Koreans Gone Wild: Spring Break In Seoul

It’s Easter weekend, a perfect time for a confession: I spent half of last week traveling through Korea as a private college admission consultant. (I spent the other half flying to and from Korea, but I’ll save the story of that disaster for a different time.)

Having spent several years as a college admission officer at Stanford, I’m well aware of the stigma folks in our profession attach to such for-profit consulting enterprises. It was not uncommon at conferences or meetings to hear virulent condemnations against those charged with “selling our knowledge” or “prostituting your experience” or, my favorite, “crossing to the dark side.”

Bless me, father, for I have sinned.

But I’m happy I went. Not because I particularly liked being whisked around the country the way celebrities usually are – and the way educators usually are not. And not because I successfully convinced the hundreds of people who came to my presentations that the very generic pieces of information I shared were the “inside secrets from a former Stanford admission officer” that the PR department had promised.

I’m happy I went because I learned more in 2 ½ days than I ever could have elsewhere about the threats to schooling when markets trump morals, when entrepreneurs invade education, and when competition outpaces counseling.

It was clear early in my trip that I was expected to tell parents every possible advantage, every trick, and every loophole that would give their students a better chance. It was a brilliant ploy by the consulting company using my presence to recruit customers: prey on the fears of parents, convince them that access and influence matter, show them that strategy is key to success, and then offer the “Deluxe Ivy Guarantee Package.” Education, they suggested, was purely a marketplace maneuver.

The nervous parents and shell-shocked students ate it up. During my trip, I never once had a conversation with a parent or student who asked about a college’s commitment to educational excellence or how to find the campus that would be the best social or academic fit. To the future college applicants and their families, concerns about educational success, intellectual growth, and personal development paled in comparison to concerns about the business of just getting in.

While that disturbed me, I still left Asia with a great respect for the exceptional business savvy of my Korean colleagues. They have found a niche field and have turned the fears and frenzy so many have about the college admission process into a thriving scene for capitalist forces. They’ve performed their jobs and maximized their market influence perfectly. And that’s the problem.

On the long flight home, I crossed the International Date Line again and watched Sunday become Saturday. Literally and symbolically, in that moment I wondered if I had seen the future in Korea: is the obscenely chaotic pre-college landscape a warning of the perfect storm that will occur when education and the marketplace intersect?

To a certain extent, I understand the appeal of the market-based strategies for school reform that we often discuss in class. But I’m now even more skeptical about where they might lead.

I still agree that maybe we should offer more choice to students and parents and promote more competition among schools if doing so will spark necessary changes. That’s the bright promise of capitalism. But are we ready, to quote my old colleagues, to "cross over to the dark side?” Can we find a way to have market-inspired educational practices without also having the dog-eat-dog corporate mentality of Wall Street raiders? How can we encourage the most entrepreneurial and innovative reformers to focus less on business models and more on inspiring the intellectual imaginations and creative freedoms of students? And, perhaps most importantly, will competition among schools have to breed competition among students?

I’m not ready for board rooms to overtake school houses. If that happens, we’ll all need more than one weekend for confession. Bless us, father.