South Korean schools hold entrance ceremony for one child as empty-class crisis reaches Seoul

The school has just 18 students in total and was forced to combine two grades into one class this year.

To stay viable, the school runs camping, water sports, skiing and reading marathon programs designed to attract families from the cities. Seven other students arrived this year through Gangwon Province’s rural study-abroad program, allowing the school to maintain five classes. Without the program, a school official told Yonhapthe catchment area might have had no elementary students at all.

Kang’s school is far from alone. The empty-classroom crisis has been recorded in dozens of schools across rural South Korea and begun to hit biggest cities like Seoul.

Across Gangwon Province, 20 elementary schools enrolled zero first-graders this year while 21 others held entrance ceremonies for just one, according to the Gangwon Provincial Office of Education. The province lost 121 elementary classes compared to last year.

Nationally, 210 elementary schools failed to enroll a single new student in 2026, an 81% increase from 116 five years ago, according to Ministry of Education data cited by the Chosun Ilbo.

A normally operating school in Seoul’s Gangseo District had no first-graders for the first time. Previously, Seoul’s zero-enrollment schools had all been campuses closed for reconstruction. In Gwangju, two schools with histories exceeding a century, Jungang Elementary and Samdo Elementary, also enrolled no new students, the Chosun Ilbo reported.

South Korea’s total fertility rate hit a record low of 0.72 in 2023 before inching up to 0.75 in 2024 and 0.8 in 2025, according to government data.

Most rural farmers are now elderly, and villages across the countryside are largely devoid of children, making it all but impossible for small schools to find students locally, Yonhap reported.

Gangwon Province has acknowledged that growing the school-age population is effectively unrealistic. Officials are instead pushing for smaller class sizes calibrated to what they call “social needs,” aiming to raise education quality with fewer students. But as enrollment drops, so do teacher quotas and hiring budgets, making even that modest goal difficult to achieve, observers warn.