Seoul cram schools chase Samsung, SK Hynix chip bonuses

Cram schools in Seoul now sell semiconductor crash courses the way they used to sell med-school prep, and the boom is being driven by teenagers chasing the specific jobs Samsung and SK Hynix are hiring for, according to the Financial Times.

The numbers show how fast the market has shifted. At Korea Semiconductor Meister High School, the admission competition ratio rose to "1.67-to-1 from 0.88-to-1 last year." At Chungbuk Semiconductor High School, 96.4% of students are graduating with a job offer in hand. Private fabrication programs charge up to 1 million won for courses as short as a week, and one reported waitlist runs 12,000 deep. Sales of prep books for Samsung's proprietary hiring exam rose 40 percent on-year in the first quarter.

The pay is what pulls them in. SK Hynix agreed with its labor union to distribute 10% of operating profits to employees, which reporting says "translates to an extra $476,000 per employee this year." A Fortune account describes teenagers landing six-figure Samsung jobs at 17 with bonuses of up to $400,000.

The pull is reshaping the university system too. Semiconductor majors run jointly with Samsung and SK Hynix have overtaken Seoul National University's natural sciences programs in this year's entrance scores, per The Korea Herald. Hanyang University's department, tied to SK Hynix, scored 98, just above the average cutoff for provincial medical schools. South Korea now has 58 vocational high schools, four of them focused on semiconductors, with another set to open in Seoul in March 2027 and one in Yongin in 2028.

It is one of a run of AI-chip labor-market stories in our chips feed (330 chip items in the past 90 days): before Samsung and SK Hynix hit their capacity targets they need bodies, and a country long famous for funneling its top students into medicine is redirecting them onto the fab floor.