Number of multiracial students rises to 46,900

The number of students from multiracial families increased fivefold since 2006 and by more than 20 percent over the past year, statistics showed Monday.

Data compiled by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology showed the number of multiracial students increased by 8,276, or 21 percent, to 46,954 this year from 2011; five times the 9,389 six years ago.

The survey was conducted by Korean Education Development Institute on 11,390 elementary, middle and high schools nationwide.

If the current trend continues, students from multiracial households will take up more than 1 percent of the country’s total primary and secondary school students by 2014, according. As of April this year when the data was last compiled, they took up 0.7 percent of the total.

If the 9,035 foreign students attending international schools here are included, the numbers rise to 55,989. These students were excluded from the survey this time. There were more students from multiracial families in elementary schools (72 percent) than middle (20.5 percent) or high schools (7.5 percent).

Most of them (85.3 percent) were born here, whereas 9.1 percent came to the country with a foreign parent, and 5.6 percent were born to foreign couples residing here.

By region, most of them lived in the metropolitan area (43.3 percent).

By nationality of the foreign parent, Chinese took up the majority (33.8 percent), followed by Japanese (27.5 percent), Filipino (16.1 percent) and Vietnamese (7.3 percent), according to the data.

The rise in the number of students from such families is attributed to an increase in the number of Korean men marrying foreign women and a steady influx of migrant workers settling here for work. <The Korea Times/Yun Suh-young>

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