Korea ‘unlikely’ to meet 2027 target for 300k international students

With only a few years to go, South Korea’s recruitment drive to boost foreign enrolment to 300,000 students is unlikely to meet its target, faculty believe.

The Study Korea 300,000 initiative, designed to address the country’s looming demographic crisis and help make universities more globally competitive, wants them to increase their overseas learners by more than a third, up from an estimated 180,000 currently in the country. The plan, in development since 2016, was officially announced this summer.

But experts in the sector say it expects too much too soon – and fails to provide better support for institutions unused to catering to a large international cohort.

Jun Hyun Hong, a professor in the School of Public Service at Chung-Ang University, who was an adviser to the government on the initiative, said that although attracting more foreigners was undoubtedly crucial to the long-term survival of the sector, the approach was “unsustainable”, putting production-like emphasis on outputs but failing to understand the complex human interactions behind them.

“The government is only focusing on [a] number – I always say that education now is considered part of industry, but this is an industrial view, this is not an education view,” he said.

Professor Hong said he tried to warn officials that without proper structures to ensure quality of education for overseas students, a push to significantly increase their numbers could ultimately backfire.  

“The education system should try to embed these things into the curriculum…but the government is not that interested in that yet,” he said.

Professor Hong said he believed that universities needed to put more effort into making education programmes truly global – with changes to curricula and on-campus support required before a huge wave of foreign students hit campuses.

“If we encompass more and more foreign students on our campuses and we don’t develop the actual mingling programmes and teaching and learning programmes, [the students will be] staying together here but actually they’re separate,” he said.

Professor Hong also criticised a recently proposed change that would lower the bar for Korean language proficiency for foreign students, with sizeable cohorts coming from countries including China and Vietnam. “If they don’t understand either English or Korean, how can they actually follow the lessons?”

Minah Park, a representative of the Korean Council for University Education, the country’s body for four-year institutions, agreed they needed “more time” to grow their international student bodies.

“Of course we can set the number as a goal, but…to get that number, we have to do many things,” she said.

She noted that the government had long set “ambitious” goals. In 2012, it launched the Study Korea 2020 initiative, which aimed to attract 200,000 students.

Although there’s a big indirect upshot to internationalising – amid declining domestic enrolment, attracting foreigners helps fill seats and keep universities running – there are upfront costs to supporting and housing more overseas learners that make universities wary.

“Individual universities are not interested in that numeric goal,” Ms Park said.

Chong-yang Kim, president emeritus at Hanyang University, said he agreed with the broader aims of the plan, but the government needed to produce "some kind of strategy” to help institutions, for instance by giving students fully funded scholarships. While such a programme exists, it is currently on a small scale; the majority of foreign students must pay their own way.

This puts Korean higher education, which relies on learners from lower-income countries such as Vietnam and China, in a tight spot.

“At this moment there’s no benefit,” Professor Kim said. “So why go to Korea?”

pola.lem@timeshighereducation.com