universities. 3 Central to that brand capital is globalization itself, namely universities’ differential ability to go global (for example, through opportunities to study abroad or English-language courses). Although students attending South Korea’s upper-tier colleges benefit from the prestige of their universities, those at lower-tier schools feel the burden of taking on the project of developing their human capital value on their own. However, this burden is borne in ways that are notably inflected by gender. Our research demonstrates that the feminine is imagined to be domestic (in both senses of that word): limited and limiting in direct contrast with masculine images of free circulation on a global stage. 4
We use neoliberal subjectivity to index personal characteristics and proclivities that embrace the pursuit of active, vital, and cosmopolitan lives. This constellation of attributes as neoliberal agrees with many scholars who argue that changed economic and political formations across the globe have led to powerful changes in ideas about desirable or required ways of being. More specifically, this literature examines the articulation of personal formation with, for example, the flexibilization of labor, the demise of job security, and the retrenchment of both state and corporate support for social welfare. For South Korea, these personal features distinguish this generation from earlier generations of college students. Today’s college students are committed to becoming vital—people who lead active and enjoyable lives, people who live hard and play hard and who aim to experience the world to its fullest. Students are aware, however, that these are more than just matters of style and pleasure. They realize that this new mode of being is a requirement for leading a productive life in a rapidly transforming and globalizing world. A feature of this discourse on human development is its explicit understanding of what it takes to succeed in the contemporary economy. That the
work
of embracing these new ideals can be onerous is, therefore, not unrecognized by students. At the time of our research, we noted a shared optimism among our interlocutors in their willingness to embrace this developmental narrative. In hindsight, some of this optimism may be waning as employment prospects grow ever bleaker and South Korea enters into an era of global fatigue, in which the call for the global has perhaps become so saturated as to lose all meaning.
Nonetheless, this new generation distinguishes itself from the hardworking model students of an earlier generation who were driven by familial pressures to achieve in the highly regimented discipline of formal schooling through the well-recognized education management of their families (especiallytheir mothers). Today’s successful student must necessarily be more than simply a hard-working social conformist: He or she must be a self-starter. The new generation also sees itself as different from student movement activists who, although not model students, conformed to another sort of collectivistic pressure. Both of these earlier groups, then, are imagined as collectivist subjects driven by the external demands of families or their cohort group. In differentiating themselves from the past, contemporary students articulate a discourse of individuality, style, and self-fashioning. Additionally, the scope of this new persona extends beyond South Korea in an age of radical liberalization and the globalization of all forms of capital. Competition does not end at the boundaries of the state. Thus, the present college generation is deeply committed to a cosmopolitan ideal in which people are able to circulate in a wider and increasingly global arena. At the heart of this personal development project is English mastery, and many students described English as a necessary base (
beisŭ
) (Park and Abelmann 2004; see also Crystal 2003).
In some senses, the lives of the students today are
We use neoliberal subjectivity to index personal characteristics and proclivities that embrace the pursuit of active, vital, and cosmopolitan lives. This constellation of attributes as neoliberal agrees with many scholars who argue that changed economic and political formations across the globe have led to powerful changes in ideas about desirable or required ways of being. More specifically, this literature examines the articulation of personal formation with, for example, the flexibilization of labor, the demise of job security, and the retrenchment of both state and corporate support for social welfare. For South Korea, these personal features distinguish this generation from earlier generations of college students. Today’s college students are committed to becoming vital—people who lead active and enjoyable lives, people who live hard and play hard and who aim to experience the world to its fullest. Students are aware, however, that these are more than just matters of style and pleasure. They realize that this new mode of being is a requirement for leading a productive life in a rapidly transforming and globalizing world. A feature of this discourse on human development is its explicit understanding of what it takes to succeed in the contemporary economy. That the
work
of embracing these new ideals can be onerous is, therefore, not unrecognized by students. At the time of our research, we noted a shared optimism among our interlocutors in their willingness to embrace this developmental narrative. In hindsight, some of this optimism may be waning as employment prospects grow ever bleaker and South Korea enters into an era of global fatigue, in which the call for the global has perhaps become so saturated as to lose all meaning.
Nonetheless, this new generation distinguishes itself from the hardworking model students of an earlier generation who were driven by familial pressures to achieve in the highly regimented discipline of formal schooling through the well-recognized education management of their families (especiallytheir mothers). Today’s successful student must necessarily be more than simply a hard-working social conformist: He or she must be a self-starter. The new generation also sees itself as different from student movement activists who, although not model students, conformed to another sort of collectivistic pressure. Both of these earlier groups, then, are imagined as collectivist subjects driven by the external demands of families or their cohort group. In differentiating themselves from the past, contemporary students articulate a discourse of individuality, style, and self-fashioning. Additionally, the scope of this new persona extends beyond South Korea in an age of radical liberalization and the globalization of all forms of capital. Competition does not end at the boundaries of the state. Thus, the present college generation is deeply committed to a cosmopolitan ideal in which people are able to circulate in a wider and increasingly global arena. At the heart of this personal development project is English mastery, and many students described English as a necessary base (
beisŭ
) (Park and Abelmann 2004; see also Crystal 2003).
In some senses, the lives of the students today are
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