What ‘Only the Obedient Become Leaders’ Means for Korean College Admissions
Last Saturday, I was grabbing napa cabbage and a jar of fermented soybean paste at my neighborhood Emart in Seoul when a woman called my name. It was Soo-ah, one of my former 11th grade students from 10 years back, pushing a stroller with her toddler and scrolling through a parent chat on her phone. We ended up splitting an iced americano at the food court, where the air smelled like fried tteokbokki and sugar glaze from the corn dog stand, and she told me about her 17-year-old son Jun-ho, who’s wrapping up his college applications for engineering programs this fall. Halfway through talking about his extracurricular list, she sighed and said, “You know the old saying, right? Only the obedient become leaders. My mom drilled that into me when I applied, and I’m drilling it into Jun-ho now.”
Jun-ho spent three months building a free app that helps freshmen find books in the school’s overcrowded library, and it’s already used by almost half the student body. But their college counselor told them to cut it from the main extracurricular section. It doesn’t fit the expected profile for a top engineering applicant: the counselor said he should replace it with his 100-hour volunteer stint at the local hospital, which checks the “community service” box admissions officers look for. Jun-ho wants to keep the app on the list, and Soo-ah told him no. “What’s the point of rocking the boat?” she asked me. “Every year, thousands of kids get rejected for the slightest thing that doesn’t fit. If he follows the rules, he gets in. If he doesn’t, he’s out.”
That phrase took me right back to 2016, when I had a student named Min-woo who led a walkout of 200 students to protest the school’s moldy cafeteria food and overpriced meal plans. He put the entire organizing experience on his college application, wrote his personal statement about how he wanted to study public health to improve school food systems across the country. He had top 1% grades and a perfect CSAT score. He got rejected from every top 10 university in the country. His counselor told me later that the admissions committee marked him as “disruptive.” Min-woo ended up going to a small regional college in Gyeongsang, and now he runs a non-profit that helps low-income schools renegotiate their meal contracts. I saw him speak at an education conference last year, and he’s far more of a leader than most of the Seoul National University graduates I know who work in big corporate jobs.
What a lot of people outside Korea don’t get about that saying is that it’s not some ancient cultural proverb. It’s a straightforward description of how the Korean college admissions system has worked for generations. Obedience here doesn’t mean you never speak up at all. It means you learn to read the unwritten rules, align your achievements and your image to what the system says it wants, and don’t draw attention to anything that might be seen as controversial or out of step. The “leaders” the system produces are the people who’ve mastered that skill: they know how to work within existing structures, they don’t rock the boat, and they fit the expectation of what a leader should look like. That’s why the saying sticks: generation after generation of parents see it play out, so they pass it on to their kids. It’s not that they want to squash their kid’s creativity. It’s that they don’t want their kid to pay the price for breaking the rules.
I work with a lot of parents navigating admissions right now, and most of them know the system is flawed, but they don’t know what to do about it. Changing the whole system isn’t something a single parent or kid can do, so I tell them to start with small, low-stakes changes that don’t risk their kid’s chances but keep their interests intact. For example, if your kid has a project that doesn’t fit the application profile, leave it off the main section if that’s what your counselor recommends, but add a one-sentence link to it in the optional additional notes section. Most applications allow that, and even if admissions officers don’t click it, your kid knows you value their work enough to include it. Another thing I suggest is keeping a “kid’s list” separate from the application resume. Write down every project, every hobby, every weird thing your kid cared about that didn’t make it onto the application. Pull it out once a month over dinner, and talk about what they loved about each thing—no talk of what looks good for college. And when your kid pushes back on cutting something that matters to them, you can say something specific like, “I understand why this matters to you, and I want you to keep working on it even if it’s not on the application. We’re following the counselor’s advice for this round, but this project is yours to keep.” That acknowledges the reality of the system without dismissing what the kid cares about.
Soo-ah had to leave before we finished talking to pick Jun-ho up from his 10PM cram school math class. She said she’d think about adding the link to Jun-ho’s app in the additional notes, even if their counselor says it’s unnecessary. She laughed when she left and said, “I still remember my mom made me cut all my poems about student stress from my application 10 years ago. I never wrote poetry again after that. I don’t want Jun-ho to feel that way.”
I walked back to my car with my cabbage and soybean paste, and thought about how that saying is still half true. Right now, in this system, the obedient do still end up with the spots at the top colleges, and the leadership roles that come after. But that doesn’t mean we have to give up the parts of our kids that don’t obey. Jun-ho might get into his top choice engineering program, or he might not. Either way, that little library app he built already matters more than any box he checks on an application. That part is up to him, no matter what the system says.
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