As children disappear, education firms chase the elderly

Children are disappearing. The elderly are multiplying. And South Korea's education companies are reshaping their businesses to match.

Kyowon, once synonymous with the "Red Pen" workbook and "Kumon" tutoring brands, has staked its future on funeral services under second-generation chief Chang Dong-ha. Woongjin, which dominated the home-learning market through Woongjin Thinkbig, vaulted to the top of the funeral-services industry in a single move by acquiring Freed Life. Daekyo, known for its "Noonhopi" tutoring brand, is pivoting toward senior care. What were once children's education companies are, under their founders' heirs, shifting their center of gravity toward the parents and grandparents of those same children.

Kyowon Group founder Chang Pyung-soon established the Jungang Education Research Institute in 1985, the company that would become Kyowon Group. The following year he launched a workbook called "Jungang Complete Learning," which later evolved into the iconic "Red Pen" brand. His eldest son, Chang Dong-ha, joined the group's strategic planning division in 2011, worked his way through the education business, and from 2016 took charge of stabilizing the funeral-services arm and identifying new ventures. He went on to build up non-education businesses through Kyowon Life and Kyowon Tour, was promoted to president last year and became the group's overall chief executive this year.

The flagship business Chang has built is Kyowon Life, the group's funeral-services company. Its advance payments have grown to the 1.73 trillion won ($1.29 billion) range this year, placing it second in the industry. Across Kyowon Group as a whole, revenue from non-education segments — funeral services, travel and rental — has surpassed 500 billion won, accounting for roughly 40 percent of the total.

Kyowon Life members can redirect their funeral-plan payments toward package tours, cruises, wedding and matchmaking services, English-language camps, study-abroad programs, healthcare and massage chairs. Integration with Kyowon Tour is accelerating: use of the conversion service jumped 137 percent in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year, with travel conversions alone up 169 percent.

Travel is another area Chang oversees directly. Kyowon acquired travel agency KRT in 2021, rebranded it as Kyowon Tour and launched a package-tour brand called "Yeohaengiji." At a meeting with airline industry partners earlier this year, Chang said the company would focus on "providing stable product operations and differentiated travel experiences through organic collaboration with airline partners."

"It is the result of offering customers a wide range of choices and benefits through our business tie-up with Kyowon Tour," a Kyowon Life official said. "We will continue to expand life-care services tailored to the customer's life cycle."

Woongjin, best known for Woongjin Thinkbig, found its next growth engine through a major acquisition. Just as founder Yoon Suk-keum once rapidly expanded the group through mergers and acquisitions, Vice Chairman Yoon Sae-bom — the second-generation figure now at the center of management — acquired Freed Life, the industry's top funeral-services company, for around 880 billion won. It was a deal she led.

The Freed Life acquisition transformed Woongjin's corporate scale. Group assets surpassed 5 trillion won again, and Woongjin this year returned to the list of publicly disclosed large business groups for the first time in 12 years. Yoon Sae-bom is the largest shareholder of Woongjin, the group's holding company, with a 17.02 percent stake as of June. Combined with the 12.88 percent held by her brother, Vice Chairman Yoon Hyeong-deok, the founding family controls roughly 30 percent. After the acquisition, the Woongjin name was added to Freed Life's. Woongjin Freed Life launched its "Woongjin Freed 360, 450 and 540" product lines in January — its first since joining the group — overhauling its funeral-plan lineup for the first time in five years.

The range of services members can convert their plans into has also expanded. Options now include health checkups, resort stays, pet care, home care, weddings, first-birthday celebrations, 60th- and 70th-birthday parties, cruise travel, language study abroad, home interior services and burial-site services. This year the company added a continuous glucose monitoring home-care service and a senior monitoring service that lets families remotely check on the daily safety of elderly relatives.

Woongjin Freed Life also invested directly in the wedding business. Earlier this year it joined a wedding and catering company as a strategic investor, securing a foothold in wedding-hall operations at venues including Grand Hill Convention in Gangnam, Bottega Maggio in Seongsu and Wedding City in Sindorim. "We will walk alongside our customers' lives with life-care services spanning not only funeral planning but also travel, weddings and senior care," said Moon Ho-sang, chief executive of Woongjin Freed Life.

Daekyo offers perhaps the most direct example of an education company transplanting its know-how into the senior market. Led by Kang Ho-jun, the eldest son of founder Kang Young-joong, Daekyo entered the senior-care business in 2021 and spun it off in 2023 as Daekyo New Life, a wholly owned subsidiary. Kang has also signaled his commitment to the business: in August he bought about 300,000 Daekyo shares on the open market, raising his stake from 0.03 percent to 0.40 percent.

Daekyo New Life operates across day care, home-visit nursing and bathing, training of care workers and social welfare officers, dementia-prevention cognitive education, health food, welfare equipment and funeral services. The model mirrors Daekyo's original business — teachers visiting children at home to deliver workbook lessons — now applied to home-visit senior care and cognitive education. Daekyo New Life has set a goal of building "the world's largest senior school," saying it will apply "the knowledge and know-how Daekyo has accumulated over many years to senior services."

The pace of expansion has quickened recently. Daekyo New Life posted sales of 26.6 billion won last year. This year it has extended its day-care and home-visit nursing center franchise to additional locations in Yongin Dongbaek, Hanam, Daegu Suseong and Suwon Paldal. It has partnered with the Korea Companion Service Association to train hospital-escort managers, and is co-developing a "Senior Brain Care" service with Lina Life Insurance that bundles dementia-prevention home-learning visits with insurance coverage. In January Daekyo also launched a postpaid funeral plan called "My Own Graduation Ceremony," expanding into the funeral-services market.

The surge into funeral services and senior care by second-generation education company heirs is driven largely by rapid demographic aging. According to resident registration statistics from the Ministry of Interior and Safety, the under-20 population stood at about 8.76 million at the end of 2020 but had fallen to about 7.47 million as of September this year — a drop of more than 1.29 million. Over the same period, the population aged 60 and older grew from about 12.44 million to about 15.31 million, an increase of nearly 3 million. As the pool of school-age students shrinks rapidly, education companies are shifting their weight from youth education toward funeral services and senior care.

The structural overlap between education businesses and funeral or senior-care services is also significant. Workbook companies recruit members, provide services on a regular long-term basis and manage customers through a network of tutors and consultants. Home-visit senior care and cognitive education for the elderly similarly require a nationwide workforce, regional organizations and long-term customer management. Companies that have spent decades running door-to-door workbook sales and membership management operations already possess considerable assets they can deploy in the senior market.

"Education companies are the first to feel that the decline in the school-age population is not a temporary phenomenon," an industry official said. "It should be seen as a process of searching for new markets where they can leverage the brand, membership management and door-to-door organization strengths built up through their existing education businesses."