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I agree that Korean is far too difficult a language for a summer program to have much value. It is also pretty much only useful in Korea.
If I had to subjectively rank languages based on their utility, taking into account (i) the total number of speakers, (ii) the distribution of speakers, (iii) the relative difficulty of the language for a native English speaker, and (iv) the second-language ability of speakers of the foreign language, I would prioritze the top languages to learn as follows:
1. Spanish
2. French
3. Arabic
4. Portuguese
5. Chinese
6. Russian
How these subjective criteria work may be seen with German. There are about as many speakers of German as there are of French, but they are overwhelmingly found in just three countries - Germany, Austria and Switzerland - and English as a second language is fairly common. Also, the German-speaking countries are no longer as strategically significant to the US as they were before 1989.
Dutch is in a similar boat. English-language ability is even more common among the Dutch than among Germans. Joint German-Dutch military units even use English for command and control purposes. Dutch never took root in the Netherlands' former colonies the way French and English did in France's and Britain's colonial empires.
As for the languages I listed:
1. Spanish has the 3rd or 4th largest number of speakers in the world. It is spoken in a large number of countries, but except for Spain these are geographically limited to a particular region of the world. However, that region is of great strategic importance to the United States.
2. French is somewhere around 10th or so in total number of speakers, but is second only to English in the number of countries where it is spoken. Outside of Western Europe and Canada, though, most of these French-speaking countries are in Africa. Generally, they are not of great strategic importance to the US, though several, including some where French is a major second language like Algeria, are of growing importance. French like English functions as one of the world's more important second languages for speakers of another language, so it is also helpful as a bridge (e.g., in Algeria or Lebanon, where there are few English speakers and where we may be short of Arabic speakers).
3. Arabic, of course, is currently one of the most important languages for the US, given the war in Iraq and our other interests in the Arab world (not just GWOT-related). Arabic, however, is a very difficult language to learn and its many dialects complicate its usefulness (what you learn at DLI might be minimally useful in Iraq and may get you stared at blankly in Algeria or Egypt).
4. Portuguese ranks about 6th or 7th on the list of total number of speakers. Its main utility is limited to a few countries, but at least one of these, Brazil, may prove to be of growing relevance. It is also spoken in several former Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia. Portuguese is also sufficiently similar to Spanish that learning one may help you transition later to learning the other.
5. Mandarin Chinese has the most speakers of any language in the world, and the People's Republic of China is, needless to say, strategically significant. Mandarin is a fairly difficult language to learn.
6. Russian is not nearly as important as it was during the Cold War, but it does retain some importance. It is also useful in the non-Russian former republics of the USSR, especially among the older generations.
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