The Institutional Floor: How Contest Mobility Erodes the Class Ceiling in South Korea

• In Event: Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 18. Race, Class, and Gender

Abstract

While sociological research on elite reproduction has increasingly highlighted a persistent “Class Ceiling” in the Global North, these models—often assuming “sponsored mobility” and the effect of embodied cultural capital—fail to account for the specific dynamics of “contest mobility” systems prevalent in the Global South. This study investigates the historical experience of South Korean academic elites (1960s–1980s) to demonstrate that elite universities, situated at the absolute pinnacle of national academic hierarchies, functioned as an “Institutional Floor” rather than a ceiling. Drawing on 29 in-depth life-history interviews randomly sampled from a comprehensive database of over 20,000 state-produced overseas student records, I trace the divergent trajectories of individuals who successfully navigated the nation's hyper-competitive "Exam Hell". The analysis identifies two distinct pathways to the elite: the “Glass Scaffolding” of the privileged, where familial resources provided an invisible, buffered conveyor belt through meritocratic contests, and the “Self-Forged Scaffolding” of the "Meritocratic Poor," who utilized raw academic labor—often through years of private tutoring—as a lifeline for survival and mobility. Despite these disparate starting points, the elite institution served as a site of “Elite Convergence”. Once students survived the state-administered high-stakes testing, the state-university nexus provided a standardized institutional floor through aggressive patronage, including the mandatory military service acceleration and national scholarships. This structural safety net “bleached” marginalized origins and facilitated “Class Alchemy,” transforming fragmented class trajectories into a unified, state-guaranteed elite identity prepared for the transnational academic circuit. This research extends Turner’s (1960) typology by theorizing a system of “state-administered sponsorship” that challenges conventional myths of meritocracy and reveals the institutional mechanisms of elite reproduction in developmental states.

Author

• HongJin Jo, University of Chicago