The Only Reason I Want My Child to Study in the United States

Today, I want to talk about a topic that came to mind during a conversation with a friend in Korea. What is the best part about having our children study in the United States?

Of course, there are reasons related to language and various benefits that can be gained from growing up in a diverse cultural environment, but if I were to pinpoint just one reason, it would be as follows.

What is the one reason to have our children study in the United States?

The word I want to focus on today is “limit”. The graph on the left represents the unemployment rate in the United States, and the graph on the right represents the number of currently employed people.

You can see that the unemployment rate rose during the pandemic and has now recovered to pre-COVID levels. The job market also changed with the pandemic, but it has now recovered to pre-COVID levels. The graph above shows how many jobs a person who is not currently employed can hold in the United States. To conclude, a jobless person can hold about 1.8 jobs. This means that the U.S. job market can accommodate all current unemployed people and still have room to spare.

A characteristic of the Korean job market is that the employment rate for the economic backbone, the 30-40 age group, has decreased, while employment for those over 60 has increased. In other words, it’s a tough job market for young people in Korea. The reason I’m showing you these graphs is not just because the job prospects in the United States are bright. All of this is just background information for the story I’m about to unfold. If you look at the graph representing the Annual Salary in the United States, you’ll see that many people earn a median salary, and the distribution of lower and higher salaries is less. If we look at the data based on the starting salary after graduating from college and getting a job, on the left is Korea, and on the right is the United States.

The average top salary in Korea is 51 million won, in the United States it’s about $78,155, the median average salary is 35 million won in Korea, $45,996 in the United States, and the lower average salary is 28 million won in Korea, $24,048 in the United States. It’s worth noting that in Korea, the sample was business majors from universities ranked in the top 10, and in the United States, it was business majors from universities ranked in the top 30. I’m not simply trying to say that salaries in the United States are higher than in Korea.

The one reason I want to mention is the one reason to have our children study in the United States! It’s that the environment for setting one’s own limits is different. The biggest difference between a student who studied in the United States and a student who studied in Korea at the time of graduating from college is that they set the upper limit when defining their own limits. In the case of students who studied in the United States, I found that they tend to set the upper limit of their own limits very high. This is the one reason I think our children should study in the United States. An environment where you can set an upper limit that surpasses your limits could be a great advantage for the United States. This is the message I give to the high school students who attend our academy, and when they grow up and start studying in college.

Don’t define your limits based on the values you currently have, and don’t limit your abilities to what you can see right now. Being able to grow into a person who can surpass their limits without limiting their abilities in the land of the United States, which has many opportunities, is the greatest advantage. This is the reason why it has become the greatest benefit for students who have studied and grown up in the United States. I urge you to remember this, and with that, I will conclude today.

A-One Institute will strive to be an educational institution that takes advantage of the various strengths that students can gain from the environment, not just their academic aspects.

Thank you.