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It is well-known that Korean students’ performance belongs to the top group in international competence tests such as OECD’s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), which have been testing fifteen-yearold students from the OECD member countries in reading, mathematics and science every three years since 2000. Recently, the OECD implemented a similar test for adults during the period from 2011 to 2012, called PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies), where the competence or skill levels of 16_65-year-old adults are measured in the three areas of literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technologyrich environment skills. Surprisingly, the performance of Korea’s adult population in the PIAAC test was quite disappointing. In contrast to the stellar performance of the Korean youth in PISA, Korean adults’ skill levels turned out to be slightly lower than the OECD averages. Furthermore, the gap between Korean skill level and the OECD average widens as the population gets older. We are motivated by this puzzling fact and attempt to explore the features of Korean adult skill levels from the PIAAC data. In particular, we focus on establishing empirical patterns of age–skill profile after controlling for a rich set of confounding factors rather than establishing the causal relationship. However, we will provide a benchmark study so as to infer that weak life-long learning is the key fundamental problem for the Korean education system and labor market. It would be difficult to establish a solid causal inference about the relationship between skill levels and age simply from observing that the skill level decreases in age from PIAAC. Such observation may indicate that the skill level deteriorates as people get older, which can be interpreted as a ‘depreciation’ of human capital stock with age for some reasons. However, this may also indicate that younger generations are more skilled than older generations. That is, it might indicate that there has been improvement in skill across cohorts during Korea’s development process. To distinguish between the two possible interpretations, we need to use panel data. PIAAC, however, provides a cross-sectional data at the moment so that the empirical pattern about the cross-sectional age–skill profile from PIAAC does not clearly tell us about the precise interpretation.

Goldin and Katz (2008) called the twentieth century the era of American human capital and argued that the U.S. economic dominance in the twentieth century was possible because the U.S. surpassed Europe in terms of education. Similarly, the second half of the twentieth century was an era of Korea’s triumph in terms of human capital accumulation, which was recognized by the Nobel Laureate economist Robert Lucas (1993) and also by the former U.S. President Barack Obama. Korea’s successful educational development has been praised not only by such global leading figures but also by various international communities and developing countries. During this period, Korea transformed itself from a poor and aid-dependent nation to a donor country providing development assistance to others. This was possible in large part by the human capital accumulation through the rapid expansion of education (Kim, K-H., 2013). For the last half century, Korea showed the fastest educational expansion in the world and reached the world’s top level in terms of average years of schooling, performance in international academic achievement tests, and number of researchers per population. Yet Korea still faces quality problems in higher education that is not apparent in quantitative indicators. For example, Korean research universities have yet to reach the world’s top level in terms of research impacts; colleges are vertically differentiated based on admission test scores, and the horizontal differentiation through specialization and industry–academia cooperation are still weak. Korean primary and secondary schools place strong emphasis on cognitive skills that are measurable through test scores, and their test score performance of those skills are in fact superb. However, the emphasis on measurable cognitive skills in Korean schools seems excessive, lacking sophisticated evaluation criteria and supporting conditions for developing students’ creative thinking, character skills, and effective on-the-job social skills.