficulty persists anyway, the hagwon market grows, and occasionally someone gets arrested.

Wealth Disguised as Ability

South Korea’s education system presents itself as pure meritocracy. The Suneung is standardised, administered on the same day to every student under identical conditions, scored objectively, ranked clearly.

But the killer questions reveal what the system actually measures. A student from a wealthy family in Gangnam can afford years of elite hagwon training. A student from a rural province with a single public school cannot. Both take the same test. One has spent hundreds of hours learning how to decode problems the other has never seen.

According to the Korea Herald, teachers acknowledge that killer questions “can only be solved through the help of private tutoring.” An English teacher at a public school in Cheongju explained: “It’s a race against time. Students have to solve each problem within two minutes, but schools don’t train students this way. Only hagwon do.”

The exam filters for wealth disguised as ability. The meritocracy machine produces an aristocracy.

Planes Grounded, Tutors Indicted

Police booked 126 people in early 2026 for selling Suneung questions to hagwons and private tutors. The scandal implicated teachers, instructors, and intermediaries across the country. The amounts involved ran into millions of won per transaction, with some relationships spanning years.

South Korea’s obsession with the Suneung is often attributed to Confucian values or cultural emphasis on education. The simpler explanation is economic. Admission to a top university remains the clearest path to a stable, well-paying career. When a single exam can determine economic trajectory for life, parents will spend whatever it takes to shift the odds.

The Suneung costs South Korean families an estimated $20 billion annually in private tutoring. That figure does not include the opportunity cost of childhoods spent studying, or the mental health burden on students. South Korea has the highest suicide rate among OECD nations, and education pressure is frequently cited as a contributing factor.

Grounding planes for a nine-hour exam says something about national priorities. Paying a math tutor more than a Premier League striker says something about incentive structures. Indicting that tutor for bribing teachers says something about where those structures lead. The system is working exactly as designed. The outcomes are what you would expect.

The Suneung was designed to create equal opportunity. It created a $14 million math teacher instead.