Stars · music
Jisoo and Jungkook went to the same arts high school
Four Hands, Two Sonatas — the Korean drama that broke into the world's 1,000 most-read Wikipedia articles this week — is set in an arts high school. Those schools are real. We counted 366 Korean stars across seven of them.
The table this is written from: /school
Four Hands, Two Sonatas (포핸즈) entered the thousand most-read articles on English Wikipedia on 30 August, at rank 340 with 15,420 reads — one of only two Korean articles in that list that day.
It is set in an arts high school.
Those schools exist, and a surprising share of the people whose names you already know went to one.
The seven arts high schools
Of the 4,535 Korean entertainers in our roster with a school on record, 366 attended an arts high school.
| School | People | Names you may know |
|---|---|---|
| School of Performing Arts Seoul | 125 | Jisoo, Jungkook, Kang Seul-gi |
| Hanlim Multi Art School | 123 | Kim Da-hyun, Cha Eun-woo, Krystal Jung |
| Anyang Arts High School | 42 | Oh Yeon-seo, Park So-yeon, Im Soo-hyang |
| Kaywon High School of Arts | 22 | Kim Go-eun, Cho Seung-woo, Oh Na-ra |
| Korea Art High School | 20 | Yoon Bo-mi, Choi Young-jae, Raina |
| Lila Art High School | 18 | Park Ji-yeon, Luna, Hyelim |
| Sunhwa Arts High School | 16 | Sumi Jo, Moon Chae-won, Park Han-byul |
Two schools hold 248 of the 366 — two thirds of everyone in this category went to one of two buildings.
Blackpink and BTS, same corridor
Jisoo of Blackpink and Jungkook of BTS both attended the School of Performing Arts Seoul. So did Kang Seul-gi of Red Velvet, and 122 others in our roster.
We cannot tell you whether any of them overlapped. Wikidata records the school but rarely the years, so “same school” here means the same institution across an unknown span of time — not the same classroom.
What it does mean is that one school in Guro-gu, Seoul has 125 people in a roster of 9,249 Korean entertainers. Nothing else in our school data concentrates like that except the universities.
The universities are bigger still
| School | People | Names |
|---|---|---|
| Seoul Institute of the Arts | 352 | Cho Jung-seok, Bae Suzy, Park Seo-joon |
| Korea National University of Arts | 115 | Suho, Kim Go-eun, Park So-dam |
| Dong-Ah Institute of Media and Arts | 82 | Yim Si-wan, Kwon Eun-bi, Zico |
| Baekseok Arts University | 34 | Minzy, Pyo Ye-jin, Ken |
| Chugye University for the Arts | 23 | Moon Chae-won, Lee Hae-ri, Park Hyun-bin |
| Seorabeol Art College | 23 | Lee Jung-gil, Park Geun-hyung, Sunwoo Yong-nyeo |
Six arts universities account for 629 people. Together with the high schools, 995 of 4,535 — 21.9% — of Korean entertainers with a recorded school went to an arts institution.
Kim Go-eun appears twice, at Kaywon High School of Arts and then Korea National University of Arts. People with both a school and a university on record are counted once in each row, which is why the two tables overlap.
The half we cannot see
This is the part that decides how much the 21.9% is worth.
4,714 people in our roster have no school recorded at all — slightly more than the 4,535 who do. If arts-school alumni are more likely to have that fact written down (and there is a plausible reason they would be: a school with famous alumni maintains the list), then 21.9% is too high. If the missing half looks like the visible half, it holds.
We cannot tell which, and we are not going to pick the reading that makes the number sound better. The count is 995 out of 4,535 recorded. That is the sentence we can defend.
Where to look next
Every school above has its own page here with the full roster, not just the three names we picked — the schools index lists all 55 institutions with at least 15 people. If you came here from the drama, the roster is the part worth opening.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Wikidata — Educated at (P69) for Korean entertainers, and the school type (P31) for each institution named · https://query.wikidata.org/
- Wikimedia — Pageviews top-1000 per day, en.wikipedia, for the drama's rank · https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/
What we checked
- Our roster holds 9,249 Korean entertainers. 4,535 of them have a school recorded on Wikidata and 4,714 do not. Everything on this page is counted out of the 4,535 — a school with no entry is unrecorded, not absent, and the missing half is larger than the half we can see.
- A school is listed on our site only once at least 15 people in the roster attended it. 1,474 schools fell under that line and are not on any page here. A star's own school may be one of them.
- High school versus university was decided by each institution's own type on Wikidata, not by its English name. All thirteen arts institutions resolved to a type; none were left unclassified.
- Attending is not graduating, and Wikidata does not distinguish the two. Someone who enrolled and left counts the same as someone who finished.
What we left out, and why
- When each person attended. Wikidata records the school but usually not the years, so we cannot say who overlapped with whom.
- What they studied. Department and major are not recorded for most of the roster.
- Whether the school made any difference. We counted where people went, which says nothing about cause.
The data behind this
Written from the same data
Take this away — 10 cards
The figures in this article, as images. Free to repost with the address on them.
If you work in this business
Everything on this page is measured from the same weekly Netflix lists, per market and per title. We publish the pages free; what we sell is the same measurement cut to one company's catalogue — including the figures behind /school and /person.
What a company sheet contains, and what it cannot tell you →