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This chapter provides a historical overview of policies on higher education in South Korea since 1945 and illustrates growth of science production based on expansion of higher education.

We divide higher education policies into three historical time periods: (1) 1945–1950s, a period of developing modern higher education system; (2) 1960s–early 1990s, a period of rapid expansion of higher education, while government establishing a few research-focused science and technology institutions aimed at better quality research production; and (3) since mid-1990s, a period of fostering the workforce and raising science productivity in universities using targeted investments in research. We use the SPHERE project’s comprehensive historical dataset based on Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science and data from Higher Education in Korea to analyze growth in scientific publication in national and organizational level.

The analysis suggests that the combined private and public investments in the expansion of higher education, and sequential policy intervention facilitated the massive and ongoing growth of science production in Korea.

The chapter provides a thorough description about the growth of higher education and science production in South Korea and draws lessons for developing capacity for producing science.

With their national economy rapidly and structurally turning away from the long-cherished stable employment regime since the national financial crisis, South Koreans’ poverty is increasingly manifested through financial entrapment ensuing from heavy personal indebtedness to banks, kin members and friends, and, the worst of all, private usurers. The world’s once most aggressively saving population turned into one of the world’s most indebted populations merely in a decade. Having lost its once-proud capacity of a developmental state, the South Korean government has instead been busy devising various public schemes for offering grassroots consumer loans in supposedly preferential terms. Consumer credit, instead of social wage, has been offered rather generously by this increasingly neoliberalized state. This is another crucial component of financialization in the contemporary world political economy. South Korea’s emergency measures for escaping the national financial crisis have paradoxically ended up transplanting the financial trouble from banks and industrial enterprises to grassroots households.

This paper analyzes the communal fund of a school alumni association in South Korea and attempts to expand the understanding of money's social role in maintaining its network. The analysis concentrates on the account book of the 1974 alumni association of Hani High School in Seoul and follows the expenditure traces of its communal fund since 1987. Over the last 30 years, money for the communal fund has been regularly collected at the alumni reunions and distributed on various ceremonial occasions, such as member weddings and funerals. By defining the alumni association as a type of kye, this study explores the correlation between the communal fund's operation and the members' belongingness in the association. Most of them have actively engaged in operating their communal fund. They have applied flexible management regulations, reflecting members' respective financial conditions and life events. In the distribution of their fund, not only economic principles but also moral and normative standards are manifested. The 1974 alumni association and their communal fund demonstrate the symbolic meaning of money and its active role in a community. It also challenges the widespread belief that money is an alienating object in the market society. Indeed, money has morality and the potential to help maintain social ties in the long run.