Ivy League, Targeted: New Institutionalist Explanation of a South Korean High School’s Solution

• In Event: 2484 - Section on Sociology of Education Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Access to Education

Abstract

Schools often face external requests to conform to institutional environments regardless of their technical cores. Despite the new institutionalism’s finding of loosely coupled pair of the two cores, Korean Minjok Leadership Academy, a new South Korean private high school established in 1996, exemplifies a case where the two cores are highly coupled. KMLA declared its educational goal as nurturing national leaders instead of placing students in elite universities like other schools in the Korean K-12 system. The school, however, later became well-known for its American college admission results as the first Korean high school to place its graduates in Ivy League. Based on published voices of various actors and university admission data of graduates, this study examines the school’s strategic change by the new institutionalist perspective. Despite its myth and ceremonies with the national identity education and gifted education, the technical core of KMLA was highly disclosed and coupled with the institutional environments. In addition, its small number of students made it easy for the institutional core to incapacitate the technical counterpart. As a result, facing several crises in its early period, KMLA found out Ivy League admissions as a way to compromise with the institutional environment because the symbolic capital of the elite American universities satisfied the institutional conformity requests and the school itself. This case illustrates how the tension between the highly coupled two cores in schools can be resolved by the existence of the symbolic third party.

Author

• Hong Jin Jo, University of Chicago