The biggest Korean arts school is not the K-pop idol school
Seoul Institute of the Arts has 352 people in our roster, more than any school. Twenty-eight are in a group. School of Performing Arts Seoul has 102.
The table this is written from: /school
Wikidata records where 4,535 of the Korean actors, singers and songwriters in our roster went to school. It separately records which of them belong to a music group. Those two columns have never been read together, so we read them together.
1,106 of the 4,535 — 24.4 per cent — are in a music group. That is the number to hold on to, because almost every school sits a long way from it in one direction or the other.
The largest school is an actors’ school
| School | People recorded | In a music group | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seoul Institute of the Arts | 352 | 28 | 8% |
| Chung-Ang University | 310 | 17 | 5% |
| Dongduk Women’s University | 206 | 48 | 23% |
| Dongguk University | 200 | 25 | 13% |
| Kyung Hee University | 145 | 51 | 35% |
| Dankook University | 143 | 16 | 11% |
| School of Performing Arts Seoul | 125 | 102 | 82% |
| Hanlim Multi Art School | 123 | 99 | 80% |
Seoul Institute of the Arts is the most-recorded school in Korean entertainment by a wide margin. It is also, on this column, one of the least idol-shaped places in the country: eight per cent, a third of the roster average.
School of Performing Arts Seoul has 125 people recorded against its name — barely a third of Seoul Institute’s total — and 102 of them are in a group. Hanlim Multi Art School is the same shape: 123 people, 99 in groups.
Two schools account for 201 of the 1,106 idols with a school recorded — 18 per cent of them. Five schools account for 31 per cent. The other 632 schools that produced at least one share the rest.
The highest shares belong to schools that are not really schools in the usual sense
| School | People recorded | In a music group | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global Cyber University | 24 | 23 | 96% |
| Korea Art High School | 20 | 19 | 95% |
| Kyung Hee Cyber University | 35 | 29 | 83% |
| School of Performing Arts Seoul | 125 | 102 | 82% |
| Hanlim Multi Art School | 123 | 99 | 80% |
| Howon University | 29 | 18 | 62% |
| Dong-Ah Institute of Media and Arts | 82 | 45 | 55% |
Two of the top three are online universities. Six schools in the whole file have “Cyber” in the name and together they account for 57 group members. That is not an incidental detail: a performer already working full time cannot attend lectures, and the online degree is the form of higher education that fits a schedule set by a company. The share does not measure teaching. It measures who can enrol.
Korea Art High School sits at 95 per cent on 20 people. We are reporting it because the number is what the file says, and flagging it because twenty is a small base — one different person moves it five points.
What this does not say
It does not say a school makes idols. Wikidata is filled in by volunteers, and a famous group member is more likely to have a school recorded than a session musician who never charted. The same bias runs the other way for actors, who are covered heavily by film databases.
It also does not say anything about 4,714 people — more than half the roster — because no school is recorded for them at all. A school with three entries here may have taught three hundred people.
What the file does support is narrower and still worth saying plainly: among the people whose schooling is written down, the places that recur for idols and the places that recur for actors are different places, and the largest name in Korean performing-arts education is on the actors’ side of that line.
Every school we hold, with the people counted from each, is listed on our schools page. Birthdays for the same roster are at born on.
Where these numbers come from
Sources
- Wikidata — SPARQL — Korean actors, singers and songwriters (P27 = South Korea, occupation in actor / singer / songwriter and related), read for P69 (educated at) and P463 (member of). 9,249 people in the roster; schools recorded for 4,535 of them · https://query.wikidata.org
What we checked
- The two columns come from two separate reads of Wikidata made on the same day, joined on the person's Q identifier rather than on a name, so a person is never matched by spelling
- The first run of this join returned zero idols at every school. That figure was impossible, so the join was checked before the number was used: the school file is keyed by row index with the Q identifier inside the row, not by the Q identifier itself. The corrected join is the one reported here
- Every school total in this article is recomputed from the raw rows rather than read from our own school pages
What we left out, and why
- 4,714 of the 9,249 people in the roster have no school recorded in Wikidata. Nothing here describes them, and a school with few entries may simply be a school Wikidata editors have not filled in
- The difference between attending, graduating and enrolling. Wikidata's educated at property does not separate them, so neither do we
- Any judgement about which school is better. This counts what is recorded, not what is taught
- 1,055 of the 1,519 schools have exactly one person recorded. They are counted in the totals but no school is described from a single entry
The data behind this
Written from the same data
Take this away — 8 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 /born-on.
What a company sheet contains, and what it cannot tell you →