Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together? Exploring the Geography of Educational Segregation in Seoul, Korea

This paper explores the changing patterns of the geography of educational segregation across neighborhoods in the Seoul metropolitan area during the 1995-2005 period, and investigates whether spatial clusters of a specific educational group can be isolated across neighborhoods in the metropolitan area. Three key findings were obtained. First, the college-educated groups are highly segregated from their less educated counterparts, but segregation has decreased for both of the college-educated groups. Second, overall declines in multi-group segregation over this period were mainly due to declines in segregation of the group of college graduates, and to a less extent declines in segregation of the lower educational groups. Third, the residential pattern of educational segregation is by nature spatially clustered and becomes more clustered over the period. The neighborhoods with a relatively high level of human capital tend to be localized close to other neighboring areas with a high level of human capital. This paper concludes by discussing implications of the findings for theoretical and empirical research on the polarized geography of neighborhood educational segregation.