Colloquium in April 2026
Soo-yong Byun (Penn State University)
Using data from the Korean Education Longitudinal Study of 2013, this stud examined how the “elite educational pathway” in South Korea—linking English kindergartens, private elementary schools, international middle schools (more precisely, private middle schools), specialized and autonomous private high schools, and prestigious universities—is structured, and for whom it operates to advantage.
The findings indicate that this elite educational pathway is tightly interconnected across stages. Parental socioeconomic status has a direct effect on entry into English kindergartens and private elementary schools, but its direct influence does not persist in later stages. Instead, parental educational expectations and support, along with children’s academic achievement, play a decisive role in progression to private middle schools, specialized and autonomous high schools, and ultimately prestigious universities.
These results suggest that while early stages of the elite educational pathway are shaped by stratified family resources, subsequent stages involve continuous selection through competition centered on academic performance. In other words, the pathway constitutes an ongoing process of competition with the possibility of attrition at each stage. This implies that elite education in South Korea is less a closed system that exclusively reproduces upper-class advantage and more a system that selects elites from a broader population.
*The complete findings will be published in mid-May in the book Elite education pathways in South Korea: From English-medium preschools to prestigious universities. (Seoul: Pak’yŏngstory)
