South Korea has one of the world’s liveliest higher education policy scenes. For over a decade now, the country’s been dealing with the challenges of a declining youth population, and hence, declining student numbers. Yet at the same time, it’s continuing to invest heavily in knowledge and education from programs in artificial intelligence, to the upgrading of 10 major regional universities, while all the while seeking to offset population loss through the expansion of international student numbers. And all of this is happening with the background of major political polarization, exemplified not just by the attempted coup of December, 2024, but also by a huge gender divide among youth and exploding right wing manosphere. There’s never a dull moment in Seoul.
Returning to the podcast once again to discuss all of this today is Jisun Jung. She’s an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Education, and a close observer of the higher education scene in Korea. Jisun patiently answered my questions about the direction of government policy, the repercussions of recent AI cheating scandals, and how Korean to English translation problems colour the way foreigners see right-wing student activity in the country. It’s a fast episode about a country where the policy evolution never stops. Hope you enjoy it.
And with that, let’s hand things over to Jisun.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.25 | Zombie Universities and the Politics of Survival in South Korean Higher Education
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Jisun, when we last spoke, a lot of our discussion was about Korea and demographics. The country’s lost something like half its youth population in the last 25 years, and it’s still going down. One thing that’s happened since you were last on the program is that the government adopted a law which was popularly nicknamed the “Zombie University” law.
Which is—yeah, it’s a great name. What’s in this law? What does it allow the government to do, and why was it necessary?
Jisun Jung (JJ): So the whole idea is to give an exit strategy for those private universities that are in a very difficult situation in terms of enrolment. Previously, the way universities shut down was based on evaluation. The government would evaluate performance, find various kinds of malpractice at the institution, and then simply order the university to shut down.
There was huge resistance to this. Private university owners—basically foundations, but many small private universities are essentially family businesses—would say, “This is our asset. We invested a lot in the campus, facilities, buildings, infrastructure—everything. That’s our asset.”
So they resisted. The new law basically provides a kind of settlement fee—about 15%—and gives them some flexibility to sell their assets, property, and land, as a form of financial compensation. The idea is to encourage private universities to close down voluntarily.
Otherwise, it’s not going to happen. Private universities will simply resist shutting down and continue operating, but the government knows that’s not sustainable. So the policy provides compensation and allows them to sell land and property, and then, in return, they have to consider their survival strategy and decide what to do.
The government has also implemented some additional policies alongside this “Zombie University” policy.
AU: So it’s a financial incentive, which matters in the private sector. But what about the public sector? Presumably there are some public institutions that are financially at risk or have low enrolments. Are people thinking ahead about how to close some of those, or is the idea just to squeeze private institutions as long as possible to protect public ones?
JJ: Public universities are not the target of closing—they are the target of merging. So they are all encouraged to merge. That’s the overall approach.
Over the last 10 years, 19 public universities have become eight, and that process is still ongoing. For example, in Busan, the second-largest city in Korea, there is one public comprehensive university and a public teachers’ college. The teachers’ college will be merged into the comprehensive university as a faculty of education. We also have a region close to North Korea, in the northern part of South Korea, where there are four public universities. They are going to become one public university—what they call a major public university. So, smaller public universities become second or third campuses and specialize in certain fields. The idea is to make the university bigger and more comprehensive, so it can be internationally competitive.
All these smaller public institutions are being merged into larger, comprehensive public universities. Each city or major region has one kind of representative state university, and that institution leads the others. So it’s a merging strategy rather than closure or shutdown.
AU: I want to ask you a question about Korean universities and their pursuit of international students. Because it seems to me that one of the really big policy responses to a declining domestic population has been to go after international students. And last year, the country hit 300,000 international students—that was two years ahead of a goal set by the government. Just before Christmas, one of the major newspapers—with, I would assume, a lot of encouragement from the sector itself—created a new set of rankings just for Korean universities, specifically for international students trying to choose between them. That’s a lot of effort. Is this going to work? What do you think of this strategy? How likely is it that international students can be a lifeline for more than just a handful of institutions?
JJ: Well, as long as there are enrolment pressures, universities will do everything to bring in students. And, surprisingly, Korea is becoming more culturally popular, and there is increasing demand from international students, which is very promising from the government’s point of view. So they are doing everything they can to bring in more international students, and I think more and more students are coming.
That’s a positive thing for universities’ survival. But, of course, quality is always an issue. Outside of universities in Seoul, many regional universities simply accept anyone who applies.
A lot of international students come not to study in Korea, but to work—as a kind of labour force in smaller cities.
In these small cities, you see small factories and farms full of international students. They are enrolled in regional universities, but they are not on campus—they’re at workplaces, sending money back to their families. And universities can’t do much about it because they need these students.
Many of these students also don’t have Korean language proficiency. Some universities don’t require a strong standard for Korean. And Korea is not an environment where English is the medium of instruction—you need to speak Korean, especially in smaller cities. Without it, students can’t participate in group activities or have a proper campus life.
But it works both ways. Students are coming for other purposes, and universities need them for financial reasons. So quality is a real problem right now.
AU: I want to come back to that issue about regional universities, because since the election last year, the new government has really been on a tear about creating essentially regional centres of excellence. The slogan is “10 Seoul National Universities,” 10 SNUs.
That’s not about creating new universities—it’s about pouring a lot of money into institutions that are already fairly large and substantial, but located outside the capital. And as I understand it, what happened in the budget in December basically doubled the budget for those institutions and raised overall public spending on universities by about 20%. The number I saw was 4 trillion won (₩). That’s pretty incredible for a sector that is shrinking, right? It’s a smaller sector, and yet the government is putting more money into it. What’s your take on this policy, and how likely is it to meet the government’s objectives for greater national scientific strength? Or maybe that’s not what it’s about—maybe this is really more of a regional development policy.
JJ: Well, it’s both. The idea of creating “10 SNUs” was really more of a political campaign term. They use it for political purposes, and there are other terms as well, like developing regional universities into research-intensive institutions.
The main purpose is to create more research-intensive universities, but also to reduce regional disparities.
About 20 years ago, each city or region had a comprehensive public university. All the local talent would go there, and they would stay there. These universities had strong reputations within their regions. But that hasn’t been the case over the last 10 to 20 years. Students now want to go to Seoul and other large cities.
So regional universities are no longer as supported by local society as they used to be. The idea now is to invest significant funding to retain talent—through scholarships, attracting strong researchers, and encouraging research that connects to regional industries.
For example, in a coastal city like Busan, you focus on marine studies and work with the marine industry. In another region, you might focus on agriculture and build strong links there. The goal is to create specialized research strengths in different regions, rather than having everything concentrated in Seoul. Why should Seoul hold every research cluster? That’s the basic idea.
Personally, I’m a bit pessimistic. I understand the goal, and it’s an ambitious plan, but it goes against market dynamics and student preferences.
AU: Could it work with a smaller number? I mean, 10 just seems like a lot, right? You could make a university in Busan much more attractive, and maybe in a couple of other cities. But by the time you get to the ninth or tenth city, that’s tough. That’s really what you’re saying, right?
JJ: But that’s politics, right? You can’t give money to only one city, because Korea is quite politically divided—west and east. If you choose just one university, it creates a lot of political issues.
So it has to be spread more evenly. The idea of having one comprehensive university in each region actually goes back to the 1960s. During industrialization, each region had a strong university, and they performed quite well.
For a long time, these public universities played a very critical role. But over the last 20 years or so, their reputation has declined.
AU: I want to move on to another story—we’ve got so many to cover today. I want to talk about the long strike of medical students in South Korea. They went out, I think sometime in—maybe even 2023 or 2024—and were on strike for over a year, protesting a government plan to increase spaces in medical programs.
This is not something medical students usually strike about—more medical students—and yet they opposed it. And it’s still an issue, because although the strike ended several months ago, maybe a year ago, institutions are still struggling to reintegrate students who missed a year. So there’s effectively a double cohort. What was the strike really about, and how did it get resolved?
JJ: We’ve always had a problem with a lack of medical doctors. If you go to rural areas, you don’t find hospitals or public clinics. So securing enough medical doctors has always been an issue, and everyone agrees that we need more doctors—that’s number one.
But the way the government implemented the policy was the trigger. The government wanted to show that it would increase the number of doctors, and they simply announced that they would add 3,000 more medical school places starting the next academic year.
That was the issue. Even academics and professors in medical schools said, “We’re not ready. We cannot accommodate 3,000 more students, and this will reduce teaching quality.” They don’t have the facilities, labs, or practicum placements—nothing was ready. This is not how you implement policy.
So they started protesting. At the beginning, many people—including myself—criticized the students, because it looked like they were being selfish, trying to protect their own positions. It seemed like they didn’t want others to become doctors.
As the protest went on, it looked like they were abandoning patients, because many of these students were doing practicum or internships and stopped showing up. Citizens were the ones who suffered.
The conflict continued. The government also had political motivations. Medical school is the most preferred major in South Korea—you can make a lot of money, and it’s a broader social issue. Top students are expected to go into medicine rather than fields like engineering.
So from the government’s perspective, increasing enrolment by 3,000 students also meant making 3,000 families happy. But the policy didn’t go well, and the government couldn’t back down because they had already announced it and wanted to show strong leadership. So the conflict dragged on, and people suffered.
Then we had a change in government.
Now, the approach is to increase the number of medical students gradually, based on projections of how many doctors are actually needed, year by year. They are also planning to open new medical schools in smaller cities that didn’t previously have them.
They are introducing policies to recruit students from those regions and encourage them to stay and work there as local doctors. Again, this ties into addressing regional disparities.
So they are combining several policy approaches. It’s still too early to say how well it will work. Doctors have returned, and students are starting to come back, though not fully.
There have also been many smaller issues—whether students need to retake exams, whether they receive exemptions for missed semesters. These may sound minor, but they are significant for the students, and they are still being worked through.
The situation isn’t fully resolved, but at least they are now at the negotiation table.
AU: Just before Christmas there was a very big exam cheating scandal involving artificial intelligence at, I think, Yonsei University. And it seemed to trigger a lot of soul-searching about the meaning of higher education in the age of AI. Has this event created any impetus for change at South Korean universities? Or was that just a flash in the pan?
JJ: It became a huge scandal and major news story because it happened at Yonsei University. People paid a lot of attention because it was a top university.
In a way, it’s a bit unfair that they get the spotlight—but when something like this happens at a top university, people react by asking, “How can students at a top university cheat using AI?”
So it stayed in the news for quite some time. But there hasn’t been any government-level policy response. In South Korea, issues related to teaching and learning are mostly handled at the institutional level. There are funding policies related to teaching and learning, but universities themselves set the rules.
So each university is trying to develop its own regulations. But I don’t think this is unique to South Korea—universities everywhere are struggling to establish new rules around AI.
AU: What the government has been doing is putting a lot of money into universities for AI. So I hear you about policies on the use of AI, but there’s also a huge project—something like 38 universities now offering AI and digital training for employees. So that’s more of a workforce development strategy or program. They’ve also authorized a competition to set up 10 new artificial intelligence graduate programs. Why is Korea betting so heavily on AI as a technology, and what do you think the chances are that this strategy will succeed?
JJ: I think there’s a kind of social and political anxiety—a sense that we might be falling behind. That’s a big, collective concern when it comes to technology.
When Korea introduced the internet in the 1990s, there was a lot of pride. The country was very advanced in making internet access available to all citizens, and there was a feeling that we were leading. But over time, there were many regulations on technology and innovation, and those regulations slowed things down.
So now, there’s a push to change that. During the last presidential election, this was part of the campaign—building a strong, innovation- and technology-oriented economy. And it makes sense, because Korea has major industries that will all be affected by AI. These industries are going to be restructured by artificial intelligence.
But we don’t have enough experts or a large enough workforce in this area. So the idea is that the government needs to step in with major investment.
They are opening new programs, but there’s another issue: engineering is no longer the top choice for high-achieving students in Korea. If you look at China, top students are going into engineering. In Korea, this is widely criticized—why are the smartest students all going into medical school instead of engineering?
So part of the policy response is to provide scholarships to attract strong students into engineering, and also to recruit internationally—bringing in talent and hiring new faculty. But that’s not going very well, simply because there aren’t enough people with the necessary expertise.
Still, the government sees this as the future, and they’ve been very explicit about their goal: Korea should be number three in AI globally. The U.S. and China are ahead, but Korea doesn’t want to fall behind any other countries.
So the strategy is to invest heavily in AI and build capacity as quickly as possible.
AU: I want to end on a more general question about students in politics. Obviously, Korea overcame a very grave threat to its democracy in the summer of 2024, and you’ve elected a new government. But the country still seems very split, in a way similar to the United States or Brazil, with an authoritarian pole and a more democratic pole—it’s not quite left and right.
In Korea, there’s also an interesting twist. Like those other countries, there are significant gender divides, with males tilting more toward authoritarian positions, and that seems particularly pronounced in Korea based on the data I’ve seen. One thing that’s happened in the last few months is the emergence of a new movement called “Freedom University,” which is an interesting term—an interesting use of the word “university.” From a distance, it looks a lot like a “Make Korea Great Again” type of movement. The difference is that it’s young, urban males, rather than older, suburban or rural men, who are at the centre of it.
So what is Freedom University, and how does it fit within Korea’s long tradition of student radicalism?
JJ: We’ve seen a group of unhappy young men emerge, especially over the last couple of years. I think this is partly related to their economic situation, including unemployment rates among young men.
There’s also a sense of grievance or victimization. In South Korea, men are required to complete compulsory military service, which lasts about a year and a half. Many feel that this puts them at a disadvantage compared to their female peers—that they lose time and fall behind in competition.
So there has been this underlying gender-based frustration, often expressed on social media. But this particular movement formed around opposition to the impeachment of the former president.
When the president was impeached following the declaration of martial law, these young men mobilized, arguing that the president should be protected. There are also rumors—and I think they are plausible—that there was some political organization behind the scenes helping to mobilize this group.
They initially organized protests against the impeachment, but as the political situation stabilized and the impeachment became less of a central issue—Korean politics moves very quickly—the focus of the movement shifted.
Now, it is more focused on anti-immigration sentiment, particularly directed at Chinese immigrants. The broader narrative is that these young men feel they are losing opportunities—losing out to women, and also to immigrants.
So it has taken on elements of both anti-feminist and anti-immigration sentiment. It is concerning. But I should also say that this is not a large movement. Socially, it is still quite marginal.
Most people see this group as politically extreme, and it hasn’t had a major impact on the broader political landscape so far. The concern, though, is that if economic conditions worsen and more young men feel dissatisfied, there is always the possibility that movements like this could grow. But for now, it remains a relatively small and fringe group.
AU: Got it. Jisun, thank you so much for being with us today. Korea is—well, it’s a very dynamic policy environment, and I’m sure we’ll have you back, as we were saying before we started. There’s always something to learn from what’s happening there.
JJ: Thank you.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, our readers and listeners, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, or suggestions for future episodes, don’t hesitate to get in touch at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week, when our guest will be Dr. Pushkar. He’ll be joining us again from the International Centre in Goa, and we’ll be catching up on developments in higher education in India. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
