Last month, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released statistics for 2009 in which Japan ranked 31 out of 31 developed countries in terms of the portion of GDP spent by the public sector on education. It was the third straight year that Japan placed last.
As pointed out by the Mainichi Shimbun, the most important implication is that Japanese parents still pay a lot of money to educate their kids. The Ministry of Internal Affairs says that in 2010 the average household of more than two people spent ¥1.91 million on education, which was about ¥700,000 less than the amount spent in 2009 owing to the fact that the ruling party abolished tuition for public high schools that year. Nevertheless, this amount represented 37.7 percent of average annual income in Japan. The OECD says that private spending on education accounts for 31.9 percent of all funding for education, which is a lot, but in two other countries private expenditures count for even more: Chile and South Korea.
In Korea, in fact, household spending on education has become a serious social issue, since it is related to competition for acceptance to elite universities. Korean education is respected worldwide because of high achievement test scores, but for the most part children who do well academically receive much of their education in cram schools and with private tutors, which means richer students have a clear advantage. The situation is similar to Japan's in that an education industry sprang up to take advantage of a perceived need and subsequently came to supplant the education system it was designed to supplement.