> Considering the students were allowed contact with an American and allowed the free access to the Internet and software you describe, I conclude they were children of the elites of the country.
My assessment is different.
I currently teach at an "elite" US college (liberal arts college ranked top-5 nationally with more than 20% of students having parents in the top 1% income bracket) and previously taught at a mid-ranked UC school. My impression is that the student demographics at PUST more closely resemble the mid-ranked UC school than the elite liberal arts school. The elite students in the DPRK tend to prefer their version of elite colleges like Kim Il Sung and Kim Chaek universities. For example, students from these other universities are regularly lauded in national newspapers for their achievements (which exceed those of PUST students), but PUST students have never been mentioned in a national newspaper as far as I am aware. My understanding is that students at these other universities have similar levels of internet access as students at PUST, but they do not have regular in person contact with westerners.
> Probably they were given this education so they could learn to deal with westerners and potentially to improve their training for cyber warfare and intelligence gathering in the west.
As someone who has professional experience running/developing cyberwarfare and nuclear military operations with the US military, I can unequivocally state that the work I did at PUST was not developing these capabilities for North Korea.
Western experts who study the DPRK largely agree with me that educational exchanges are a great way to improve relations between the US and DPRK building on the model of how educational exchanges improved relations between the US and USSR. See for example https://www.38north.org/2010/11/pyongyang-university-and-nk-...
> I'd bet within a few miles of the experience you enjoyed that there were families starving in substandard housing.
One of the major goals of the PUST project is to help improve and internationalize the North Korean economy. The longterm effect will be to improve the standard of living of all North Koreans.