What Happens When Only Obedient Students Become Leaders: Insights From Korean College Admissions
Last Saturday, I met my 18-year-old niece Soo-ah at a tiny coffee shop two blocks from her after-school cram academy. She had 40 minutes between her calculus lecture and writing revision class, so she ordered an iced americano that was already half-gone by the time she pulled out her crumpled college application personal statement from her backpack. Her phone buzzed every two minutes with hagwon reminder texts, but she just stared at the first paragraph, stirring her coffee so fast the ice clinked against the glass. “My counselor made me cut the whole opening,” she said. “I wrote about how the school’s mandatory 100-hour volunteer requirement is just performative—when I worked at the local nursing home, we spent most of our time taking staged photos for the school website instead of actually talking to the residents. He said that makes me look argumentative. Admissions officers don’t want leaders who question the rules, he told me. They want leaders who know how to follow them first.”
I’ve been tutoring high school seniors applying to college here in Seoul for 12 years, and that line didn’t surprise me, but it still stung. When I went through the same system 22 years ago, my counselor told me almost the exact same thing after I wrote my personal statement about the school banning our student-led climate club. I got rejected from my top choice; my classmate, who wrote a generic essay about learning leadership through organizing our senior class picnic, got in. I thought maybe things would have changed by now, with all the talk of holistic admissions and encouraging creativity. But the core unwritten rule of Korean college admissions is still the same: only the obedient get ahead, and that’s how they’re groomed to lead later.
These days, admissions aren’t just based on the national college entrance exam anymore. Extracurriculars, personal statements, and teacher recommendations count for almost 40% of a student’s score at top schools. That sounds more flexible on paper, but what it actually means is that kids and their parents have to learn to hit every unwritten mark perfectly. If your extracurricular doesn’t fit the expected mold—like Soo-ah calling out the broken volunteer system, or a kid I tutored last year who made a zine about teen anxiety instead of doing the expected hospital volunteer work—you get marked as “difficult to work with.” Teacher recommendations are written to fit what admissions officers want, so most teachers won’t highlight a kid who questions things, because that reflects badly on the school. The whole process rewards students who learn early to shape themselves to what other people want, instead of bringing their own ideas to the table.
My sister, Soo-ah’s mom, said to me a week later over dinner, “I know it’s messed up, but what choice do we have? If she doesn’t get into a top three college, she can’t get a job at a good company, she can’t build the kind of life we want for her. What’s one edited personal statement compared to that?” I don’t judge her for that. Most parents aren’t going to risk their kid’s future to stick to a principle, and the system is set up that way on purpose.
I’ve started doing three small, low-effort things with the kids I work with, and I tell parents to try them too—they don’t require dropping out of cram school or throwing away your kid’s application chances. First, reserve one hour a week of completely unstructured time with your kid where you don’t talk about test scores, applications, or college plans at all. Just let them lead the conversation, whatever it’s about. For Soo-ah, that’s our 40 minutes every Saturday at the coffee shop, and it doesn’t cost anything extra; it just means I don’t bring up her application unless she does. Second, when your kid complains about a rule at school, don’t automatically say “just follow it so you don’t get in trouble.” Ask them one question: “What would you change if you were in charge?” It doesn’t take long, it doesn’t challenge the school administration, it just lets them practice thinking through problems instead of accepting things the way they are. Third, let your kid do one small thing a month that doesn’t look good on a college application. It can be writing that zine, or organizing a small group to talk about a problem they care about, or just hanging out with friends instead of going to an extra cram class. It only takes 2-4 hours a month, enough to keep the habit of thinking for themselves alive.
A lot of people talk about how the Korean education system produces high test scores, but no one talks much about what it does to leadership. When the system rewards obedience for 12 years before college, and keeps rewarding it after that when you’re climbing the career ladder, you end up with leaders who know how to follow the rules, but not how to change them when the rules are broken. I see it in politics, I see it in big companies, I see it in universities: when a crisis hits, the first response is to protect the existing system, not fix the problem. That’s the end result of picking only obedient kids to lead.
Soo-ah has her interview at Seoul National next week. She submitted the polished, obedient version of her personal statement, the one that talks about learning responsibility through volunteer work. But she keeps her original draft in the notes app on her phone, and she reads it to me sometimes when we’re sitting in the coffee shop. I don’t know if she’ll get in. I don’t know if 10 years from now, when she’s in a position to lead something, she’ll remember that original draft, or if the system will have smoothed that edge off completely. I don’t have any big solution to fix the whole admissions system. All we have right now are these small, quiet spaces where kids can still say what they really think. That’s enough for now.
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