When it comes to higher education systems, few countries can match South Korea for its sheer dynamism. From its explosive growth to meet “Education Fever” in the 1980s and 1990s, to its astonishing run-up in research output in the 90s and 2000s, to its policy innovations like the self-study degree and the Academic Credit Bank, it’s always been a system to watch.

However, as Korea got rich, it also began to shrink. The birthrate fell precipitously to the point where today, Korea’s population pyramid is effectively inverted. It has nearly four times as many forty years olds as it does newborns. With an 18-year lag, that fall in fertility has created continuous pressure on universities and colleges for the past decade, and looks set to continue doing so for at least another decade or two more.

Today, my guest today is Dr. Jisun Jung of the University of Hong Kong. She is an expert in Korean higher education and our discussion today ranges from the post-war history of higher education to the very real and immanent challenges that institutions are facing with respect to declining enrolment. One thing to listen for here is Jisun’s explanation of how demographic change has had very different impacts not just geographically, but also across the public and sectors. The very diversity of the Korean system means that its experiences have some very important lessons for almost all countries in the OECD, a majority of whom are now or will soon be experiencing demographic challenges.

But enough from me, let’s listen to Jisun.

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The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 2.31 | Korean Higher Education

Transcript

Alex Usher (AU): Jisun, I want to go back to the beginning of the Korean higher education system. So back to 1945 and the end of the Japanese colonial period, there really were only a few universities at the time, right? So mainly private ones like EWHA Women’s University. There was one big public university, which was the Imperial University, which was then broken up to form the core of a series of new universities. Then immediately, there’s a war that lasts three years, quite a devastating war. How does Korea come through all of this and then develop its system of higher education through the next three decades or so? Because that’s a lot to do in three decades.

Jisun Jung (JJ): Yeah, actually, your description is very correct. The modern universities in Korea do not have a long history. Only a few universities existed during this Japanese colonial period and the Korean War. The Imperial College that you mentioned actually became the foundation of the best national universities in Korea today. Although the institution has transformed a lot, influenced by the U. S. after the Korean War. The other elite universities during the colonial period, like EWHA, were established either by these nationalistic independent movement people or the US missionary church-based people. The South Korean government was more engaged in higher education after the 1960s, and they started to build more national universities, teacher’s colleges, and two-year vocational colleges considering regional balances. However, the demand for higher education was so high since 1980s, driven by this baby boom generation, and the government had to rely on the private sector to absorb such strong demands, because the government did not have sufficient resources. After the 1990s, a lot of private universities were opened. Now we have the highest enrollment rate in among OECD countries with more than 400 four years universities and two years at these junior colleges.

AU: So it is noticeable in Korea that enrolments in Korean universities were quite low until the 1980s and then blew up enormously, as you said, in the 1980s and 1990s. What was the reasoning here? Why did the government choose to delay the development of higher education for so long?

JJ: They could not, even if they wanted, they could not. Until the 1980s, there were not enough demands and supplies for higher education. After the Korean War, there was nothing in the country, basically. The literacy rate in the 1950s was around 20%. Until the 1960s, of course, primary education was the absolute priority. The priorities were improving the literacy rate and providing just a minimum nutrition to the student. That was all. Then it was also matched with economic development, because the industry during the 1960s heavily relied on this cheap kind of labor-intensive manufacturing, which did not need a highly educated people much. That educational priority moved to the secondary level, in the 1970s, especially including this vocational secondary schools, mainly due to the industry demand. Heavy and chemical industries were developed in 1970s and 80s, and they wanted these high school graduates Since the late 80s, that was the time that high education was increased people had a high school degree and now they wanted more and the government had to respond but they didn’t have a capacity to absorb all those demands. That’s how they rely on the private sector since 1980s and 1990s.

AU: That makes Korea a lot like places like Japan or Taiwan or the Philippines, where there’s a profound private sector tilt to the system. So it’s a system and it’s got big important public universities. But I guess unlike some of the others, there are private universities that are among the real elite, right? So Korea University, Yonsei University. If I had to say to you, how is Korea different from Japan or Taiwan in its system? What are the key features of the Korean higher education system that differ from those other countries?

JJ: I think you’re right. Like in Japan, for example, there are only a few elite top private universities like Waseda, Keio, and then all other private universities are basically lower positioned compared to public and national universities and it’s much more smaller scale. Korea’s case is different. Again, at the very beginning of the development, not many public universities existed. Some of the private universities, like you mentioned, Korea University, Yonsei University, EWHA University, they had a longer history than any other public universities. So they could survive well, and they had a reputation in the society. Many of them, especially ones in Seoul, in the capital, they are actually globally competitive in terms of this research performance. They appear in these ranking tables. That is the major differences from the Japanese private sector. In the Philippines, that’s a different story, relying on these all-religious churches to observe this small demand in the local society. But in Korea’s case where they have a lot of highly competitive private universities, which is a major difference but at the same time, it makes it difficult for the government to reform the whole system because of the high proportion of good private universities.

AU: So, you have the benefit of a system that’s cheap for government because it leaves it mostly to the private sector, but also difficult to steer.

JJ: Exactly.

AU: You mentioned that some of these universities did start to do very well in these global research rankings. It is really noticeable when you go back to the early 1990s and you compare it to now, how many universities, big ones like Kaist and POSTECH, these specialized research universities pop up, some of them in the private sector. What was it that drove this? What’s the money driving private research universities and also to what extent were universities, not just private ones like POSTECH, but say a public one like Seoul National to what extent were they responsible for the economic boom the rapid economic growth of those years? Did they play an important role in in lifting the technological level of production in South Korea?

JJ: Yeah, absolutely. I would say like those top 20, 30 universities, they are all engaged in this economic development and the national innovation. They all do that. First of all, the whole system was developed and advanced after these three to four decades of the development. At the beginning, they didn’t have anything. They didn’t have strong graduate schools, like PhD programs. All the talented people, they had to go abroad, like US, Germany, Japan to study their PhD. Their responsibility was just importing and deliver the knowledge, not producing the knowledge. Then made progress, and now Koreans have a very strong doctoral education system, which was strongly supported by the government. Korean research and development investment is number one among OECD countries, and they became active producers of the knowledge in the global system. Another reason actually is something related to the evaluation policy in the country, where Korean government uses a lot of this evaluation criteria for the research output, and they use them for the financial resource allocation, including private universities. So, most universities have to rely on government funding. Whenever they have a variation, they have to go for the government funding, which makes the university to give more pressure to academics to produce more research output, then they can get the more money from the government. So, the cycle, of course, which is not really good sometimes. People criticize a lot with this obsessive, excessive evaluation criteria. But still, it helped a lot for the universities to increase their research productivity, and a lot of private universities, public ones, they are all engaged in this industry collaboration, patent and research output. Again, I would say this top 20, 30 universities, they are all engaged in this research productivity now.

AU: Interesting. Going back in time a little bit. It seems to me that one feature of Korean higher education, which is really different from many countries in the region, is the role that students have played in politics, right? So that the higher education system has been politicized to some extent because students did play such a role in various changes of government, right? They played a big role in bringing down the Syngman Rhee government in 1960. They were the center of the Guangzhou Uprising in 1980, and they played a key role in ending military government through the June democracy movement in 1987. I don’t think any country’s students have had such a decisive effect on a country’s political history as Korea’s. What do you think accounts for this?

JJ: I’m glad to hear this question because not many people actually have asked about this issue in Korean high education. There are some other country cases like Latin American countries and South Africa. But again, like you said, South Koreans, these students, political participation is absolutely strong. From the beautiful side of the story, I guess it comes from the history and culture, which emphasize this social responsibility of educated people. There was always this tradition that intellectuals have to speak up to the authorities in any unjust situation. That’s the tradition. But from the realistic side, there were basically no strong political bodies or civic organizations in Korea after the Korean War. So, they had to make a sort of a connection between university students participation and outside campus political organizations like political parties or labor unions. For example, like they fought against this authoritarian government and military dictatorship until 80s. There were a lot of sacrifices, deaths, tortures, prison times for these university students, but no one denies that they made a significant contribution to the political democracy. It’s not only for the political side. In the 70s, 80s, the economy was growing so well, but there was no protection for the laborers. The university students had to fight for the economic democracy as well to show the kind of bonding with these labor unions. So student union, political union, and labor unions are all connected to support each other. That was the history. They finally obtained kind of legal status as student union in the late 1980s. Since then, the agenda has changed with time, of course, and they don’t fight against the politics as strongly as before now, but they still speak up for the global or national issues. For example, there are ongoing small-scale protests today, like including Israel and Palestine situations. So they still speak up, and then it’s part of tradition.

AU: Let’s talk about one of the more recent examples of that. So 2012 was a presidential election year in Korea, and there were a lot of protests about tuition fees, which hitherto had been relatively high in both public and private universities. My understanding is what students got out of that movement was a freeze in tuition, which has largely stayed in place until today. What I want to know is, in a system that is as tuition dependent as Korea’s that must have had some pretty major and adverse effects on institutional finances. So have I got that right? Have I got the sequence of events, right? And if so, how’s the system holding up financially?

JJ: Yeah, absolutely. Again, like this tuition issue goes back to this question about student activism, like you said, because the main reason for the freezing tuition was the students protests and strikes. But before this 2012, private universities tuition fees was increasing more than 10 percent annually after 1990s including during this financial crisis time. So most households, they felt really huge burden, especially since we have a high proportion of private universities, they couldn’t afford to pay this high tuition. Then when students started protesting the government and university, they tried to control them, but it became violent, and the students didn’t stop. Then, of course, there were elections. So both political parties, they had to promise to freeze the tuition fee to win the election. Since then, it has almost become a taboo talking about tuition in any election. Both political parties have to show that they want to increase the tuition. That’s what’s happening until today. Of course, the university leaders complain a lot. As you said, they say they can’t make any changes, any improvement for teaching and research because they don’t have a increasing tuition fees. They even don’t reflect inflation rate. But the debate is still with the politics. So some private universities could not hold on with decreasing enrollment, no tuition fee increase. So they basically were bankrupt. Some are surviving, mainly by saving the cost. So they have to restructure the department. They closed some department. They hire a lot of these non-tenure track academics, part time lecturers. Most universities are desperate to receive government funding. So they chase all types of government competitive kind of funding schemes. But I don’t think this is purely the issue of tuition. It’s more related to the declining enrollment in general today, many universities and their financial survival issues.

AU: Jisun, you raised the issue about declining student enrollment. So let’s talk about the birth rate in Korea, which is one of the lowest in the developed world and has been for a couple of decades now. What’s the current demographic situation for youth aged 18 to 24 and how has it been affecting student numbers? I take it student numbers have been falling at least somewhat, so the sector hasn’t managed to balance off falling youth numbers with higher participation rates. What’s the situation? What have institutions been facing for the past 10, 15 years?

JJ: Indeed, this is the most serious problem today in South Korea. The birth rate in South Korea today is 0.7, meaning that one woman has 0.7 children in their life. Most experts say that the country needs 2.1 to 2.4 to maintain the system so you can imagine how low this is. So every 10 years since 1995, the number of births decreased by almost 200,000. So how does it affect to the universities? In 2021, there were more than 40,000 vacancies unmet. These unmet vacancies are projected to be more than 100,000 this year, meaning that 10 percent of universities in the country might have less than 50 percent of their target enrollment in the coming years. So most universities except the very top universities in Seoul are struggling with the declining numbers, where it directly affects their income and operations. So, it is a very, very serious problem now.

AU: Has the demographic decline been relatively even across the country?

JJ: Geographically, it is very concentrated. So, the most affected areas are small cities. So, when the system was growing, all these private providers would build the private university in a very even smaller cities, even like countryside, we have a university campuses there. When the system was growing, students had to go any universities to enter, but no one choose those universities anymore. So those campuses are basically empty. So small universities in terms of scale, less than 500, we call them smaller universities in Korea. So those ones in a smaller, remote area from urban area, they are the most affected universities. Those ones are the closed ones for last couple of years.

AU: Interesting. Has the government taken any policy measures to try and increase student numbers? In the face of demographic change, I know there’s been a very big increase in student assistance in Korea in the last 10 years. I believe there’s also been an attempt to attract a lot more international students from China and Mongolia and other countries in East Asia. Are these moves connected to the demographic decline? And what other kinds of policies, if any, have been introduced to try to prop up demand?

JJ: The first policy is to reduce the quota across all universities. That’s the main policy direction. Increasing student number is not that easy, but they try to reduce the number equally across all the universities. It means that each university has accepted fewer students than in the past. The logic is to balance universities and prevent all universities from closing. At the same time with less number of students, they believe we can improve the quality of learnings. Of course, this is not enough, and there are not many debates about how to control this number of students among universities. Is it based on the performance? And then what basis? and can government really control the number of student across the universities? So there are a lot of debates. But as you said, they implement several policies, especially for international student recruitment. However, as we can see from the COVID situation, relying on international students is not a long-term solution for enrollment. In addition, remitting international students only for the sake of enrollment created a lot of problems in South Korean universities. First of all, it didn’t help much for the diversity of student body because most international students have very similar background in terms of nationalities, disciplines, all this background. Basically they were not ready for studying in Korea. Most of them, they were accepted without any kind of standard. They can’t speak Korean and they can’t speak English, but they just come. Then they have a lot of these challenges to adapt. At the same time, universities, they don’t have any support for their learning because they don’t have enough resources. Many international students today, they just come to gain student visa, and they just find jobs in the local labor market instead of coming to the universities. But universities can’t do anything about it because they need them. Even if they don’t come to the campus for the study, they still have them so that they show they have enough number of students.

AU: So are there any institutions that have done something notable to boost their numbers? Like apart from government policies, are there things that individual institutions have come up with to keep their numbers high?

JJ: Individual institutions, they do their best. Some positive cases, successful cases, they develop innovative programs like industry collaboration programs, providing more internship programs, and they basically change their degree programs all the time based on the local demand. For example, now all these AI majors, they are opening Laser, welding, that kind of programs are open. Instead, they close these humanities, linguistic programs, philosophy programs. That’s not really ideal stories, but that’s one of their strategies. There are some also very negative unexpected consequences, like some universities, they even fake the enrollment. Because the number of enrollment, number of students, this will be the base of the government subsidy. So, they have to show we have sufficient number of students. So they just put their I don’t know, relatives names for the first year enrollment. And then that’s the kind of really unexpected and even unethical.

AU: It’s a kind of innovation, So you mentioned that the government’s main policy was about trying to reduce enrollment spots, but that must be a very political decision to be deciding what kind of spots to get rid of and where you get rid of them, how you distributed between institutions. You mentioned earlier that, of course, it’s very difficult to do in a system that is there’s so dominated by private universities, right? In, in Eastern Europe, and I’m thinking places like Russia or Romania essentially the government propped up the public institutions and let the private institutions wither. So the private sector, which was a demand absorbing sector to begin with became like a sponge. You squeezed out the water from the sponge once you were done with it. Is that more or less what Korea is doing too? How much of the adjustment to date has fallen on the public and private sectors respectively?

JJ: Since 2000, they closed 18 universities. 18 institutions were closed, but they were all private. I wouldn’t say they were closed because they are private. They were closed because they are in a small city. Mostly they were operated by this family business. They had these kind of corruption issues because they run this business as a family business and they took some money and then they misuse the money. So all these cases were involved. So they were all private. Then the public ones, they also have struggles, especially in the small cities, regional public universities also have struggles, but the government is approach and institutional approaches where it’s not really closing down. They’re more focused on merging. So they merge the institution one public university in the city merges with one teacher’s college, for example, and then one vocational college. So they merge, and they combine these universities as a larger institution, and make them kind of branch campuses, campus one and two, and try to specialize them for other purposes. That’s public universities are trying to do. It all also depends on the these political regimes. We have two major parties, like democratic parties and conservative party. They have different approaches. Democratic party is trying to make more like an equitable, let’s sacrifice together, that kind of approach. Conservative body more is more like competition and the evaluation based. Then they cut the funding if they don’t have enough students, and for the long term, let’s make them to close down when they confront really tremendous challenges of recruiting students.

AU: Interesting. So what does the future look like? You talked a little bit about declining numbers and what they’ve done so far, but there’s still a long way to go in this demographic decline, right? I was looking at the population projections, and it looks like about a fall of another 40 percent in the size of the youth population over the next 20 years. This strategy you described of private universities closing and public universities consolidating, is that going to be enough to get you through the next phase of this demographic decline? Or are we likely to see university closures on a much larger scale?

JJ: I do think more universities will be closed down. It seems like very inevitable, unfortunately. It’s important though, to coordinate among stakeholders, how to minimize these damages. More institutions will be closed down, and we can already see what problems are emerging. For example, for students you are in a university, and your university will be closed down in after two years. Then the government is trying to transfer these students to another institution in the same region. Of course, there is no perfect match, and it is highly likely, they will drop out. So students will be highly affected. Academics and admin people, all the managers, they lose their jobs. So, that’s another problem. Then the biggest another problem, especially for private universities, they don’t know what to do with these huge buildings and asset all the properties that universities had. Nobody knows how to use those buildings and asset. So that’s another problem. Then also local economy of the whole city. Sometimes it is small city university series. They basically go down, the whole economy dies when students are gone. So a lot of things are related problems. Then the government is trying to coordinate things in advance, not in advance, it’s already a bit late, but they are doing things. Then the thing is how do we prepare for such changes next five years, ten years, and then how to coordinate things? I think that will be the main challenges.

AU: So how optimistic are you for the Korean higher education system in the face of this, existential challenge? We know that if we did this interview again in 20 year’s time, the Korean higher education system will be smaller, but will it necessarily be worse? What’s the case for optimism in Korea?

JJ: The system will be smaller in terms of the number of students for sure, unless we change immigration policy dramatically, but I don’t think so. But it can be still stronger with other strengths. That’s what I’m hoping to see. For example, the system should improve like, diversity. Currently in Korean high education, we have a lot of universities, we have a lot of students, but they are mostly like similar institutions. We do similar programs based on the similar background of students selected by the same standardized test. That’s what’s happening in Korean high education. So in the future, where the size will be smaller for the number of students, that kind of standardized model would disappear in my opinion. Each university has to have innovative programs to specialize their strengths in terms of programs, target students and pedagogies. So that the kind of traditional hierarchical structure of these four-year comprehensive universities should be transformed into multiple models of institutions. Some universities are doing good job, like they have innovative cases focusing on only non-traditional learners. They only recruit adult learners, part time learners, and they develop their tailored programs. That kind of new approaches will be applied. They might develop sort of network model among universities, including overseas institutions and industries so that they provide more creative programs, by using the network, not necessarily these physical campuses. I think anyway, the whole concept of university will be changing in the next 20 years. So they will require universities to be more creative, but although it’s going to be very challenging, but there is a chance to be growing more optimistically with creative and innovative approaches. Hopefully.

AU: Fantastic. Jisun Jung, thank you so much for being with us today.

JJ: Thank you.

AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and of course you, the listeners, for tuning in. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, please do not hesitate to contact us at podcasts@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week when our guests will be Dr. Andrea Peto and Dr. Jo-Anne Dillabough of Central European University and Cambridge University, respectively. They’ll be joining us to talk about the rise of illiberal universities in Europe and North America. Bye for now.

*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.