hankyoreh

A cluster of test-preparation academies and gosiwon

According to figures released by Statistics Korea, 40% of the 650,000 South Koreans who are looking for a job – 260,000 people – are preparing to take one of the country’s civil service exams. Last year, a record 220,000 people took the ninth-level civil servant exam, even though spots were available for less than 2% of test-takers.

Some survey results suggest that the number of people preparing for a civil service exam is actually closer to 400,000 and (believe it or not) that 38% of office workers today are spending their free time preparing for a public service exam.

Some people say the reason for this is that South Korea’s civil servants get too many benefits. There is some truth to that. Other reasons no doubt include young people’s desire for stability, the custom among Koreans of valuing the public sector over the private sector and a culture of disparaging labor.

But if you listen to the stories of people who are preparing for a civil service exam, you will learn that they are turning to the exam because working conditions at private companies are poor and because employment is so uncertain. A survey by the Korea Employers Federation found that 27.7% of new hires quit their jobs within one year, mainly because of an oppressive corporate culture.

Office jobs have become precarious since the Asian financial crisis, but the country has failed to set up an adequate social safety net. Getting a good regular job has become nearly impossible, and once you start working at a smaller firm, it becomes hard to advance to a chaebol. Even if you get into a chaebol, you have to endure a “life without evenings” and put up with stiff competition and an authoritarian corporate culture.

Ultimately, the explosion of interest in civil service exams can be attributed not so much to the fact that public sector jobs are a paradise as the fact that people are unwilling to entrust their lives and their futures to companies in the private sector.

Since the government abolished the age restriction for taking the civil service exam, there has been a significant increase in the number of people who spend several years preparing for the test. Surprisingly, one often hears about people becoming public servants after the age of 50.

After about three years of studying for the civil service exam, people are apt to become closed off from the world. They run the risk of being cut off from their friends and losing their appetite for life.

To be sure, civil servants have an important role to play. Nevertheless, they cannot create anything new, nor can they bring about change. This means that it is a very bad sign for the nation that talented young people who ought to be trying new things and making changes are instead so eager to find stability by entering the civil service.

Furthermore, the fact that people are preparing for a civil service exam that is basically unrelated to their major after devoting their precious time and money to two or even four years of university is both a serious loss for the national economy and also suggests that university education has lost its way. Preparing for a civil service exam may be the most rational choice available for these individuals, but it has brought about extremely irrational consequences for the nation.

Youth unemployment is a serious issue in almost every country, but young people in other countries do not flock to the public sector as they do in South Korea. In contrast with Europe, youth unemployment and the surge of interest in civil service exams here is tied to the labor market for university graduates.

In other words, South Korea has been moving toward a service economy since the 1990s in which the manufacturing sector plays a smaller role in providing employment, and companies cannot afford to hire and train university graduates for office work. Ignoring the economic conditions and changes in the labor market since the 1990s, the Ministry of Education has irresponsibly increased quotas for university students, and particularly for students in the humanities.

Furthermore, South Korean parents and students applying for university are less interested in the major than in the name brand of the university. Since the university you study at is the most important qualification in the South Korean labor market, your major at university has little relation to the job that you get or to the rest of your career.

With the chaebols overshadowing even the neighborhood markets, nearly all new startups end in failure. As young people see it, the civil service exam is the best way to receive recognition for one’s talents and to guarantee a secure future.

In the end, the 400,000 South Koreans who are preparing for the civil service exams are a bundle of contradictions that encapsulate nearly all the problems the country is facing in the areas of industry, labor, welfare and education. They represent the intersection of the government’s policy of propping up the chaebol, the absence of long-term industrial policies, the weakness of the social safety net, the lack of social justice and the Ministry of Education’s failure to regulate the supply of highly educated workers. They are the product of an extremely unequal and unstable society that has concentrated all of its wealth and resources in the chaebol.

Insecurity gnaws at the spirits of the youth, at society as a whole and at the future of the nation. The Ministry of Education’s policy of taming the universities by making the employment rate the standard for university evaluations is doing nothing to resolve this situation. The good jobs are gone, and labor culture and a strong work ethic have vanished along with them. The government, companies and universities need to put their heads together and find a solution to this problem.

By Kim Dong-chun, director of the Inter-Asia Graduate School of NGO Studies at SungKongHoe University and director of The Tomorrow research center

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