Record number of new PhD holders face low-wage trap in Korea

A graduate walks up the steps at Sookmyung Girls’s College in Yongsan District, Seoul. Korea Occasions file

The variety of new doctorate holders in Korea hit a document excessive of almost 20,000 final yr, however an rising proportion of those extremely educated professionals are taking low-wage jobs in a labor market structurally incapable of absorbing them.

In response to information launched Tuesday by the Korea Training Statistics Service underneath the Korean Academic Growth Institute, 19,831 people earned a Ph.D. from home graduate colleges in 2025.

This marks a 51.6-percent surge in comparison with 2015, the very best because the institute started monitoring information in 1999.

When information started in 1999, the nation produced simply 5,586 new doctorates yearly. That quantity steadily elevated, surpassing the ten,000-mark in 2010 earlier than almost doubling once more over the next 15 years.

Girls largely drove the surge, accounting for a record-high 43.5 p.c of all new Ph.D. recipients final yr with 8,629 graduates. In 1999, only one,144 girls earned a doctorate, representing 20.5 p.c of the full. The newest determine displays a 7.5-fold enhance over the previous 26 years.

Regardless of holding superior levels, a rising share of those graduates are discovering themselves trapped in low-wage work. Among the many 7,005 new Ph.D. recipients who discovered work final yr, 10.4 p.c reported an annual wage beneath 20 million gained ($13,638). That’s up 4.1 proportion factors from 6.3 p.c in 2011, a drop in actual revenue that’s even steeper when accounting for inflation.

The wage disaster disproportionately impacts these from non-STEM fields. The humanities and humanities sector reported the very best proportion of poorly paid Ph.D. holders at 26.8 p.c. Training adopted at 19 p.c, with social sciences, journalism and data research at 14.9 p.c. Agriculture, forestry and fisheries recorded 11.1 p.c, whereas the providers sector stood at 10.6 p.c.

Labor specialists attribute the bottleneck to a structural mismatch within the job market.

This synthetic intelligence-generated chart reveals the proportion of newly employed Ph.D. recipients in Korea incomes an annual wage beneath 20 million gained ($13,638) throughout non-STEM fields in 2025.

Track Chang-yong, a senior analysis fellow on the Korea Analysis Institute for Vocational Training and Coaching, famous that the home high-skilled labor market can solely take up between 2,000 and three,000 Ph.D.-level employees yearly, and people positions are closely skewed towards science and engineering.

“Nonetheless, there are additionally a substantial variety of individuals whose aim is the doctorate diploma itself, so the low-wage drawback of Ph.D. holders needs to be interpreted by contemplating a number of complicated elements,” Track stated.

This text from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Occasions, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Occasions.