Universities picked to become regional innovation hubs

South Korea has picked the first universities to benefit from President Lee Jae Myung’s flagship pledge to build “10 Seoul National Universities” outside the capital – but in a considerably scaled-down form that has drawn sharp criticism from the six flagship universities left out.

On 1 September, the Ministry of Education named Pusan National University, Chonnam National University and Chungnam National University as the first recipients of intensive government funding meant to raise regional national universities to Seoul National University's level.

Each will receive up to KRW100 billion (US$72 million) a year – about KRW70 billion in the first year – through 2030.

Lee’s original campaign pledge, made during the 2025 presidential race and written into his administration’s national policy agenda that August, was far broader.

All nine of Korea’s regional flagship national universities were to be developed into SNU-calibre research universities, backed by more than 800 billion won a year – roughly 4 trillion won ($2.9 billion) over five years.

The pledge piqued interest from countries around the world who are seeking to address disparities in regional development and higher education provision and are experiencing regional depopulation.

Lee’s goal was to attack three entrenched problems at once: the hyper-concentration of people, jobs and prestige in Seoul; the accelerating depopulation of the regions; and a university hierarchy so rigid that “in-Seoul” has become shorthand for a viable degree.

The scale of the imbalance is stark: the greater Seoul metropolitan area is home to just over half of the national population – 50.6% as of August 2023. The city hosts 35% of the country’s universities yet draws 40.9% of all university students nationwide.

That gap reflects how many school leavers from the regions still leave home to study and often never return.

By April 2026, ten months into the new government, the plan had narrowed considerably.

The Ministry of Education said only three universities would be selected this year, each to receive KRW100 billion annually for five years – a shift Education Minister Choi Kyo-jin attributed to “limited budget” and a decision to “concentrate resources where universities are best prepared” in order to produce faster, more visible results.

No firm timetable for expanding the programme to the other six flagship universities has been announced.

Universities were judged on four criteria: alignment with the government's national spatial-development strategy, regional readiness, institutional capacity, and the credibility of their reform plans for education and research.

On that basis, Pusan National University will build out shipbuilding, marine engineering, aerospace and a new AI college, with partnerships planned with LG Electronics and Hanwha; Chonnam National University will expand advanced semiconductor and energy research, including a packaging research institute with Samsung and Korea Electric Power Corp; and Chungnam National University will build a Nexus College of Science and Technology and a joint AI research institute with Naver Cloud, alongside collaboration with KAIST.

“We will create successful models of regional growth through regional universities,” Choi said, “and produce results that people can feel through continued cooperation with relevant ministries.”

Six universities left out, and angry

The National and Public University Faculty Council Federation, an umbrella body for faculty councils across Korea's national and public universities, put the “10 SNUs in name, three or four in practice” critique on the record in an emergency joint statement on 17 September.

It argued that “selecting only some universities as priority-supported institutions runs directly counter to the purpose of balanced national development” and described the approach, in effect, as ranking universities against one another rather than developing them together.

Winning universities will receive two to three times the annual support available to the rest – a gap the federation warned will only widen the very disparities the programme was meant to close.

The presidents of Korea’s flagship national universities have made the same case at a more institutional level.

Their council, the Association of Flagship National University Presidents, in a formal statement on 4 September called on the government and the National Assembly to “quickly draw up and present a concrete roadmap so that all nine universities can be included in the programme and contribute to balanced national development,” arguing that leaving universities out contradicts the policy's own rationale.

Officials at Jeonbuk National University, one of the six excluded, said the pressure for a fix was coming from alumni and the local community as much as from campus, and some in the sector have floated an expansion to five universities – adding Jeonbuk and Kyungpook National – as a compromise.

The complaints go beyond money. In a statement on 2 September, Kyungpook National University's professors’ association demanded the ministry “transparently disclose the selection process and detailed evaluation scores”.

One university representative involved in the process told University World News that unselected institutions broadly agreed there had been “procedural problems”, noting that a June Education Ministry document already used phrases such as “southern maritime and energy” and “central science” – language that, in retrospect, appears to have mapped neatly onto the three winners, leading critics to question whether the outcome was effectively decided in advance of a formal evaluation.

Universities had reportedly been told results would come in late September, but instead they were announced with little warning, about a week before the start of early-admissions season, which several university officials said risked shaping applicants' choices before the results were even fully explained.

Critics have also pointed out that all three winning universities sit in cities with mayors from the governing Democratic Party, fuelling suspicion that political considerations, not merit, shaped the outcome.

The Union of Korean National University Professors has warned that the split risks stigmatising the six unselected universities as “failed universities, regardless of their actual educational and research capabilities” – a reputational effect that could feed back into student recruitment and further entrench the very hierarchy the policy was designed to dismantle.

A design still being filled in

Independent of the politics, higher education policy analysts have flagged a more structural concern: that the scheme's implementation still lags well behind its ambition – a worry that predates the current, scaled-down version of the programme.

Back when the plan still covered all nine universities, a 2025 policy assessment by the Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI), “Issues and Challenges of the ‘10 SNUs’ Policy”, already concluded that the programme’s “design and implementation are still abstract” – a budget and framework have been announced but not the operational detail beneath them.

Among the gaps it identified are: a clearer definition of what role flagship universities are meant to play regionally versus nationally; a mechanism for the selected and non-selected universities to cooperate rather than simply compete for the same shrinking pool of students and funding; and an accountability framework to evaluate whether the concentrated investment is actually delivering results before further funding decisions are made.

A more unusual line of criticism has come from legal academia. Bang Seung-joo, a professor at Hanyang University School of Law, argued in an opinion piece published in Kyosu Shinmun (literally the “Professors’ Newspaper”, a national newspaper written for and read by university faculty) on 10 September – and carried again by the daily Kyunghyang Shinmun on 21 September – that the programme may run into constitutional trouble on three fronts:

• It risks violating the equality principle in Article 11 of the Constitution by channelling hundreds of billions of won to a handful of national universities while excluding private universities competing in the same regions.

• It arguably bypasses the principle that major, selective, multi-year spending decisions of this scale should rest on clear legislative authority rather than executive discretion alone.

• A five-year funding commitment through 2030 sits awkwardly with Article 54 of the Constitution, under which the National Assembly must approve the budget every year, leaving the legal and fiscal basis for that promise unclear. “Even if the goal is legitimate,” Bang wrote, “that does not mean every means of pursuing it is justified.”

In an interview with University World News, Bang went further, saying he believes the programme could face a genuine legal challenge. Excluded private universities, or the six unselected flagship national universities, would have standing to bring a constitutional complaint over unequal treatment, he said, and should not wait too long given the statute of limitations on such a filing.

Claim of discrimination

The deeper problem, in his view, is that the scheme discriminates not only among the nine national flagship universities but against private universities altogether, which enrol roughly 80% of Korea’s university students yet have operated for more than a decade under government-imposed tuition freezes.

“By throwing itself into the academic marketplace as a competitor and backing only the national flagship universities,” he told UWN, “the government inflicts serious managerial damage on private universities standing in the same competitive field.”

He pointed out the asymmetry: “The government needs to answer why it isn't considering a '10 Korea Universities’ plan, or a ‘10 Yonsei Universities’ plan – or even a ‘10 Harvards’.”

Bang also pushed back on the comparison with Germany's Excellence Strategy, drawing on his own experience as a former visiting scholar at the University of Konstanz, itself a past Excellence University.

Almost all German universities are public, he told UWN, so channelling state funds to them under open, legislatively grounded and transparent criteria raises none of the equality concerns at stake in Korea, where private universities were never even eligible to compete for the funding in the first place.

“That programme let the whole of German higher education compete for the designation,” he said, “whereas this policy set out from the start to pour taxpayer money on the scale of Seoul National University into national flagship universities alone.”

Will they achieve a self-sustaining cycle

Others have focused less on whether the plan is lawful than on whether it will actually work.

Song Ji-jun, a professor of biological sciences at KAIST, argued in a separate opinion piece published in Kyosu Shinmun on 7 September that the real test for the three selected universities is not how they spend KRW400 billion but whether they use it to build a self-sustaining cycle: attracting strong researchers, whose work then draws further funding and talent, so that momentum continues once government support runs out.

Song points to POSTECH – built rapidly in the 1980s into one of Korea's leading research universities – as the model to emulate, and argues that success in five years' time should be judged by whether that kind of virtuous cycle is running, “not by how many new buildings have gone up”.

In an interview with UWN, Song, who has spent nearly a decade on the steering committee of a coalition of some 30 basic-research organisations, said he sees real promise in the programme's basic premise: pouring serious government money into raising research capacity outside Seoul is, in his view, a legitimate way to build a nation with stronger overall research strength.

His worry is about execution. Universities under pressure to show results within five years, he said, risk chasing outcomes that look impressive to government evaluators – new buildings, marquee foreign hires, symbolic partnership agreements – without building any underlying capacity to sustain research once the funding ends. “I worry universities and the government could fall into the wrong loop,” he told UWN, “rewarding what’s visible rather than what's fundamental, because fundamentals don't show up on a five-year scorecard.”

Song argues the more durable model is the one he says actually built POSTECH into a top research university in the 1980s: recruiting promising young researchers with genuinely competitive start-up funding and a guaranteed five-to-ten-year research budget, while shielding them from the heavy teaching loads that dominate national university life so they can focus on research, attract strong graduate students, and win the follow-on grants that keep the cycle going.

The core problem at Korea’s regional national universities, he said, is structural rather than financial: they still hire and promote faculty primarily to cover teaching needs rather than to build research capacity, a gap that no amount of money can close without a change in mindset at the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science and ICT over what counts as success.

“Five years and this amount of money is much too short and much too small to turn any university into Seoul National University,” he told UWN.

“But if I were a university president, I would put everything into the fundamentals and worry about how I’m judged later – in the long run, that's what actually works.”

That tension – between funding a small number of universities intensively to build fast, visible excellence, and spreading support more thinly to preserve balance across a national system – is not unique to Korea.

Germany’s Excellence Strategy, which channels outsized funding toward a select group of “excellence universities”, has faced similar criticism that it is quietly building a closed elite tier at the expense of institutions left outside it, particularly in the former East Germany.

Korean officials are, in effect, betting that concentrating resources on the best-prepared universities will produce results persuasive enough to justify expanding the programme later; critics argue that betting only deepens the gap it was meant to close.

For now, the government has given no indication of when – or whether – the remaining six flagship universities will be added to the programme, leaving Choi’s comment that expansion “depends on how closely the universities designated today carry out their plans” as the only signal of a path forward.

That leaves South Korea’s most politically visible higher education pledge in an awkward position: three universities with real money and a five-year runway to prove the concept works, and six more watching from the sidelines, warning that every year of delay makes the gap the policy was supposed to close a little harder to close.