Originally Posted by withchemicals

You're wrong! Most Korean native students are not educated at all (especially the rich ones). There's a reason why many of the brightest Korean students come to the US for their studies. Korean education is too structured upon grades and degrees from "top universities" (those top universities are not even comparable to the top 50 universities in the US). The issue with Korean education is that the richest can pay for the national exam courses while the poor cannot, and so the richest students do indeed get into the top 3 universities in Korea. Afterwards, they only party and mess around since all you need to get a fine job in Korea is a degree from either of the 3 top universities. It's no wonder Korea is lagging behind in sciences.

This is a double-edged sword because it means that motivated DREAMers like you and I could easily enter the better universities through exams and hard work. This would be a huge generalization, but my experiences with Korean foreign students mostly show that the hardworking ones are here in the US to stay while the rich and spoiled ones attend mid-tier universities in the US and then simply return to Korea. If Korean DREAMers were forced to return, they'd easily topple the average students in Korea, so don't fret too much.

All of what I said above is too generalized (of course there are great students in Korea too), but it's true that Korean students are a bit too focused on beating the education system rather than thinking. A lot of them struggle when they enter US universities because they're used to the immense amount of information they need to memorize rather than using that information to critically think on exams, etc. I'm only scared about the language barrier if I do have to return to Korea since my Korean is only useful for casual encounters.