What the Korean College Admissions System Teaches Us About Obedience and Leadership
The auditorium smelled like burnt instant coffee and scuffed linoleum when the college admissions counselor leaned into the mic last spring, speaking to a room full of crumpled, nervous parents of 12th graders. “Let me cut through all the fine print for you,” he said. “Everyone in this room wants their kid to go to SKY, and everyone wants their kid to grow up to lead this country. Let me tell you the rule no one says out loud: Only the obedient become leaders.” I was there visiting my niece Soo-ah, sitting in the back row because my sister had a last-minute shift at her job and asked me to fill in. The line stuck with me, because I’d never heard it said so plainly.
After the meeting, Soo-ah and I walked 10 minutes to the hole-in-the-wall noodle shop near her apartment, ordered two plates of jjajangmyeon with extra onions, and she laid out what that rule actually looks like for her. A month earlier, the student body had organized a petition against the school cutting all after-school art programs to free up more time for test prep. The principal called all the applicants to SKY – Seoul National, Korea, Yonsei, the top three universities that produce most of the country’s political and business leaders – into his office and told them any student who signed would get a negative mark on their mandatory character evaluation, a document that carries as much weight as your final test scores in admissions. Soo-ah crossed her name off. “I’ve put three years into this,” she said, stirring black bean sauce around her noodles. “I can’t afford to be difficult right now.”
Her mom, my sister, told me later that they’d paid $320 a month for a tutor just to edit Soo-ah’s personal statement and extracurricular profile. The tutor’s first rule was: No controversial takes. If you write about volunteering at the stray animal shelter, you don’t talk about how the city council refuses to fund low-cost spay and neuter programs. You talk about how you learned to follow the shelter manager’s instructions to keep the animals safe. Extracurriculars aren’t about what you care about – they’re about what looks good. Soo-ah has loved reading banned YA novels since she was 14, and runs a secret monthly book club out of her friend’s basement, but that wasn’t going on her application. Not until we talked about it.
It’s easy to write off this dynamic as something specific to Korean education, but I’ve seen the same thing play out in US high schools too, just less explicitly. When every part of your application is curated to please a committee of people you’ve never met, you learn very fast that the easiest way to succeed is to give them exactly what you think they want. When the highest reward for 12 years of school is getting into a top college that will then set you up for a leadership position in government or business, you learn to comply early. The system doesn’t just reward obedience – it selects for it. The kids who can’t or won’t hold back their opinions get weeded out before they ever get close to that leadership spot. That’s how you end up with a ruling class that learned decades ago not to rock the boat, even when the boat is sinking.
After lunch, we walked along the Han River, and I asked Soo-ah what she actually wanted to write about in her personal statement, if she didn’t have to worry about what admissions officers thought. She told me about the book club, about how girls from her school and three others come, and they talk about things they can’t talk about in class, about sexuality and gender and fighting with their parents. I suggested two small things, things any parent or kid can do, even when you’re trapped in a high-stakes system. First, keep the book club going, but don’t force it onto your resume right now. Keep one hour a week of activity that doesn’t count for anything – no college credit, no application line, just for you. Second, the application has an optional additional comment section. You can add one paragraph about the book club there, just to be honest. If they reject you for it, it’s their loss, but you don’t have to lead with it.
That’s the thing I’ve been telling my friends with high schoolers back home, too. You don’t have to upend your kid’s entire college prep plan to push back against this pattern of rewarding obedience over independent thought. You can do one small thing consistently: carve out that uncredited time, where what they do doesn’t matter for anyone’s approval but theirs. When you’re going over college essays, ask what they want to say first, before you start editing to fit what you think admissions wants. If a teacher tells you your kid is too talkative or too opinionated, ask your kid what that means to them, don’t immediately tell them to tone it down. These aren’t big, expensive changes. They just require you to stop treating every part of your kid’s life like it needs to be optimized for someone else’s approval.
Soo-ah ended up getting into Seoul National University last fall. She thinks that extra paragraph didn’t hurt her, maybe even helped, but she also knows she wouldn’t have gotten in if she’d put the book club front and center, instead of tucking it into the optional section. Last month, I texted her to ask if she was still thinking of running for the student government council at school, like she talked about over the summer. She texted back that she was still deciding. She’s good at following the rules now, she said. It’s what got her here. Unlearning that, and learning how to lead while being honest about what you care about, that’s the hard part. We’re meeting for coffee next time I’m in Seoul, to talk it through. No plans, no agenda, just conversation. I don’t have the answer for her. No one does. But it’s still worth talking about.
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