In a Nation Obsessed With Academic Credentials, 'You Have Constant Pressure to Fake it'
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
SEOUL -- An epidemic of phony academic credentials has broken out in South Korea, a nation where calibrations of human worth are obsessively tied to college achievement.
Admired performers, beloved media personalities, assorted academicians and a revered Buddhist monk have been exposed as long-time résumé inflaters. In most cases, they have confessed their sins and asked for public absolution.
"When I was young and was making my living singing commercial jingles, I lied and for the next 30 years that lie has been troubling my conscience," confessed Yoon Suk Hwa, 51, a famed and versatile actress who has been called South Korea's Meryl Streep.
The state prosecutor's office has launched a nationwide investigation this summer into fabricated degrees, plagiarized doctoral theses and forged test certificates. It has asked tipsters to call in with information.
"Even if you are accomplished in Korea, people are constantly asking about your college degrees," said Whang Sang Min, a professor of psychology at Yonsei University in Seoul. "You have constant pressure to fake it."
In an online statement, Yoon said last month that she faked it to enhance her career. She said she falsely stated on a résumé that she attended the prestigious Ewha Womans University. The lie took on a life of its own after she became well known. She was invited to speak at the university's chapel, where she recounted her supposed college memories.
Like Yoon, many of the fakers who have been outed this summer are prosperous and middle-age. Until their lies became public, they held solid perches in the Korean establishment.
They invented academic achievements three decades ago, when this prosperous nation -- now the world's 11th largest economy -- was still recovering from the economic and cultural devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War.
It was a time when traditional social structures had largely collapsed, when a college credential had become the preeminent measure of individual worth and when it was terribly hard to get into a good university.
"Unless you finished college, you were not really a decent human being in this society," said Whang, who has a doctorate in psychology from Harvard and studies South Korean popular culture. "For actors and for singers, it was the same. If you had a degree, people appreciated your acting and singing more."
Whang said a sizeable number of ambitious and talented Koreans who failed to get into the right university wrote fiction in résumé form in order to grab a secure rung in this credentials-crazed culture. For many years, no one checked them out.
A university credential in South Korea could even enhance the perceived holiness of a Buddhist monk -- and attract hordes of followers to his meditation center.
Venerable Ji Gwang, 57, who presides over a large and prosperous meditation center in an upscale area of Seoul, said as much last month when he admitted that he lied on a long-ago résumé. It falsely said he had attended Seoul National University, this country's top-rated public college.
"People swarmed in because they heard that a monk who had gone to a distinguished university was teaching the scriptures in English," Ji Gwang said at a news conference last month.
His meditation center has grown phenomenally since the mid-1980s, from a handful of members to more than 250,000.
In a reluctant interview this week inside the center, the monk said his résumé problems occurred when "I was still in the secular world." He falsified his résumé when applying for a newspaper job in the 1970s.
"This is now irrelevant for me as a practicing monk," he said in the interview, which came after he had delivered a long lecture on ecological responsibility to a hall packed with attentive middle-age women.
He said he expected his scandal to blow over: "I am just waiting for time to pass." For his followers at the meditation center, it seems enough time has already passed. During the interview, several expressed anger at questions about the degree and repeatedly asked the reporter to leave.
The passage of time, though, is unlikely to help others in the diverse religious worlds of South Korea. There are rumblings here of widespread fraudulent academic credentials among Christian ministers.
"Credentials are a big, big problem," said Rev. Joseph Shino Park, a director of the Christian Council of Korea, an umbrella group for the churches of a nation where about 30 percent of 49 million people are Christian. "It may soon be revealed that very famous, high-ranking church officials have faked their credentials."
For ministers, there are financial, as well as social, incentives to pump up college achievements. Successful churches, together with their senior ministers, can become wealthy, drawing on the tithing of prosperous congregations whose members value the wisdom of preachers with college credentials.
Not everyone who has been accused of faking credentials has admitted a mistake and asked for forgiveness.
Most notable among the unrepentant is Shin Jeong Ah, 35, an art history professor at Seoul's Dongguk University. She was a rising star in Seoul society and the youngest-ever artistic director of a major arts festival.
She had a doctoral degree from Yale and bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Kansas on her résumé. Yale, however, told the Associated Press that she never attended the university. Kansas said she attended, but did not earn a degree.
Prosecutors want to investigate her on charges of forgery, according to press reports. Shin, though, reportedly left the country in July and her whereabouts are unknown.
Even among those who have faked degrees, the abiding desire in Korea for college credentials does not necessarily disappear.
Ji Gwang, the monk who falsely dressed up his résumé decades ago, has since earned a master's degree in religion.
"Right now," he said proudly, "I am a doctoral candidate in the graduate school at Seoul National University."
That's the school he did not manage to attend in his younger days.
Special correspondent Stella Kim contributed to this report.
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