Why Does Undergraduate University Follow You For Life In South Korea, Explained
Last month I met my former student Jaehyuk at a coffee shop in Seoul’s Gangnam district, iced americanos sweating through their paper cups on the table between us. He’d just come from his second job interview that week, and he pushed his printed resume across the table like he was ashamed of it. The first line under his name wasn’t his most recent role leading a 12-person edtech startup— it was “Sogang University, Bachelor of Computer Science, 2014.”
“I already told them I ran that company for five years,” he said, twisting a plastic stirrer so hard the end snapped off. “Every single person I’ve talked to this month still spends the first 10 minutes asking about Sogang. Why does it matter? I graduated 10 years ago.”
That question stuck with me, because I’ve heard it a hundred times from students and parents over the 12 years I taught high school in Seoul. Most people outside South Korea hear that your university sticks with you your whole life and write it off as simple academic snobbery. But it’s more rooted than that, woven into how the entire education and social system is built.
Let me give you another example: my cousin Minwoo, who got a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford a decade ago. He moved back to Seoul in 2020 to take a senior role at a big bank, and even with the Stanford credential, every background check and internal promotion review still leads with his undergraduate degree from Kyung Hee University, a well-regarded school but not part of the elite SKY (Seoul National, Korea, Yonsei) tier that tops all rankings. He didn’t get the head of department role he applied for last year, and a colleague told him off the record that the hiring committee still saw the undergrad rank as a “more reliable” measure of his baseline ability than his 10 years of work experience or his US graduate degree.
It’s easy to call that unfair, but it helps to understand where it comes from. For almost 50 years, South Korea’s entire undergraduate admissions system has revolved around one standardized test: the Suneung, the national college entrance exam. Your score on that single test, taken over one 8-hour day in November of your final year of high school, determines exactly which university you can get into. Extracurriculars, personal essays, and teacher recommendations have only started to matter a little in the last 10 years, and even then, they’re a very small part of the decision. That means the ranking of your undergraduate university is a direct, publicly understood reflection of your rank out of hundreds of thousands of 18-year-olds who took the test that year. For employers, for in-laws, even for casual acquaintances, that rank feels like a quick, objective way to size you up. It’s not personal— it’s a shared shortcut everyone has learned to use.
That shortcut stuck because for generations, it worked the way it was supposed to. After the Korean War, South Korea’s economy grew incredibly fast, and companies and government agencies needed a quick way to sort thousands of applicants every year. The university rank, tied to the Suneung, was fairer than family connections or personal favors, so everyone bought into it. Now that the economy is slower and more people value different skills, the norm hasn’t shifted— social habits take generations to change. I’ve seen even young recruiters in their 30s, who went through the same system, default to checking the undergrad rank first, because that’s what they were taught to care about too.
So what does that mean for parents raising kids who might go to university or work in South Korea? I don’t tell parents to lie to their kids and say it doesn’t matter where they go— that just feels empty when kids feel the pressure every day. Instead, I tell them to say this line, straight: “This is how the system works right now, and it matters, but it’s not the only thing that will define your life.” That’s concrete, it validates what they’re feeling instead of dismissing it.
I also tell parents to plan based on what their kid wants to do after graduation. If your kid wants to work in traditional finance, law, or government, getting into the highest ranked undergraduate school possible matters a lot more than any graduate degree you can get later. Don’t assume a master’s from a top foreign school will make up for a lower-ranked undergrad in those fields— I’ve seen that mistake too many times. If your kid doesn’t get into their top choice undergrad, guide them toward fields that prioritize work samples and experience over alma mater: graphic design, content creation, software development for early-stage startups, or working for foreign companies based in Seoul. Those fields are growing fast, and they care a lot more about what you can do than where you went to school a decade ago.
Back to Jaehyuk. A week after our coffee, he got an offer from a Singapore-based fintech company opening a Seoul office. The hiring manager never asked about his undergraduate university— they asked to see the code he wrote for his startup, and talked to him for an hour about how he handled his team when the company was running out of funding. He’s leaning toward taking the offer. But he still told me that when he met his wife’s extended family for the first time last year, the first question after his name was where he went to university. When their daughter was born last year, the patient intake form at the hospital had a line for both parents’ undergraduate schools. It’s still everywhere, even for him.
We walked out of the coffee shop together, and he checked his watch— he was running late to pick up his daughter from daycare. He said he doesn’t want her to grow up with that weight, but he knows it’ll probably still be there when she’s 18. No one has figured out how to change it yet, even as more people are talking about how unfair it is. For now, it’s just how things work.
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