Why Does Your Undergraduate University Follow You For Life In South Korea, Explained
The soy sauce dish was sweating condensation on the plastic tablecloth at my second cousin’s Seoul wedding reception last month when I overheard my aunt lean over to my mom and murmur, “Do you know which team he’s on at KB? The corporate strategy team. Of course he went to Yonsei.”
I didn’t think much of it at first, until the same conversation popped up an hour later when a guest asked me what my boys studied, then immediately followed up with, “Which university do they attend?” Back home in Portland, where we live now, the order is usually job first, then school only if they’re still studying. In South Korea, the university name comes up almost before the job, sometimes even before your age.
I got a front row seat to how this works 10 years ago, when my two younger brothers were both job hunting in Seoul. Junho, the older of the two, got into Seoul National University, the top of the so-called SKY trio of elite schools. Minjun, two years younger, tested into a small mid-tier provincial school a couple hours outside the city. Both applied for the same opening in the Seoul metropolitan government’s transportation department. Minjun scored three points higher than Junho on the written civil service exam, a test that’s supposed to be the great equalizer. But the hiring panel called Junho for his final interview a full week before Minjun, and offered him the job before Minjun even got an interview slot. No one ever said it was because of the university, but it was obvious to all of us what happened.
A lot of people outside South Korea assume this is just old-fashioned corporate bias, or a tight old boys’ network. Last year I met an old high school friend for makgeolli in Gangnam, and she’s now a senior hiring manager at one of South Korea’s biggest tech companies. She put it more bluntly than I expected. She gets 1,200 resumes for 4 open entry-level roles. She doesn’t have time to read every personal statement or look through every project portfolio. The first thing she does is sort the stack by university name. Any resume from a school outside the top 5 goes to the bottom of the pile, unread. “It’s not that kids from other schools aren’t good,” she said, swirling her makgeolli in a paper cup. “We all know how hard you have to work to get into a SKY school. The entrance exam ranks you against every other 18-year-old in the country that year. That ranking is clearer than any resume bullet point could ever be.”
That’s the root of it. The entire South Korean education system is built around ranking, starting in middle school, when kids start preparing for the national college entrance exam, the suneung. Your score on that one test determines which university you get into, and that rank sticks with you because everyone agrees what it means. A SKY degree means you were in the top 1% of your age group, in terms of work ethic, test-taking skill, and ability to perform under pressure. Those are exactly the traits most big employers want, so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle: top universities get the top students, top employers hire them, so the university name stays valuable forever. It’s not just for jobs, either. People ask your university when you’re joining a new church, when you’re going on a blind date, even when you’re joining a parent-teacher association for your kids. It’s a core part of how people size each other up.
As a parent of two teens who are considering going to university in South Korea, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to local parents and teachers about how to handle this. It’s easy to just say it’s unfair, but that doesn’t help when you’re trying to plan for your kid. The first thing I’ve learned is that pushing blindly for a top university isn’t the only move. A 4th grade teacher I know in Seoul tells her parents to talk about specific career paths early, not just “get into the best school possible.” If your kid wants to be a UX designer, a mid-tier university with a strong industry-connected design program and lots of opportunity for internships is often a better bet than a general humanities degree at Yonsei. Specialized technical colleges for nursing, automotive engineering, or beauty brand management often have higher employment rates right out of school than many top ranked liberal arts programs.
The second thing is that tangible, verifiable skill can cut through the university filter, if you build it early. My neighbor in Seoul has a son who went to a small private university outside Seoul that’s not even ranked in the top 20. When he was a sophomore, he started getting Google Analytics and UX design certifications on his own time, and did three part-time internships at local startups while he studied. He put his portfolio and internship experience at the very top of his resume, before his university name. He got hired at one of South Korea’s fastest growing startups right before he graduated, for a higher starting salary than many of his SKY peers going into finance. It takes extra work, but it works.
For parents who have kids at non-elite schools, the third small shift that helps is to connect your kid working professionals who also went to non-top schools in their field of interest, instead of just repeating generic encouragement. A lot of kids internalize the stigma early, and meeting someone who built a good career without a SKY degree makes it feel actually possible, instead of just a hypothetical you tell them to feel better.
I talked to Minjun last month on the phone, right after the wedding. He never did get that government job, so he opened his own coffee roaster shop outside Suwon now. He says suppliers still ask him what university he went to when they first meet, and some of the bigger ones treat him a little differently at first. But once they taste his coffee, that usually goes away. The shadow of his university is still there, he says, but it doesn’t have to block the whole path. I don’t know if the system will change much in my kids’ lifetime, but we’re learning how to work around it, one small step at a time.
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