Emerging social stratification in the Korean welfare regime : focusing on institutionalised differentiation in the education system and students’ attitudes towards welfare

Since the financial crisis, the impact of liberalism has had an enduring influence on Koreans. Being familiar to individualism and self-reliance which liberalism promotes, an increasing number of people have been suffering from precarious jobs in the dualised labour market whilst good jobs guaranteeing long-term employment have been decreasing, and the foundation of social solidarity in Korea now seems to be weak. The status competition for security in life begins in the education system among students which has been exacerbated by the government policy promoting privileged high school establishments since 2008.
This study aims at exploring and explaining the impact of high school stratification on students’ welfare attitudes. In sequential mixed-methods research design, the research project begins with conducting a quantitative survey followed by qualitative interviews. Firstly, this study investigates whether social stratification is empirically identified in the integration of values and attitudes towards welfare between two groups of first-year university students from general and prestigious high schools. Secondly, it scrutinises how the stratification in terms of high school type influences students’ welfare attitudes and subjective future SES from interviews and ladder test sets with selected survey participants from both groups.
In the quantitative stage, the strength of the cognitive link between values and attitudes towards income redistribution is compared between the two groups under the impact of SES. Unsurprisingly, the special group has higher SES showing a stronger and coherent integration than the general group in the cognitive link. Meanwhile, the general group shows an unexpected positive, strong association between the value focusing on self-interest and attitudes of supporting income redistribution, which needs to be identified at the next phase. In the qualitative phase, three types of welfare attitudes are identified among interviewees: liberal, pragmatic liberal, and progressive, which is less liberal than the former two. Interviewees having degrading experiences under unfair circumstances tend to belong to liberal welfare attitude types; the general group is more likely to be in the liberal and pragmatic liberal welfare attitude types, implying that the group could be more exposed to degrading experiences under the discriminatory education system. Other than the participants from the highest SES group, the special group is likely to have higher expectations for future SES than the general group, especially in the lower SES group.
This dissertation contributes to debates on high school stratification and its impact on social policy to broaden the perspective about the interactions between policies. It also provides both quantitative and qualitative data collected recently, which contributes to building references to promote further studies in the research area.