The demographic extent of the exit of pre-college children from South Korea for early study abroad (ESA) is perhaps unparalleled in world history. This veritable “education exodus” offers a window on the challenges of globalization with, in some cases, sobering impacts on children, family life, and education. In South Korea, it has now become commonplace for families to leave the country and to take their children abroad to study in abroad. “Early study abroad” (chogi yuhak), which began as the movement of upper middle class children to North America, is today the exodus of pre-college children from much of the class spectrum who move abroad for stints long and short across much of the globe.
The chapters in this volume attend to this new and distinct chapter of educational migration. The authors utilize a wide range of methodological approaches including analysis of quantitative survey data, media discourse analysis, and qualitative ethnography. Their field sites include neighborhoods, schools, and churches in Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States. Together, they underscore the considerable diversity of ESA, distinguished by heterogeneity of class and destination; the considerable change in ideas about and expectations of ESA as it comes of age; and the on-the-ground effects of ESA on the ecology of the “Korean” family as is takes new forms.