The South Korean Ministry of Education revealed this week that over 4,000 schools have shut down nationwide between 1980 and March 2025, responding to the rapid collapse of the child population in the past generation.
School enrollment in South Korea dwindled by nearly 5 million students during the same time period, according to the Korea Times, indicating that the school shutdowns are directly related to South Korea’s status as the world’s least fertile country.
“Elementary schools account for the majority of closures, with 3,674 shut down permanently, compared with 264 middle schools and 70 high schools,” the Korea Times reported. “Over the past five years alone, 158 schools have closed, and an additional 107 schools are projected to shut down over the next five years.”
The newspaper went on to note that studies by Korean government-linked experts indicated that the number of schools is expected to continue to fall through the end of the decade, educating over 800,000 fewer students in the next five years.
The newspaper, citing the Ministry of Education, identified the catastrophically low birth rate as the “chief reason” the school system is shrinking.
The remaining students, Education Ministry officials noted on Tuesday, are also struggling to stay in schools and, in many cases, to stay alive amid a wave of mental health and suicide cases. The Ministry revealed that it had documented 221 teen suicides in 2024, over 100 more than in 2021, over half of them in the greater Seoul area. The government of leftist President Lee Jae-Myung is treating the situation like an emergency, announcing plans to hire large numbers of mental health professionals for schools by 2030, expand counseling and hotline services to ensure 24-hour availability, and implement other measures.
The situation with schools mirrors reports that began surfacing in 2023 of a significant decrease in the number of available pediatric services in the country. As the number of babies being born declined, medical students began avoiding pediatrics as a lifetime career out of financial concern. Pediatricians, reports in 2023 noted, were paid less than peers in other medical fields and less than pediatricians in other countries — in addition to facing the concern of too small a pool of customers to support their business.
Concerns of a lack of appropriate medical care for children in the country were exacerbated by two horrors stories in 2023, both involving hospitals rejecting child patients due to a lack of appropriate staff. One case involved a 17-year-old girl who suffered a major head injury and died after being rejected by four hospitals; no hospital took her before her death. In the second case, a five-year-old died with a respiratory complication after also being rejected by four hospitals, though a fifth hospital took him in before his death.
The alarm about a lack of medical care for their potential children added to already existing anxieties that would-be Korean parents expressed to media about starting families, fueling the birth rate decline. South Korea recorded its first-ever decline in population in 2020, reporting 20,838 fewer people than in 2019. The population at the time stood at about 51.8 million people. The birth rate at the time was documented as 0.92, far lower than the 2.1 rate (meaning, an average of 2.1 children per childbearing woman) necessary for what is commonly referred to as “replacement fertility,” the number of children needed to mitigate deaths and ensure no change in the population.
In April 2025, the birth rate was documented as 0.79, the lowest in the world. Statistics Korea, a government agency, nonetheless reported the first good news on the birth rate front in June that the country had seen in some time — a modest increase in the raw number of childbirths in the country. Following the implementation of aggressive policies to encourage couples to start families under deposed conservative former President Yoon Suk-yeol, who declared the country in a state of “national demographic emergency,” South Korea documented an 8.7-percent increase in childbirths between April 2024 and April 2025. Yoon was impeached and ousted after attempting to impose martial law on the country in December 2024.
“The rise in births appears to be influenced by increased marriages since last year, growth in the population of women in their early 30s, and various birth promotion policies by the central and local governments,” Statistics Korea observed in June.
In addition to attempting to offer money and other incentives for couples to become parents, the South Korean government faces a culture increasingly hostile to children. The phenomenon of “no-kid zones” began emerging in 2023, typically including cafes and restaurants as well as other spaces often considered to be for children in the West, such as museums and libraries. Le Monde reported that “hundreds” of businesses in South Korea were identifying as “no-kid zones” by 2024, including the National Library of Korea.
While an extreme case, South Korea is far from the only country facing projected population decline as a result of low fertility rates. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) warned in its annual “State of the World Population Report” in June that the planet is facing a “fertility crisis” in part due to governments and societies offering inhospitable climates for couples to be able to afford and raise children.
“As policymakers and pundits raise the alarm about fertility rates, they often assume that if people are having children, it’s because they can and want to, and if they’re not it’s because they can’t or don’t want to,” UNFPA observed.
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