Despite topping the OECD for tertiary-educated 25 to 34 year olds, South Korea also has a third of its working-age adults scoring at the lowest levels of literacy — and the gap reflects both generations and ageing

South Korea leads the developed world on one measure of education and lags on another, and both facts describe the same country at the same moment.

Its young adults are the best-schooled in the OECD by tertiary attainment. Its older ones are among the weakest readers. 

Korea has the highest rate of tertiary education among young adults in the OECD. Some 71 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds have completed tertiary education, against an OECD average of 48 percent. Yet the same 2025 OECD reporting shows that 33 percent of Korea’s 25- to 64-year-olds read at or below Level 1. The OECD average is 27 percent.

The number that doesn’t fit

The low-literacy figure comes from the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills, published in December 2024, which assessed adults aged 16 to 65 on literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem solving. Scoring at or below Level 1 does not mean a person cannot read. At Level 1, adults can understand short texts and organised lists when information is clearly indicated; those below Level 1 can  understand short, simple sentences.

Because the two headline numbers sit in the same OECD reporting, they invite a tidy story about degrees that don’t reflect real skill. However, the low scorers and the high achievers are largely not the same people. They belong to different generations.

The generation that built the miracle

Korea recorded a particularly wide age gap in the survey. In the OECD’s words, “In literacy, adults aged 55-65 scored 55 points lower than 25-34 year-olds (OECD average: 30 points lower).” That is nearly double the typical gap between old and young across the countries surveyed.

Some of the gap does look like genuine ageing. Following comparable birth cohorts over time, adults who were 44 to 54 in the first survey round scored 42 points lower in literacy a decade later.

Part of the gap is also the story of who had access to more education. Korea’s older workers grew up before the country’s exceptional expansion in educational attainment had fully played out. Korea’s rapid expansion of education accompanied its economic development, leaving today’s workforce with unusually large differences in educational experience across generations. Their lower scores are not a verdict on their ability.

The generation that inherited it

The contrast with young Koreans is sharp. The country’s 16- to 24-year-olds averaged 276 points in literacy On schooling, the young are unmatched. Alongside the 71 percent tertiary rate, just 1 percent of Korean 25- to 34-year-olds have not finished upper secondary education, the lowest share in the OECD.

The speed of that shift is the point. Between the two survey rounds, Korea had both the largest increase in the share of 55- to 65-year-olds and the largest increase in the share of tertiary-educated adults among participating countries and economies. The result is a workforce spanning two very different educational worlds under one flag.

What the gap costs

Carrying both generations at once has a cost in the job market, and it is not confined to older workers. The employment rate for Korea’s tertiary-educated young adults is 80 percent, below the OECD average of 87 percent. Their unemployment rate is only about 4 percent, pointing instead to a significant share who are inactive, neither employed nor looking for work.

A 2022 OECD working paper by Randall S. Jones and Jinwoan Beom attributes low youth employment largely to “a mismatch between education and the labour market,” describing highly educated youth racing for credentials to secure attractive careers while older workers retire from jobs requiring less human capital. That is one paper’s analysis, not settled OECD consensus. But it names the same fault line the skills data traces: young people stacking degrees to chase desirable jobs.

What the OECD data does and doesn’t tell us

The comparison has real limits. The survey is a snapshot of test performance, not a full account of what anyone knows at work. Its lowest levels cover a range of readers, not a single problem. And the survey itself declines to blame the age gap on ageing alone. The numbers that follow comparable birth cohorts over time suggest both educational differences and ageing play a part, without cleanly separating the two.

The open question is what happens next. If generational replacement is a major part of the gap, it may narrow as older, less-schooled workers retire and highly educated younger workers take their place. But schooling and skill are not the same thing, and the cohort data shows that measured literacy can decline with age. Whether Korea’s reading gap closes with time, or reappears in a different form, is something the next survey will start to answer.