What I Learned As A Korean Mom: How Our College Admissions System Rewards Obedience Over Leadership
The ice in my yuja tea had melted to slush by the time Ms. Park slid Jiwoo’s college admissions essay across the coffee shop table. The edge was creased where she’d folded it in half, and she tapped the first paragraph with her pen. “This is the problem,” she said. “Your daughter writes about organizing a student push for longer lunch breaks. That’s exactly the kind of story you don’t want leading your personal statement.”
Jiwoo was waiting outside in the car, scrolling through midterm review notes, so I got the blunt version. Ms. Park has been a college counselor for 18 years at our district’s top public high school, and she doesn’t sugarcoat things. “Everyone talks about wanting leadership now, right? But what they really want is leaders who learned their place first. The saying around here is still true: only the obedient become leaders. If you show you’ll rock the boat at 18, they assume you’ll rock it when you graduate too. They don’t want that.”
I walked out to the car and told Jiwoo the verdict. She snorted, leaned back in her seat, and went back to scrolling. We stopped at the street cart by the subway for tteokbokki on the way home; she got two fish cakes extra, didn’t yell or cry. “I knew it,” she said. “Everyone says the same thing.”
I’ve been hearing that same phrase since I was her age: only the obedient become leaders. When I was applying to college 26 years ago, I wanted to start an after-school book club for novels that weren’t on the state curriculum – things like feminist Korean poetry my teacher called “too controversial” for students. My counselor told me to scrap the project before I put it on my application, because it would look like I didn’t respect the school’s rules. My dad told me the same thing: you follow the rules when you’re young, you get to make the rules when you’re older. That’s how it works. I scrapped it. I got into my top choice, got a steady office job after graduation, and I still think about that book club sometimes, when I’m folding laundry or waiting for the bus.
A lot of people outside Korea think our college admissions system is only about test scores, but that hasn’t been true for almost 10 years. Now most schools weight extracurriculars and personal statements heavily, on paper to reward students who show initiative and leadership. But in practice, what counts as good leadership? It’s the volunteer trip where you follow the organizer’s schedule perfectly. It’s the science club where you help your advisor run the annual fair exactly how they’ve always run it. It’s any project that doesn’t question the existing order. If you organize students to push the school to change a rule? That’s not leadership, that’s insubordination. The people reading the applications climbed the same ladder. They got where they are by obeying the rules when they were students, so they see that as the only right path.
I didn’t want to tell Jiwoo to scrap the whole story, and I didn’t want to tell her to refuse to change it and risk her shot at Seoul National University, which she’s worked toward for three years. Instead, we sat down at the dining table after dinner for two nights in a row, and we edited the essay line by line, no big changes, just small shifts. We didn’t cut the part about the 200 signatures, or the standoff with the vice principal who tried to block her from passing out flyers. We just changed the framing. Instead of opening with “I challenged my school’s unfair lunch policy,” we opened with “I noticed my peers were struggling to focus in afternoon classes because they barely had 15 minutes to eat, so I worked with student council and administration to adjust the policy.” We added one paragraph about how we collected data on test scores before and after the old policy to show our case to the PTA, instead of just leaning on protest. It wasn’t a lie. It was just showing the admissions committee that she knew how to work with the system, not just against it.
That’s the lesson I share with other parents going through this process right now. You don’t have to choose between letting your kid sell out their values or throwing away their shot at college. You can make small, intentional changes to how their story is framed without cutting out the part that makes it theirs. I also tell them to be honest with their kids about what the system actually is. Don’t tell them that if they work hard and lead well, they’ll definitely get what they deserve. That’s a lie. Tell them that the system rewards people who know how to follow the rules, even when the rules are unfair, and that’s just something to know going in. And always, keep encouraging the work that doesn’t go on the application. Jiwoo’s currently helping three other high schools in our area start their own campaigns for longer lunch breaks, and none of that will make it onto an application update this year. She does it anyway.
We sent the application off in mid-November. We won’t get the decision until next month. Jiwoo’s back to studying for final exams, and she still meets with her group of student organizers every Saturday at the local library. I think a lot about what kind of leaders we get when we only let the obedient rise. My own manager at work climbed the ranks for 20 years by always agreeing with the CEO, never questioning a bad decision. Now he’s the head of our department, and he won’t make any choice at all unless someone above him tells him what to do.
We can’t change the whole college admissions system overnight. We don’t even know if Jiwoo’s edited essay will work. But we can teach our kids that the leadership that matters doesn’t always fit what a college application asks for. It’s still there, even when you have to tweak a few sentences to get through the door.
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