The Korean school with the most alumni travels the least

We have known for a while which Korean school has the most alumni on screen. We had never asked how far those alumni’s work actually travels.

Two files answer it together. Wikidata records where 4,535 Korean actors, singers and songwriters went to school. Netflix’s weekly country files record, for 636 of the people we track, every title that reached a country’s Top 10 and how many countries it reached. Joined on each person’s Wikidata identifier, they give a school-by-school answer.

The school with the most alumni in the set has almost the lowest reach of any school we can measure.

Twenty-three schools have enough people to measure

All twenty-three are listed. Nothing is left out of this table.

The remaining 332 schools in the join have fewer than five people in the Netflix set. They are not ranked here at all, because a median drawn from two or three people is a person, not a school.

The two largest schools sit at opposite ends

Chung-Ang University and Seoul Institute of the Arts are the two biggest suppliers of people to this set — 52 and 51. They are 19 countries apart.

Seoul Institute of the Arts is the largest arts school in the country by almost any count. In our roster it has 352 people, more than any other school. In the Netflix set it has 51 — again the kind of number no small school reaches. And the median title of those 51 people reached 16 countries.

Dongguk University has 32 people in the set. Their median title reached 41.5.

This is not one person’s number

The obvious objection is that a school’s figure is really one famous graduate. That objection is testable, so we tested it: the last column of the table removes each school’s single widest-reaching person and recomputes the median.

Seoul Institute of the Arts goes from 16 to 14. Removing its widest person makes it lower, not higher. Dongguk goes from 41.5 to 40. Chung-Ang, from 35 to 34.

The schools where the objection does hold are visible in the same column. Anyang Arts High School drops from 29.5 to 13 once Shin Ye-eun is removed — that school’s figure is one person. Daejin University drops from 43 to 25 without Lee You-mi, whose widest title reached 93 countries. Those two rows should be read as being about a person, not a school.

The rows at the top and the rows at the bottom hold.

What a low number here does not mean

A median of 16 countries is not a small career. It is a career whose most widely distributed title was seen in 16 of the 94 countries Netflix publishes lists for — which is most of a continent.

It also measures only one channel. Seoul Institute of the Arts is a school with a large music and stage presence, and this file cannot see a stage. A singer whose work never entered a Netflix country Top 10 contributes nothing to their school’s number here, however widely they are heard. Of the 9,249 people in our roster, 636 appear in the Netflix set at all.

So the honest form of the finding is narrower than the headline: among the people who do reach Netflix’s Top 10 lists, the ones from the largest arts school reach fewer countries than the ones from several mid-sized universities. Why that is, this data cannot say.

What we cannot separate

We cannot tell whether a school shapes reach or selects for it. A university that admits people who were already going to travel widely and a university that teaches something that travels widely produce the same table.

Nor can we separate attending from graduating. Wikidata’s educated at property does not distinguish them, so neither do we — several people in this table left before finishing.

And 4,714 of the 9,249 people in our roster have no school recorded at all. A school that looks small here may simply be a school Wikidata’s editors have not filled in yet.

The one number we would want next

The table above ranks schools by how far their alumni’s widest title went. It says nothing about how many titles each person has, or how long those titles stayed. A person with one title that reached 90 countries and a person with nine titles that each reached 30 sit in very different places in an industry and in the same place in this table.

That is a separate measurement and we have the rows to make it. It is not in this piece because we have not made it yet.

Every school in the count, with its alumni listed, is on the schools page; the actors themselves are on the actors page.