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If you fold boxes or stack shelves at Gwangyang Steel Works until you die, I'm sure you're actually less likely to be an evolutionary dead end than those of your countrymen who got into college.
Probably not.
In the West, the people who have lots of kids are the very religious, and the absolute underclass. The latter simply act on their impulses all the time without considering the future, resulting in constant pregnancies (as well as a host of social problems). Probably in the olden days these kids would just die for the most part from not being looked after. The former do consciously decide to have kids, but do so because of their religion.
Someone who folds boxes at a steelworks his entire life can hold a job, so he isn't in the underclass. If you can't or won't consider the future and restrict your impulses, you won't be employed for long, certainly not until you die. South Korea is culturally homogeneous, so there's no reason to expect his attitude about having children to differ significantly from his better-educated countrymen.
That just leaves the fact that he's poorer than them, and when you control for culture and discount the underclass, poorer people have fewer kids than richer people, because they can afford less.
Here's how I see it: if you're a college-educated Korean man with a girlfriend/wife, who presumably is also college-educated and middle-class like you, your social circle will put enormous pressure on you to have exactly one child, preferably a boy, and make every conceivable sacrifice to try getting him into one of the top 5 or so universities because there's like a 5% chance that he'll succeed and that's more than zero. Of course, this all seems rather daunting to the average man in such a situation, and even more so to the woman, so they reject this idea in many cases. After all, there's a reason why the South Korean TFR is not even 1 but 0.8 or so.
However, if "you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die", no such pressure exists. Even if we don't categorize it strictly as underclass, it's still rather close. It certainly counts as the precariat, and when you belong to that social class as a woman, everyone in your environment implicitly understands that having children is the single most important thing you'll ever do in your life, and the only thing you'll ever be respected for, if that.
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