The best of intentions: Meritocratic selection to higher education and development of shadow education in Korea

摘要

The dissertation examined the development of shadow education in Korea development offers a number of ways to test theoretical ideas about the effects of meritocratic selection to higher education, where some places in higher education are tightly connected to the labor market. Shadow education is defined as emerging educational phenomena of large scale, structured, and supervised outside-school learning activities in the form of tutoring, proprietary cram schools, review sessions, correspondence courses, and related practices that are purchased by parents with the express intention of helping their children's formal school achievements. As such, the origins and growth in shadow education have clear theoretical and policy implications. The potential ability of shadow education to reproduce social inequality adds to our understanding of how education overall is socially reproductive. And the degree to which shadow education works against state developed meritocratic systems can present a problem for the development of educational transitions.;The dissertation conducted three related studies of different aspects of shadow education in Korea each employing a different data set. Study I examined the degree to which family background was associated with the prestige rankings of universities, even though the system holds universal opportunities and relatively equal conditions of secondary schooling and vastly expanded opportunities for higher education.;The question of Study II is, then, to what degree is the use of shadow education associated with the SES of the family and related family background characteristics?;The questions of Study III were: why does shadow education expand, especially under the mass system of higher education and universal secondary schooling?;In conclusion, the development of shadow education is, in one sense, a manifest channel of educational inequality and social reproduction veiled behind the formal meritocratic selection process. In another sense, however, it suggests some institutional theorist perspectives on modern formal schooling. As mass public elementary and secondary education has been fully expanded, accordingly higher education has become increasingly a part of institutionalized schooling---taken for granted by all participants of formal schooling. As such shadow education also becomes part of that normative package and grows as a normal part of educational preparation within the school system for just about everyone who values meritocratic achievements. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).