ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5778-9469

Date of Award

Winter 2026

Embargo Period

1-13-2028

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Sociology

Program

Sociology

First Advisor

Angie Chung

Committee Members

Elizabeth Popp Berman, Peter Kwon, Aaron Major

Keywords

Egalitarian Reform, Elite Conflict, South Korea, Educational Inequality, Status Hierarchy, Historical Sociology

Subject Categories

Educational Sociology | Inequality and Stratification | Korean Studies | Politics and Social Change

Abstract

Sociological scholarship on educational inequality demonstrates how the structural organization of educational access can exacerbate, perpetuate, or mitigate the unequal distribution of opportunities. While this scholarship has illuminated the nature and consequences of egalitarian education systems, it has not adequately theorized the policy mechanisms that constitute such systems or the origins of their reform. To advance theoretical discussions on the politics of educational equalization beyond purely cultural, economic, or demographic explanations, this dissertation investigates the history of demand-side secondary school access reform in South Korea between 1945 and 1974. This period witnessed the enactment of fifteen distinct policy configurations governing school access, which ultimately led to near-universal open access to all middle and high schools, thereby establishing the foundation for the rapid and equitable expansion of mass education in Korea.

The analysis draws on an extensive archival base assembled between 2022 and 2025, including legislative records, policy documents, institutional histories, newspaper articles, participant memoirs, and secondary history literature. The dissertation first develops three criteria—empirically derived from the Korean case yet theoretically generalizable—to comprehensively assess the socioeconomic openness of school access policy configurations: application eligibility, economic neutrality, and selection governance. Using these criteria, the study constructs a systematic ranking of the fifteen school access policy configurations, revealing three distinct reform periods. Each period comprised a series of reforms aimed at eliminating admission barriers, but they are ultimately distinguished by the outcome of each era’s culminating reform—the implementation of a no-exam policy: failure (1950–61), compromised success (1961–69), and contested success (1969–74).

Employing a relational power perspective, this study comparatively analyzes reforms across and within these historical periods, examining the complex interactions and coalition-building among powerful and marginal factions within three principal stakeholder groups: parents, school principals, and government officials. The study’s central argument is that the successful implementation of egalitarian reforms hinges on fracturing the “status-defending coalition.” Specifically, reforms fail when elite school leaders secure alliances with potential allies—such as non-elite school leaders, elite parents, and state actors—thereby forming a coalition that perpetuates their advantaged status. Conversely, reforms succeed when this status-defending coalition becomes untenable, compelling some of its members to compete with elite school leaders by seeking alternative means to protect their standings. The analysis demonstrates that this fracturing of the coalition does not necessarily result from direct challenges by the reform’s beneficiaries, such as less-privileged parents and lower-level school leaders. Instead, it can stem from their indirect influence on the status-defending coalition or from direct challenges by other external elite actors, such as fiscal bureaucrats or economic technocrats, whose actions were driven by objectives unrelated to educational equalization. These political mechanisms are therefore a critical driver of such reforms, introducing a crucial, yet previously omitted, dimension to existing theoretical discussions.

By elucidating these political mechanisms, this study extends scholarship on educational politics beyond its primary focus on expansion to the dynamics of equalization, offering a generalizable framework for understanding the politics of reform in post-elementary education and other efforts to remove access barriers to higher-status institutions. The study demonstrates that status advantage, like other forms of power, is fundamentally relational and sustained by interdependent interests. It reveals that fracturing these relationships is a central, rather than supplemental, mechanism for dismantling status hierarchy. These findings challenge conventional models of social reform by demonstrating that the fracturing of elite alliances can be a more decisive catalyst for change than the formation of coalitions among non-elites.

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This work is licensed under the University at Albany Standard Author Agreement.

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Available for download on Thursday, January 13, 2028

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