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In September 2015, the World Economic Forum (WEF) published a report titled, "Inclusive Growth and Development Report 2015" and commented on South Korea's performance in education:The Republic of Korea has a particularly strong and inclusive education system, with excellent quality and highly equitable outcomes - it has the lowest gaps in reading and math scores between students from different income levels. (Samans et al. 2015, p. 41)Yonhap News in South Korea headlined its article on South Korea's overall performance in the report "South Korea's Economy, Top in Education, Low in Others among Advanced Economies."1 This headline can give an impression that at least South Koreans should be proud of or happy about their education system today. However, they are not. One must then wonder why South Koreans are not happy with their education system today. In order to answer the question, first we need to identify the thorniest problem of the current education system in South Korea.South Korea's education system today has been summarized as equal at secondary level but unequal at postsecondary level (Kim 2007, p. 192). Following this observation, the general dissatisfaction of South Koreans with their education system, even if praised by others outside of South Korea, is closely connected with inequality in the postsecondary education system. In addition, Kim points out that South Korea's education system, equalized up to secondary level since 1974, returned to a hierarchical ranking system toward the end of 2000s. The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the historical change in South Korea's education system over the past several decades, focusing on the expansion of higher education and to discuss its implications for intergenerational mobility through investment in higher education.Theoretical FrameworkIn many economically advanced western societies, higher education has been transformed from an elite system to a mass system (Trow 1972). As Shavit et al. (2007) phrase it, "[T]he key question about educational expansion is whether it reduces inequality by providing more opportunities for persons from disadvantaged strata, or magnifies privileged" (1). In the case of higher education, the expansion has been mostly examined in terms of whether or not this transition brings about more equity in access to higher education. There has been a clear premium placed on a college degree and a greater return for more education, as numerous studies show in other social contexts. Since the 1980s, a college degree has widened the earnings gap between persons with a college education and those with only a high school education in the US (Mare 1995; Morris and Western 1999; Autor 2014), but the opposite is true in South Korea for college graduates who received their degree in the recent expansion period (Chang 2010). The value of a college degree may have decreased as the number of persons with college degrees increased because the rate of occupational upgrading has not met the continuous and universal expansion of higher education.In the situation we witness in South Korea, we consider the position of Brint and Karabel (1989, qtd. in Arum, Gamoran and Shavit 2007, p. 5) as more relevant. They view expansion of higher education as a process of diversion, which reserves higher-status opportunities for the elite by channeling children of the working class to low-status post-secondary opportunities (2 year programs, newly established, without accumulated institutional human/social capital). In this case, expanding opportunities to higher education may maintain, rather than reduce, broad social inequalities. In a very critical review on school expansion in historical perspective, Pamela Walters (2000) writes:The enormous expansion of education, the most important school reform of the 20th century (p. 256) has allowed school officials and elites to accommodate pressures for greater access to education by disadvantaged groups and to satisfy social demands for equity, for fairness, and for greater social mobility via education without fundamentally jeopardizing the benefits that the educational system has conferred on more advantaged social groups. …

The Irony of the Unchecked Growth of Higher Education in South Korea: Crystallization of Class Cleavages and Intensifying Status Competition