In 1988, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reported that North Korea had 35,000 preprimary, 60,000 primary, 111,000 secondary, 23,000 college and university, and 4,000 other postsecondary teachers.

According to the state Korean Central News Agency, a bill to expand its compulsory education was passed in September 2012.

This education includes extracurricular activities, family life, and the range of human relationships in North Korean society.

[2] The idea of social education is to provide a carefully controlled environment in which children are insulated from unplanned influences.

According to a North Korean official interviewed in 1990, "School education is not enough to turn the rising generation into men of knowledge, virtue, and physical fitness.

In the Korean Children's Union and the Socialist Patriotic Youth League, young people learn the nature of collective and organizational life in North Korea.

In students' and schoolchildren's halls and palaces, managed by the youth league central committee, young people participate in many extracurricular activities after school.

[9][2] There are cultural facilities such as libraries and museums, monuments and historical sites of the Korean revolution, and mass media dedicated to serving the goals of social education.

The palaces provide political lectures and seminars, debating contests, poetry recitals, and scientific forums.

According to Eberstadt and Banister, 13.7 percent of the population sixteen years of age or older was attending, or had graduated from, institutions of higher education in 1987–88.

"[2] Kim Il Sung University, founded in October 1946, is the country's only comprehensive institution of higher education offering bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees.

Its enrollment of 16,000 full- and part-time students in the early 1990s occupies, in the words of one observer, the "pinnacle of the North Korean educational and social system."

An important criterion for admission is senior middle school grades, although political criteria are also major factors in selection.

[2] Kim Il Sung University's colleges and faculties include economics, history, philosophy, law, foreign languages and literature, geography, physics, mathematics, chemistry, nuclear power, biology, and computer science.

Choson Exchange, a non-profit organization founded by Harvard, Yale, Wharton School and Singaporean graduate students, also runs consulting and training programs in finance, business and economics with Kim Il Sung-university and the State Development Bank in North Korea.

[11] Their programs target North Koreans under the age of 40 and combine OpenCourseWare materials and on-site lectures to deliver year-round training.

It is a joint venture institute of higher learning, founded, funded and operated by mostly Evangelical Christians from South Korea, China, and the United States.

[16] The remote universities obtained media attention while encrypting lesson plans and communicating them by a method of a radio broadcasting in 2016.

[22] Foreign students seeking to undertake postgraduate studies at Kim Il Sung University are required to provide their birth certificate, a letter of intent, their undergraduate certificate(s), a police certificate stating that the applicant does not have a criminal record in their home country, medical records certifying the applicant had a recent health examination, details of their financial background to show how they will be financing their education in North Korea, as well as a letter vouching for the applicant's Korean language ability.

[2] Adult education institutions in the early 1990s included "factory colleges", which teach workers new skills and techniques without forcing them to quit their jobs.