S. Korea's 'Dirt Spoons': Little money, no hope

SEOUL - Hwang Hyeon-dong, 25, lives in a 6.6-square-meter cubicle near his university campus in Seoul. The room, which comes with a shared bathroom and kitchen plus all the rice he can eat, rents for 350,000 won ($302) a month.

The sparsely furnished rooms, in premises called goshi-won, were previously mostly used by low-income students to temporarily cut themselves off from the outside world while they studied for civil service job tests.

Now they are increasingly becoming permanent homes to young people like Hwang, who identifies himself among the "dirt spoons", people born to poor families who have all but given up on social mobility.