Ethnic System of Supplementary Education

A relatively recent entrepreneurial development in the Chinese and Korean immigrant communities in the United States has been in an unconventional area—supplementary education. The education enterprise in the United States is normally considered a public good and is rarely seen in immigrant entrepreneurship. However, in the past 2 decades, the proliferation of for-profit private institutions serving children and youth is increasingly noticeable in the Chinese and Korean immigrant communities in major metropolitan areas in the United States, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.

These institutions include buxiban, hagwon, and kumon. Buxiban (tutoring in Chinese) and hagwon (“study place” in Korean) are generally referred to as after-school academic tutoring. Kumon is a Japanese learning method and a sort of supplemental after-school program, aiming to ...