Why Does Your Undergraduate University Follow You For Life In South Korea? A High School Counselor’s Perspective
Last month I sat across from a 32-year-old dad at a fall parent-teacher conference, the table between us sticky with spilled iced coffee from the convenience store down the street. He was twisting the crumpled cup lid between his fingers, his knuckles pink, while we talked about his 16-year-old daughter, Soo-ah, who’d skipped two days of hagwon (cram school) last week to go to a street art festival. He didn’t look angry at her – he looked tired. “I graduated from Sogang 10 years ago,” he said. “That’s a good school, right? But when I applied for branch manager at my bank last year, every person on the shortlist went to SKY. I didn’t get the job. If Soo-ah doesn’t get into a top tier school now, the same thing will happen to her 10 years from now. What am I supposed to do?”
I’ve been a high school counselor in Seoul for 12 years, and this conversation isn’t new. It comes up at least once a month, from parents old enough to have graduated college decades ago and teens just starting to prepare for the national college entrance exam, the Suneung. Most outsiders have heard that South Korea is competitive about college, but few understand just how much that undergraduate degree sticks with you, long after you’ve tossed your graduation gown and forgotten your freshman year room number.
Last spring, one of my former students came back to visit. Ji-won is 27, works in marketing at a big Seoul tech firm, and graduated from Yonsei – one of the coveted SKY schools – five years ago. She told me that at her first company retreat last year, the first question anyone asked after “what do you do here” wasn’t “do you have any pets” or “do you like hiking” – it was “where did you do your undergrad?” Her cousin got married last year, and within 10 minutes of meeting her new in-laws for the first time, they’d asked her university, her husband’s university, and where her parents had gotten their degrees. My Korean colleague, Ms. Park, who’s taught math at our school for 18 years, told me she never lists her undergraduate university on her school profile. She got her master’s degree from Korea University, but she went to a small provincial university for her bachelor’s. “People see that first, and that’s all they think about,” she said. “It doesn’t matter that I’ve got 18 years of good test results from my students. That’s the filter.”
How did this happen? It’s not just random snobbery. After the Korean War, the country went from a mostly agrarian, poor economy to a major industrial power in a single generation. The government used the national college entrance exam as a fair, standardized way to sort talent for civil service and the growing big corporations that drove the boom. For millions of families, getting into a top university was the only way out of poverty. It made sense to tie every part of life to that achievement – because it was the achievement that changed everything for your whole family. That norm stuck, even as the economy changed and more people go to college now than ever before.
Today, it’s baked into almost every part of adult life. Hiring managers at top companies still sort entry-level applicants by university tier first, before they look at grades or extracurriculars. Mid-career promotions still often favor graduates of top schools, even when work experience is identical. Matchmakers for arranged and semi-arranged marriages sort candidates by university before anything else. Even in casual social groups, the question comes up almost immediately, because it’s how people figure out where you fit.
I work with a lot of parents who feel trapped by this, whether they went to a lower-ranked school themselves or they’re terrified their kid won’t hit the mark. The biggest mistake I see parents make is either pretending the stigma doesn’t exist, or buying into it so completely that they ruin their kid’s high school years chasing a spot that might not even fit what their kid wants.
What I tell parents to do is small, concrete, and doesn’t require fighting the whole system all at once. First, if your kid doesn’t end up at the school you hoped for, map out specific alternative paths ahead of time, so it doesn’t feel like a life failure. For example, if your kid wants to work in a corporate job and doesn’t get into SKY, they can do a two-year transfer program to a top university after their first two years at a smaller school, or get a master’s degree from a SKY school, which is widely accepted as a boost. If they want to work in a creative field or a startup, many of those places care more about portfolio work than where you went to undergrad, so you can help them start building that portfolio early instead of retaking the Suneung for a year.
Second, model how to reframe the question when it comes up, instead of hiding or apologizing. If a relative asks your 20-year-old what university they go to and it’s not a top tier school, don’t deflect or mumble. Just say “They’re studying outdoor education, and they’re leading hiking trips for middle school kids every weekend – they love it.” That shifts the conversation from the name of the school to what your kid actually does and values. It doesn’t change the whole culture, but it takes the pressure off your kid right then.
Soo-ah and her dad left our conference with a new plan. She’s going to keep taking her core classes, but she’s cutting back her hagwon hours to work on her graphic design portfolio, and she’s going to apply to the design program at her local city university instead of retaking the Suneung next year to try for a SKY spot. Her dad told me he still worries – he still sees how much his own university follows him every day at work. But he agreed that it’s more important for Soo-ah to do work she actually cares about than to check a box that matters more to him than it does to her.
The culture around university here doesn’t change fast. There are still a hundred moments a year when someone will ask you where you went to undergrad, and sort you based on that answer before you even open your mouth to say anything else. But little by little, the choice of what we value for our kids can start with us, right at the kitchen table, or the parent-teacher conference, or the family dinner where the question comes up.
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