Why they're cramming in Korea: high school students in South Korea are studying overtime to get into the same colleges you're aiming for. They're part of a wave of foreign students vying for sports at top America schools.

• Author: Dillon, Sam
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

It's 10:30 p.m. and students at the Daewon prep school in Seoul are in a study hall that ends a 15-hour school day. A window is propped open so the evening chill can keep them awake. One student stands up at his desk to keep from dozing.

"I can't let myself waste even a second," says Kim Hyun-kyung, 17, who dreams of attending a top American university. And she has a good shot: This past spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School who applied to selective American universities won admission.

"Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society," says Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last year.

Daewon has one major rival in Korea--the Minjok Leadership Academy, just east of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of admission to American colleges.

How do they do it? The schools take South Korea's top-scoring middle school students, put them in English-language classes, emphasize composition and other skills crucial to the SATs and college-admissions essays, and--most important--urge them on to unceasing study.

South Korea's academic year is more than a month longer than at American high schools. Daewon, which costs about $5,000 a year to attend, requires two foreign languages besides English. Minjok, a boarding school that costs about $15,000 a year, offers AP courses and research projects.

And both schools consider teen romance a waste of time.

"What are you doing holding hands?" a Daewon administrator scolded a couple recently. "You should be studying!"

Students don't seem to mind. Park Yeshong says attractions tend to fade during all those hours of close-quarters studying. "We know each other too well to fall in love," she says.

Both schools are rethinking their grueling regimens, at least a bit: Minjok has turned off the dorm surveillance cameras that ensured students didn't doze off in late-night study sessions. Daewon is ending its school day earlier for freshmen, and its founder has begun to wonder if American schools do a better job of educating students to be responsible citizens.

South Korea isn't the only country sending more students to the U.S., but it seems to be a special case. Some 103,000 South Korean students study at American schools of all levels, more than from any other country. Around 6,500 South Korean schoolchildren live in New Zealand with their mothers so they can attend English-speaking schools and...