Why Does Undergraduate University Follow You For Life In South Korea? What Parents Raising Kids There Need To Know
Last Saturday, I met my 26-year-old cousin Jun-ho at a small coffee shop near Gangnam Station, where he’d dragged a stack of resume printouts to tweak for the tenth round of job applications. The iced americanos on the table were sweating through their paper coasters, and Jun-ho crumpled up another draft and tossed it in the bin between our chairs. “Third rejection this week,” he said, leaning back and rubbing the back of his neck. “The recruiter straight up told me after the interview that they fill 80% of entry-level roles from SKY. My regional undergrad degree was a no-go before I even answered the first question.”
I’d seen this play out before, even outside of hiring. When Jun-ho got married two years ago, my aunt pulled me aside after the reception and admitted the groom’s side had pressed for details of his undergrad before they’d even agreed to the first meeting. Jun-ho has a master’s degree in computer engineering from KAIST, one of the most respected tech programs in the country, but that detail always comes second. Where you went for your four-year undergrad is the first thing people ask, and it sticks with you forever.
I’m a Korean-American mom who moved back to Seoul with my husband 12 years ago, and we have a 16-year-old daughter who’s currently studying 12 hours a day to prepare for the Suneung, the national college entrance exam that determines where you’ll go to undergrad. When I first moved here, I assumed all this obsession with university rank faded once you started working. I grew up going to school in the US, where where you went to undergrad rarely comes up after your first job, and never comes up at a family wedding. But that’s not how the system works here.
After the Korean War, the country built its industrial economy almost overnight, and the government relied on a small handful of top universities to sort and train talent for the large family-owned conglomerates that drove that growth. Hiring managers didn’t have to think too hard about filtering candidates—if you got into Seoul National, Korea, or Yonsei (the SKY trio), you were a top performer. That system turned into a cycle that’s still self-reinforcing 70 years later. Today, even with dozens of new good universities and new industries popping up, most people in positions of power (hiring managers, in-laws, politicians) went to SKY, so they default to trusting that filter.
Two months ago, my daughter’s high school counselor called me in for a parent meeting. My daughter is a solid B+ student, and she’s on track to miss the SKY cut-off by about 1.5%. The counselor told me point blank that I should encourage her to skip applying to mid-tier schools this year and study for an extra year to retake the test. A one-point difference on the exam can cost you your whole career, she said. I left that meeting with a pit in my stomach, because I’d already seen what that extra year of pressure does. Jun-ho retook the Suneung once, and he still deals with insomnia from that year of sleeping five hours a night and studying 18 hours a day.
I’ve spent a lot of time talking to other parents and thinking through what this means for my daughter, and I’ve landed on a few small, concrete choices that work for us, even if they go against the mainstream. First, we sat down and mapped three clear paths for her, instead of framing SKY as the only acceptable outcome. We wrote down starting salaries for her target majors at SKY, at the good regional university 20 minutes from our house, and what would happen if she retook. The difference in starting salary for a marketing major, for example, is around 12% between SKY and a good regional school—not nothing, but not enough to ruin your life. We talked through what she’d give up for a retake: a year of her youth, the chance to do internships earlier, the chance to study what she actually likes instead of just cramming for the test. That’s way more useful than just telling her “do your best” or pretending university affiliation doesn’t matter at all.
Second, if she does end up going to a non-SKY school, we’ve already talked about building niche experience early. Jun-ho ended up pivoting to a small agritech startup three years ago, and the founder didn’t even ask about his undergrad until the third interview. He hired Jun-ho because Jun-ho had built a small prototype of a soil monitoring app on his own in college, and that was exactly what the startup needed. More and more Korean companies are starting to do blind resume screening for the first round, which removes school names, so internship experience and personal projects count for a lot more than they used to. I’ve told my daughter if she goes the non-SKY route, she’ll do one small internship starting in her second year, instead of just focusing on keeping her grades up to impress people who’ll only care about her school name anyway.
Last week, my daughter came home from cram school and told me her best friend’s parents are making her retake the Suneung even though she got accepted to a great mid-tier education program, which is what she’s always wanted to study. I didn’t say anything to that friend’s parents, of course, but I told my daughter that whatever she chooses, we’re sticking to our plan. The university name still follows you everywhere in South Korea, that’s true. But it doesn’t have to be the thing that defines the whole rest of your life. Jun-ho just closed on a small apartment outside Seoul last month, and he and his wife are talking about having their first kid next year. He still gets the odd question about where he did undergrad at work dinners, but his boss knows he’s the best coder on the team, and that’s what matters for his raises and promotions now. Change doesn’t happen fast here, but it’s happening, one person at a time.
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