As widely acknowledged, Korean universities have been increasingly corporatised at the advent of neo-liberalism since the late 1990s. This has had a devastating effect upon Korean universities, as the institution has become little more than a business, or a sort of prep-school for the highly-paid and secured jobs after graduation. Universities are consequently dominated by bean-counting, money-hungry, crudely-asserted “pragmatic” owners, presidents and bureaucrats. The results have been the collapse of the academic soul of university, evident in the downsizing and downgrading of traditional “liberal education” or “general education” such as the humanities, social science, natural science and foreign language and culture. Traditionally, liberal education has functioned as a course of basic college education suitable for the cultivation of a free human being and critical thinking. It has been described as a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a stronger sense of human values, ethics, and civic engagement, including a general curriculum which provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines and learning strategies in addition to in-depth study in at least one academic area. But Korean universities have abandoned this goal, advocating the promotion of “pragmatic” academics. This essay proposes to proffer a detailed picture featuring the liberal education system of American universities plus liberal arts colleges, which have paid a due attention to such communal learning as diverse academic disciplines, foreign languages/cultures, reading/writing, arts and music. This essay puts a special emphasis on the American system of “the core curriculum,” the set of common courses required of all undergraduates and considered the necessary general education for students, irrespective of their choice in major.