More than 800 students dropped out of general high schools in Seoul's Gangnam, Seocho and Songpa districts in the past academic year, with first-year students subject to the newly introduced five-tier school grading system accounting for nearly 60% of them. Analysts say many likely concluded they could not reach the top tier and quit to focus on preparing for the national college entrance exam.
An analysis of 2026 data on dropout rates and reasons by administrative district, compiled by the Korean Educational Development Institute's education statistics service, showed 816 students at general high schools in the three districts left school during the 2025 academic year, which ran from March 2025 through February 2026.
Gangnam District had the most at 312, followed by Songpa at 272 and Seocho at 232. The total represents 2.59% of the 31,552 students enrolled at general high schools in the three districts. The figure also accounts for 28.3% of the 2,884 general high school dropouts across Seoul, even though the three districts hold 21.2% of the city's general high school students, pointing to a concentration of dropouts in the area.
By district, Seocho recorded the highest dropout rate in Seoul at 3.15% among the city's 25 districts, followed by Gangnam at 2.56%, Jongno at 2.38%, Yongsan at 2.28% and Songpa at 2.27%.
The trend was most pronounced among first-year students. According to 2026 disclosures on the School Info portal, 473 first-year students left general high schools in the three districts, including 184 in Gangnam, 160 in Songpa and 129 in Seocho. That means first-year students made up 58.0% of the 816 total. Among the 10,545 first-year students at general high schools in the three districts, 4.49% dropped out, roughly 1.7 times the overall rate of 2.59% for all grades.
First-year students in the 2025 academic year were the first to be graded under the five-tier system, which replaced the previous nine-tier system for high school internal assessments.
Admissions consultants say students who failed to place in the top 10%, the threshold for the first tier under the new system, likely judged that they could not recover their grades in the remaining years and chose to leave school to go all in on the entrance exam.
The pressure may be greater in the three districts, where top-performing students are heavily concentrated and competition for internal grades is especially fierce, they said.
"Under the nine-tier system, the cumulative thresholds for the first, second and third tiers were the top 4%, 11% and 23%, so students could set a goal of moving up one step at a time," said Lim Sung-ho, chief executive of Jongno Academy. "Under the five-tier system, the first tier is the top 10% and the second tier extends to a cumulative 34%. From a student's perspective, the barrier to moving from the second tier to the first can feel far too high."
