@samuelszuchan: 41% of students at Korea's top three universities come from high-income families. 5% come from the bottom. Those are National Assembly audit figures from 2019. And the gap has been widening since. At Seoul National University alone, the share of new students from top income brackets climbed from around 40% in 2017 to 55.5% by 2021, while the share from the lowest brackets fell by nearly half. Among SKY freshmen who applied for national scholarships in 2020, about 55% came from households wealthy enough to be denied the aid. Wealth in Korea is increasingly inherited. Between 2002 and 2022, national income grew 2.7 times over while the value passed down through inheritance and gifts grew 8.3 times, three times faster than income itself. Korean economists have started using Thomas Piketty's term for where that leads: patrimonial capitalism. And the sort is tightening at the top as wealthy families increasingly route their children through overseas undergraduate degrees that form a tier above domestic schools entirely. Which is why a student club called Kkanbu matters beyond its drug scandal. Kkanbu started in 2021 as a luxury social club, then its founder found drugs through Telegram and turned the 300 members into a distribution network reaching 13 elite universities, med and law school applicants among them. It surfaced by accident, when a prosecutor noticed the same sum landing in the founder's account over and over. This 300-member student club screened applicants on looks, school pedigree, and family background. A student posted the criteria publicly in 2022 on CampusPick. Nobody acted until prosecutors stumbled into the club through a narcotics case. That student club was openly selecting for status, which is the exact thing the "meritocratic" system does quietly and calls "earned."

Sam Szuchan

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Region: US

Wednesday 05 August 2026 19:00:00 GMT