Record number of new PhD holders face low-wage trap in Korea

A graduate walks up the stairs at Sookmyung Women's University in Yongsan District, Seoul. Korea Times file

The number of new doctorate holders in Korea hit a record high of nearly 20,000 last year, but an increasing percentage of these highly educated professionals are taking low-wage jobs in a labor market structurally incapable of absorbing them.

According to data released Tuesday by the Korea Education Statistics Service under the Korean Educational Development Institute, 19,831 individuals earned a Ph.D. from domestic graduate schools in 2025.

This marks a 51.6-percent surge compared to 2015, the highest since the institute began tracking data in 1999.

When records began in 1999, the country produced just 5,586 new doctorates annually. That number steadily increased, surpassing the 10,000-mark in 2010 before nearly doubling again over the following 15 years.

Women largely drove the surge, accounting for a record-high 43.5 percent of all new Ph.D. recipients last year with 8,629 graduates. In 1999, only 1,144 women earned a doctorate, representing 20.5 percent of the total. The latest figure reflects a 7.5-fold increase over the past 26 years.

Despite holding advanced degrees, a growing share of these graduates are finding themselves trapped in low-wage work. Among the 7,005 new Ph.D. recipients who found work last year, 10.4 percent reported an annual salary below 20 million won ($13,638). That is up 4.1 percentage points from 6.3 percent in 2011, a drop in real income that is even steeper when accounting for inflation.

The wage crisis disproportionately affects those from non-STEM fields. The arts and humanities sector reported the highest proportion of poorly paid Ph.D. holders at 26.8 percent. Education followed at 19 percent, with social sciences, journalism and information studies at 14.9 percent. Agriculture, forestry and fisheries recorded 11.1 percent, while the services sector stood at 10.6 percent.

Labor experts attribute the bottleneck to a structural mismatch in the job market.

This artificial intelligence-generated chart shows the proportion of newly employed Ph.D. recipients in Korea earning an annual salary below 20 million won ($13,638) across non-STEM fields in 2025.

Song Chang-yong, a senior research fellow at the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training, noted that the domestic high-skilled labor market can only absorb between 2,000 and 3,000 Ph.D.-level workers annually, and those positions are heavily skewed toward science and engineering.

"However, there are also a considerable number of people whose goal is the doctorate degree itself, so the low-wage problem of Ph.D. holders should be interpreted by considering multiple complex factors," Song said.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.