My Conversation with a Gangnam High School Student

"I would not want to raise a kid in Korea"

This past December, a Gangnam high school student emailed me about my writing on the fertility rate issue in South Korea. After some back and forth, she was nice enough to agree to do an interview with me over Zoom. We agreed to keep her identity anonymous, so I will call her Lee.

Lee shared with me her thoughts on a range of issues: what Gangnam is really like, college admissions, the recent Yoon martial law order, gender relations, and more. I think Lee’s perspective is valuable, not just because it is rare to hear how a high school junior thinks about South Korea at length, but also because she is very smart.

I have lightly edited the transcript to omit some identifying details and for clarity and concision. Also, note that this was recorded shortly after Yoon’s martial law order.

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Snowden: How did you start to think about the birth rate issue? Is that something people talk about from an early age? Does it come up in school?

Lee: Yeah, all the things you’ve mentioned. It’s mentioned in school a lot. The public school curriculum teaches you about different issues Korea faces. I think the general sentiment in Korea is that everyone cares a lot about Korea as a country—where this country is headed towards, politics, but also the societal issues that come up in everyday life.

Snowden: Do teachers bring it up like, “This is a threat to the future?” Or a security threat? Or is it more subtle?

Lee: It’s more subtle.

Snowden: Do your peers talk about it all?

Lee: It doesn’t seem like that big of an issue in everyday life. But we know it’s coming, and it’s bad.

Snowden: It’s interesting to me, I think climate change is something that is on most young people’s horizon, but this is maybe a little more lowkey.

Lee: Right.

Snowden: You go to school in Gangnam—the glitzy part of South Korea? Maybe not?

Lee: No, I’d say it’s the opposite.

Snowden: How would you describe Gangnam?

Lee: I feel like the regular foreigners’ perspective, or the foreigner who knows a decent amount about Korea—even a lot of Koreans who live in the countryside—consider Gangnam as this place where all the rich people live and is super fancy. The fancy part is somewhat accurate, but I’d say most of the appeal Gangnam has comes from the educational side, for parents at least.

I’d say a good proportion of the people here are upper middle class. Most of my friends’ parents are lawyers, doctors, which kind of makes everyone here ultimately want to go to law school or medical school, which is a pretty toxic culture I’d say, because it puts a lot of pressure on people.

Snowden: So you were born and raised in Gangnam?

Lee: Not born, but raised.

Snowden: Do you mind me asking what your parents do?

Lee: Well, my mom doesn't work, but she used to work at Canon. She majored in computer science. My dad majored in electrical engineering, he used to work at AT&T, and he works at British Telecom now.

Snowden: Growing up, did your mom work while you were younger?

Lee: Yeah.

Snowden: Was it hard for her to raise you—and I don’t know if you have any siblings—while working? Maybe that’s why she left?

Lee: I’m an only child. I don’t know the full story, but that’s what I understand.

Snowden: I’m interested in how people in Gangnam see the rest of Korea. I was in Busan, the second city. My impression of Korea is that there’s this power gap between Seoul and everything else. Is there a bit of elitism toward the rest of Korea?

Lee: I honestly don’t see Gangnam as this rich, high-society part of Korea. Gangnam in general has a large population and high population density. So just the fact that you live in Gangnam doesn’t really mean anything. The good thing about Gangnam is that the image of a high school student in Gangnam is super smart, studying 24/7.

Snowden: So I guess, Gangnam, at the very least, there’s just more pressure academically. More students aiming for these competitive positions.

Lee: It’s mega-competitive.

Snowden: Can you talk about that a bit?

Lee: I think a lot of it comes from the school system. You worked at a middle school?

Snowden: Yeah, so I never did the grading, but I understand that you’re graded by percentiles. So only so many people can get an A, only so many people can get a B… Is that right?

Lee: Yeah, exactly. Basically, your grades are by percentiles. If you’re 96th percentile, top four percent, that’s the highest grade you can get, that’s one. It’s a scale of one to nine, so the top four percent gets a one, and then the next seven percent—that’s the 89th percentile—gets a two, 23 percent gets A three, and so on.

To get into something like Seoul National University Medical School, you need all ones, or a mix of ones and twos, which makes things a lot more competitive, and since everyone here in Gangnam aims for something adjacent to medical school, that makes things worse.

Snowden: Are there any discussions about reforming that? We have an issue in the US with grade inflation, so because everyone can get an A, right now lots of people get As when they go to university, but maybe that’s better since people aren’t killing each other.

Lee: That’s why we also have the college admissions exam. What a lot of my friends do, they’ve given up completely on school and finals, and instead, they just focus all their energy on the college admissions exam. It makes a lot of sense right? Because around half of people who go to college get in with their GPA and class ranks, whereas the other half would get in with their college exam scores. But the latter is technically a lot harder, especially for people who don’t live in Gangnam because there are a lot of retakers for the college admissions exam. People take a gap year, or two or three gap years.

Snowden: Are you applying to US universities?

Lee: Yeah.

Snowden: So in the US, it’s holistic. They look at your GPA and your test scores—they look at a lot of things. Do some schools in Korea only look at test scores? Is that one way of getting in?

Lee: I’d say college admissions in Korea is like 95 percent test scores. Test scores are the primary part of college admissions, and for the college admissions exam scores, they might only look at scores for what subjects they focus on. So if it’s a STEM major they might look more at your math scores, but generally, they just look at your college admissions exam scores.

And then for the class rank version of getting into college, they look at that, and then they look at the activities, so you’re supposed to do a bunch of projects and stuff.

Snowden: I talked to someone older, and she said that back in the 90s this was also a thing, where people would just focus exclusively on exams, but they didn’t just have this one standardized test. Some universities had their own tests. So she said some students back then would just skip school and focus on their university exams, but now you just have the CSAT—is that right?

Lee: Right.

Snowden: Why is there still so much competition in school if it’s mostly about your CSAT scores?

Lee: Right, I would say this is mostly because of how hard it is to get into college with your CSAT scores.

Snowden: Right, you’re saying they retake it.

Lee: Yeah, so around 30 percent of people who take the CSAT are retakers, and most of these retakers are pretty good.

Snowden: And it’s once a year, right?

Lee: Yes.

Snowden: It’s like nine hours, is that right?

Lee: Lunch break included, nine hours.

Snowden: That’s worse than the SAT in the US by a good margin.

Lee: Yeah, I’ve taken the SAT in the US. But the SAT is supposed to be an easy test, whereas the CSAT is supposed to be a mega-hard test. There are only like two people every year who get a perfect score.

Snowden: Right, but that’s what we use as our equivalent of the CSAT, and it’s a lot easier.

And the CSAT, I know there have been some changes to it, but I read that in the past they had these really difficult questions on almost Jeopardy-style information, like theories of psychological development. And it struck me that that would encourage people potentially to just learn everything possible.

Whereas the SAT in the US doesn't really use that much crystallized knowledge. You need to know basic algebra, but you don’t need to memorize millions of facts about psychological development.

Lee: Right. Well, the people memorizing millions of facts about psychological development aren't doing it properly.

Snowden: Fair enough. [laughing] That would not be efficient.

Lee: You do need a gist of law and econ, and some of the major things that come up on the college admissions exam and are known to be hard, especially on the Korean section. If there was a law passage last year, there will be an econ passage this year… There’s a general trend. So bracing yourself a bit might help. But overall, I guess it’s kind of similar to the SAT but much, much harder.

And there’s also a lot of private tuition, like cram schools—hagwon.

Snowden: Do you think that actually gives people an advantage? Or do you think that just makes it feel like you're doing more?

Lee: I think this is the main reason Gangnam is so famous. I’ve heard this somewhere—Gangnam is one of the places with the highest density of high schools, and that’s why it became such a famous cram school area.

I’ve been to cram school two or three times before over breaks. And it was not for me, but most of my friends go.

Snowden: Interesting, so you don’t partake in hagwons.

Lee: I used to a bit when I completely failed in math, but I found my way out.

Snowden: To me, that’s very interesting. You’re clearly very smart, but you don’t really need it. I feel like some of it is just peer pressure, or parents just trying to keep up.

Lee: A lot of it is peer pressure, but I think this is just different perspectives. Most of my friends will go to five or six of these cram schools, and then during winter break, they go to cram schools from 9 am to 9 pm—usually until much later. That’s why these kids do so well on the CSAT, eventually.

Snowden: So a lot of my students also went to cram schools, of course, and it struck me that some students go until very late at night, and then the next day they’re extremely tired during school, so they have to sleep in school. I’m almost thinking to myself, you could just go to the cram school and skip regular school, which is kind of what you’re saying about people just focusing on the CSAT. This seems like a big inefficiency, maybe.

Lee: At this point, I’m in junior year, and I’d say maybe 5 out of 30 people are awake in class.

Snowden: Yeah, this is what I saw, and this was middle school, so it only gets worse.

Lee: This might be because it’s English class.

Snowden: That’s true, it’s not the most important class. [laughing]

Lee: English is important, but the general idea is that, at least for middle school, learning how grammar works may be considered more important than what you teach, but I don’t know how you teach.

Snowden: We’re obviously dancing around the birth rate issue. What is your high-level explanation or theory of what is the problem?

Lee: I see a lot of problems with Korea. I would not want to raise a kid in Korea. I would be very, very sorry for that kid. This is my general idea.

This is just my perspective as an individual going through the school system, there’s too much stress. I guess the birds-eye view of the issue is that, yes, housing in Seoul is expensive, but would you really want to raise a kid outside Seoul? Some of the major cities like Busan have good educational infrastructure and good students, but in other places, there’s not a lot of competition. And for people aiming for good white-collar jobs, would your kid actually be able to get that if they don’t live in Seoul?

Dong-gu, Busan in the fog. Photo by me.

Snowden: This is what I’ve seen. South Korea has a very unique economy, and the best jobs really seem to be concentrated in Seoul, and that seems to cause problems. It seems that even more than in places like Japan, you have to live in Seoul if you want one of these really good jobs at a chaebol.

You said you don’t want to raise a kid in South Korea. Does that make you want to think about emigrating somewhere else? You’re still very young obviously, but do you have a sense of how you’re going to navigate these things?

Lee: Well, I’m applying to schools in the US, although they’re crazy expensive. I don’t know if financial aid will work out. That’s for me to figure out next year, somehow. And then maybe work in the US or some other place in the world. Don’t come back to Korea.

Snowden: Don’t come back to Korea? [laughing]

Lee: Okay, I definitely would come back for breaks and stuff, but to work? I don’t think the Korean economy has a good future. Maybe me being out of the country would help lessen competition.

Snowden: It sounds like you're interested in tech. Would you want to work in the Bay Area?

Lee: Uh… I don’t know if that’s doable, but we’ll see.

Snowden: I realized that a lot of my students—I don’t think that they didn’t like the US, but they did see it as kind of crazy, maybe, which I can understand. So I’m curious, what do you think of the US from afar?

Lee: Well, my mom studied in the US, and a lot of my mom’s side of the family lives in the US, or they married an American, or they are American—it’s super complicated. But that’s why I don’t have crazy images of the US, but I’ve never actually lived there before, except for a summer camp, and I do have friends from the US from other summer camps.

I guess my general sentiment is it has a bunch of cool companies, and American politics is kind of fun.

Snowden: Oh, it’s fun! That’s an interesting way of describing it.

Lee: It’s a nice source of entertainment, but actually, at this point, Korean politics is getting even more fun.

Snowden: I was about to say—do you have anything to say about Korean politics and what’s happening? You have an insider view.

Lee: A fun fact is that Gangnam is very conservative.

Snowden: That’s my understanding. More pro-American, more pro-business.

Lee: Yeah, so Gangnam is conservative, which means a lot of my family is conservative and supports Yoon—used to support Yoon.

Snowden: Used to? I saw some people still do.

Lee: Yeah, about 20 percent.

I honestly don’t know what to think about the martial law order. Impeachment-wise, I don’t really know if impeaching that many presidents is good for politics.

Snowden: Yeah so this is a thing in Korea, right?

Lee: Yeah, so all the former Korean presidents have been imprisoned, committed suicide, fled to Hawaii… It’s not a good track record.

Snowden: Why do you think that is?

Lee: I feel like generally any politician in Korea would be corrupt. I would assume that Yoon is not as corrupt because he does not have experience in politics. The kind of issues he faces isn’t exactly about him, or his career as a prosecutor, but more about his wife, his family, and things like that.

Snowden: Right, so his wife accepting the gift bag, things like that.

Lee: Yeah, so he’s a bit of an outlier. And then all the previous presidents who have more experience in politics, they’ve accepted bribes or done weird things. There’s a ton of stuff, a lot of illegal things, which seems inescapable at this point.

Snowden: So I’ve wondered about this. “Bribe” can be very broad. Gift-giving seems like a thing in Korea. Is this just kind of culturally ingrained and maybe the law is getting in the way of something that’s not the biggest deal?

Lee: I guess all politicians are corrupt to some extent...

Snowden: Yeah, in the US, people take money from different interest groups, but it’s not a bribe technically.

Lee: I guess it’s a lot more—I wouldn’t call it transparent, but people are more accepting of that generally. I guess the difference between—this might be from a conservative’s perspective—but this is what people around me usually say, is that the difference between the conservatives and the liberals is that the conservatives take money from all the chaebols. So people know it’s happening, and it’s illegal, but it’s very straightforward. Whereas the liberals take money from the taxpayers, which is a lot worse and bigger maybe.

Snowden: That’s funny.

So what do you think about current efforts to increase the birth rate?

Lee: I don’t think there is a good solution to this if it’s just small government initiatives like giving money if you have more than three children. It has to be something bigger, a structural change. Maybe lower competition, or do something with housing prices.

Snowden: Housing prices are interesting. Seoul is extremely expensive, but I was in Busan, and I didn’t get the impression that Busan is super cheap. It’s cheaper than Seoul, but it still seems like the cost of living can still be an issue, and part of this might just be that there isn’t that much land, and it’s extremely mountainous.

Lee: I guess this would make sense—high population density, not enough land… Although if you spread out from Seoul, and encourage people to move to the countryside or smaller cities, then it technically works because I’ve heard of lots of apartments and housing being emptied.

Snowden: This has to happen, right? The Seoul metro, Gyeonggi Province, is still growing, and these smaller cities are just emptying out. And that’s happening also in Japan.

I think this gets back to the jobs, but is there anyone who says, “When I get older, I’m going to go buy a huge apartment in some province that’s really cheap.”

Lee: My dad.

Snowden: Your dad? Is he thinking about retirement?

Lee: So my dad has a house in Gyeongju. It’s been handed down to him by his grandfather. He’s trying to open, not a hotel, but maybe an Airbnb of some kind.

Snowden: It’s a very historic area, right? That’s probably a good place to do it.

Lee: Actually… I doubt it will work.

Practically, people who are thinking of retirement wouldn’t go outside Seoul. All your friends are in Seoul, your kids are in Seoul, the transportation is good, the shopping, the restaurants, the hospitals.

Snowden: And Korea doesn’t have a lot of doctors, right? There’s a pretty low cap.

Lee: This is also a problem.

Snowden: So the gender dimension gets brought up a lot in Western media, and there’s some evidence that there’s a big divergence between men and women politically. Yoon, it’s been said, that he attracted young male voters to win the presidency. I’m wondering, do you think this at all affects the birth rate? Or is that just noise?

Lee: So this is weird because I go to an all-girls high school—that makes things weird right?—but I would say that the majority of my classmates are looking forward to college, and then getting a boyfriend. That’s the general—I wouldn’t call it the life goal—but it’s a big thing.

Snowden: Yeah, people bring up the 4B movement, but that is very, very fringe.

Lee: If gender wars were that important, and people were thinking of it as such a big issue, and there was a big gender divide, you wouldn’t be thinking about that [getting a boyfriend]. Or I guess you would be thinking about it, but not as much.

I also have a few friends—or a few acquaintances—talking about the issue at Dongduk Women’s University. Have you heard of this?

Snowden: No, I haven’t.

Lee: So there’s this all women’s university in Seoul. There were talks of transitioning it into coed, and it wasn’t even confirmed. Some random guy in the school was talking about it, and the student council is really into the feminist movement or something. So the students started protesting, rioting—not really—but they started throwing things and destroying the school.

Snowden: Because they didn’t want it to be coed?

Lee: Because they didn’t want it to be coed.

According to my friend, who is a huge supporter of this, there’s still some kind of gender oppression in Korea, and turning women’s universities coed would be bad because this limits the educational opportunities for women. This is a unique opportunity for women, and so on.

Although, okay, Dongduk University is not that good—this is my opinion. Yes, it’s a university in Seoul, and universities in Seoul are generally considered to be okay, but it’s not top ten. There’s one women’s university that’s considered top ten, but this one’s not that one.

Snowden: Ehwa?

Lee: Yeah, that’s the big one.

So it doesn’t seem that big of an issue to me, but there are certain people who are very, very enthusiastic about the feminist movement. I wouldn’t call it good or bad. People who support feminism—there are multiple types. It’s like a spectrum.

So I would say, yes, I see traces of this from people around me, but I wouldn’t call it a direct cause of the birth rate issue.

Snowden: Yeah, it strikes me that the competition, housing prices, and things like that might be bigger.

How do you see the issues for women trying to balance having kids and having a working life?

Lee: I don’t know that many people around me in that situation, but my general impression, seeing my classmates, most of their mothers would work part-time. Some people seem to be managing it pretty well, but not everyone.

Snowden: Sejong is the city with the highest birth rate. It seems very family-friendly as far as a Korean city goes, but it still has a low birth rate. I don’t know if you’ve ever been.

Lee: I’ve never been.

Snowden: I feel like if you’re in high school Sejong is the least cool place in Korea. It’s just government jobs and families.

Lee: Oh, yeah. I’ve never been to Sejong, and I’ve only been to Busan once—the limited geography knowledge I have.

Snowden: You said you like tech, AI, things like that. Do you think that’s what you want to do?

Lee: I actually have no idea at this point.

Snowden: Why would you?

Lee: People tell me it’s okay—maybe it’s not okay.

Snowden: It’s okay.

Lee: If I want to go to college in Korea it’s not okay, but if I go to college in the US it’s totally fine. Hopefully, it’s the latter that’s going to happen. Yeah, I’ve been coding for a long time, so I guess that’s why computer science is the way to go. Although I might be interested in other things. I’m kind of interested in econ. People tell me I have an econ way of thinking, but I don’t know what this means.

Snowden: I can see that.

So you mentioned Dongdok. “It’s in Seoul so it’s okay.” Are there any schools outside Seoul—I know Pohang, the school in Daejon, these are STEM schools.

Lee: Yeah, they’re like MIT-adjacent.

Snowden: But are there any good schools outside of Seoul a student would want to go to?

Lee: Medical school.

Snowden: It’s like the US.

Lee: It’s more than the US medical school prestige. A medical school in Jeju, which is basically the middle of nowhere—it’s good for tourism, but college-wise it’s middle of nowhere—would be better than something like econ or computer science at Seoul National University.

Snowden: So you compare those?

Lee: Yes.

Snowden: That’s interesting. There’s a hierarchy—medical school in Jeju, then econ in Seoul. I think people in the US just say, “Well, you’re not into medical school, so of course you’re studying economics.”

Do you think the media influences this? So there’s someone who’s a big fertility researcher, and he thinks that K-pop is a problem. All these pop stars are single—this is a contractual obligation in many cases—and they don’t have kids, and they look very young. So maybe all these pop stars that young kids look up to are setting a bad example.

Lee: This is like faulty reasoning. [laughing]

Snowden: But there are a lot of students who like K-pop?

Lee: True.. but I’m like the outlier in everything Koreans enjoy. I’m not that big of a K-pop fan.

Snowden: I didn’t think you would be.

Lee: But most of my friends are super into K-pop.

Snowden: Who are the biggest stars right now? It’s hard to keep up.

Lee: Uh…. Riize.

Snowden: That name came up a lot.

Lee: Seventeen.

Snowden: That’s like a group, right? Seventeen people.

Lee: It does not have seventeen people.

Snowden: It doesn’t?

Lee: I think it’s like 11 or 12, but they have different units, and adding up the different combinations, the 11 people, and then the units, and the group as a whole, and then that number is 17.

Snowden: Ok, that’s confusing but interesting.

So what kind of media do you like?

Lee: I watch or listen to anything. I do watch Korean television. I used to hate K-dramas because it didn’t look cool

Snowden: It didn’t look cool?

Lee: It did not look cool when I was in sixth grade. Some of my friends called me too whitewashed—my American friends used to call me whitewashed. But I do now watch K-dramas, although high school means no time.

And then I watch TV shows from the US, I used to in middle school, Stranger Things, Brooklyn 99, things like that.

Music-wise, anything. I do listen to K-pop every once in a while, but I go into different phases. Sometimes it’s R&B, and then indie, and then rock, whatever.

Snowden: So you said you don’t want to live in Korea, how do most of your friends feel?

Lee: My friend sent me a survey once where 80 percent of Koreans think…

Snowden: Is this the thing about hell? [laughing]

Lee: Yeah. [laughing]

And then my friend asked if the emigration stats in Korea were really bad, and it’s not that bad. If I recall correctly Korea has fewer emigrants than France. Poportion-wise it’s slightly higher, but it’s not so bad.

Snowden: So with immigrants to Korea, do you think people are coming around to it?¹

This is happening in Japan somewhat, there’s a labor shortage, and you’re seeing more South Asians, more Southeast Asians. And it doesn’t seem like a huge issue. I think in Europe there’s more of a backlash because of culture clash, but people from China and Vietnam—it’s not a completely different world.

Lee: Honestly, though, the general sentiment towards Chinese people is pretty bad.

Snowden: Why do you think that is? I’ve heard of issues with Chinese tourists.

Lee: The general stereotype toward Chinese people is bad manners, or super impolite, or they do a bunch of weird things. Yes, population-wise, if it has 28 times the population of Korea, there definitely are a lot more weird people, but media coverage portrays the weird parts of China.

Snowden: I think that happens in the US, too.

Do people talk about immigration as a solution? Like, “Look, we need to have more immigrants.”

Lee: Yoon talked about this once as a solution, and there was an incredibly huge backlash. Because he’s conservative, right?

Snowden: My impression before he staged a coup was that he was pro-business—less regulation, maybe more immigrants. In the US before Trump, a lot of Republicans were like that.

Lee: Generally in Korea, conservatives support a more homogenous country—less culturally, ethnically diverse. There was a lot of backlash.

Even if Democrats were to say something like that, that the way to solve the birth rate issue or the blue-collar job crisis is more immigration—no, that just does not work.

1. Lee’s English is as good as any native’s, and I did not even realize until listening to the recording that Lee was talking about “emigration” and not “immigration.”