Korea’s plans to decentralise higher education meet pushback

A government initiative to strengthen national universities outside South Korea’s capital has drawn criticism from some quarters in the country’s higher education sector.

The Ministry of Education has announced the first three universities to receive large-scale funding under the “10 Seoul National Universities” initiative (10 SNUs), which aims to raise education and research standards at Korea’s nine regional national universities to bring them more in line with those at Seoul National University (SNU), one of the country’s three top institutions, all of which are based in the capital.

Pusan National University, Chonnam National University and Chungnam National University are the first beneficiaries of the initiative. Each will receive 70 billion won (£38 million) annually in government funding until 2030.

The ministry has said that the three universities were selected because of their links to growth industries, particularly in science and technology. But there has been no further detail on future funding rounds or on the total funding available, sparking concern that the initiative has prioritised certain universities over others.

The backdrop to the 10 SNUs policy is an ongoing discourse around the capital’s dominance within South Korea. Diluting that concentration of political, economic and social power is part of the Lee Jae Myung administration’s national development agenda. At the end of last year, the government began unveiling plans to create five mega-regions and three special provinces in a bid to balance growth evenly throughout the regions.

Kyuseok Kim, director of the IES Abroad Seoul Center, told Times Higher Education that regionalisation is one of “the largest and the most important national agendas” of the current administration.

“Unlike past practices, where all resources, employment opportunities, jobs or research grants were very much concentrated in the Seoul region…this government is very fond of equalised development for everyone,” he said.

The 10 SNUs initiative is progressing alongside a government proposal to roll out free tuition for incoming students in the 2027 academic year at 30 national universities outside Seoul. From next year, the fund will cover full tuition costs for more than 60,000 first-year students and will gradually expand to cover all undergraduates.

Both initiatives are drawing “concern” and mounting opposition from the leaders of private universities, who have “started to be very vocal [in] their opinion that their institutions should also be supported”, Kim said. “There’s a lot of state support to public universities at the moment. So you can imagine how, from a private university perspective, they also are hungry for more money.”

John DiMoia, associate professor of Korean history at SNU, said the push to replicate the Seoul National University model could be challenging in other parts of the country. That was especially true in the rural and agricultural parts of the southwest and the mining regions in the northeast, which have very different economic profiles from Seoul, he pointed out. Efforts to decentralise higher education in South Korea should therefore go hand in hand with a plan “to develop regional economies”, he said.

DiMoia added that the three universities selected for funding will likely face considerable “pressure” to deliver specific results, although it is not yet clear what these might be.

“If you are working at a Korean university that is in those regions that’s not picked, you’re wondering why,” DiMoia said. “And even if you are picked…you’re wondering: ‘What are the consequences? How do we have to deal with this? What are we being asked to do?’”

rosalind.skillen@timeshighereducation.com