Foundations as test beds for talent beyond the average

Lee Jae-seung

The author is a professor of international studies at Korea University and head of the Ilmin International Relations Institute.

Korea’s education system long raised society’s capabilities. More people attended school and university and acquired greater knowledge and skills, providing a foundation for industrialization and growth.

However, the question has changed. A leading nation cannot compete by continually raising the average alone. Korea must cultivate people who ask questions others do not, connect fields and achieve world-class excellence. It must also support capable people excluded from existing opportunities. Talent development is shifting from raising the average to discovering and nurturing possibilities beyond it.

Public education, emphasizing universality and fairness, inevitably operates around an average. Admissions and curricula involve complex interests, and education policy is deeply politicized. Experiments including autonomous private high schools have struggled to realize their aims amid the admissions system and disputes over fairness and diversity. Universities face similar constraints. Departments, majors, credits and curricula form rigid structures, while new programs carry substantial organizational costs. A prolonged tuition freeze has also reduced capacity to invest in new talent models.

This is where private public-interest foundations deserve another look. They need not replace schools or universities. Rather, they can serve as test beds for talent development that existing institutions find structurally difficult to pursue.

Such experimentation should move in two directions: toward people whose abilities and potential far exceed the average and toward talented people denied opportunities by family circumstances, geography or limited information and networks. Both serve the public interest. Helping exceptional people go further and finding undiscovered potential are important social investments. The goal is not another credential, but giving people with an uncommon calling confidence that their ambitions can become reality.

Korea has accumulated experience through public-interest institutions. The Samsung Welfare Foundation, Ho-Am Foundation, Kwanjeong Educational Foundation and Kumho Cultural Foundation have built traditions in child care, scholarships, academia, culture and the arts. The Hyundai Motor Chung Mong-Koo Foundation has developed science and technology, arts and culture, international cooperation and social integration as pillars of talent development. The Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies has produced more than 1,000 doctorate holders through overseas scholarships.

In the past, providing opportunities to study at top universities was important talent policy. Now the foundation is broadening into an open ecosystem linking self-designed projects and mentoring with development from early research through professional life and contributions to society. The Chey Institute for Advanced Studies is building global knowledge networks in advanced science, technology and geopolitics, while the Center for Social Value Enhancement Studies has researched how to measure and expand social value.

What matters is not funding size but the ability to transform money into people and knowledge. We assign our best talent to making money. Companies endure repeated failures to create new products. Yet in spending for the public good, we often assume good intentions are enough. Public-interest foundations, too, can regard safely managing funds and distributing scholarships and research grants according to rules as major achievements.

But developing talent is far harder. It can take 10 or 20 years to mature as a scholar, and no one knows when a small opportunity given to a young artist will lead to a major achievement. Foundations must constantly consider whom to identify, what experiences to provide, when to offer support and when to let people proceed on their own.

That is why the public-interest sector also needs the best people. Foundations need a “brain” that studies how to develop talent: the capacity to design programs, track outcomes, accumulate lessons from failures and trial and error and then revise the model. The question is no longer how many scholarships are awarded but what public-interest model can be created. That requires the best ideas, people and patience.

If former scholarship recipients become world-class scholars, supported artists become mentors to the next generation and program participants return to design better programs, the benefits will not end with one generation. A living legacy emerges when one generation of beneficiaries helps cultivate the next.

Private philanthropy requires transparency and accountability. But not every public-interest activity can be confined within a “controllable framework.” Standards for serving the public interest should be strict, while leaving room to experiment in finding and cultivating new talent. Private foundations are among the few spaces where such experimentation is possible. Expanding that potential depends not only on foundations’ capabilities, but also on society’s capacity to wait for new models of public service to bear fruit.