Steps needed to woo more diverse foreign students
By Kang Shin-who
Staff reporter
A growing number of foreign students choose Korea as their destination to study. The number has already topped 75,000 but not all education experts here take the upward spiral of incoming students from overseas as positive with more than half of them coming from a single country — China. They say that Korea needs to put more efforts into attracting students from more diverse countries — it’s time for quality over quantity.
Mindful of this concern, the nation’s top educator stressed the importance of changing the direction of policies so that Korea can diversify their nationalities and attract quality students from overseas.
“It is time for Korea to overhaul its policies on studying in Korea with the goal of attracting more excellent foreign students and diversifying nationalities of those coming to Korea,” Education Minister Ahn Byung-man said in a written interview. “The government plans to achieve this goal by creating a milieu favorable for foreign students to study here, which will help further enhance the status of Korea in the global community.”
He noted the increasing number can bring positive effects including the cultivation of excellent human resources overseas, the creation of economic added value and the nurturing of Korea-friendly leaders in those countries.
“Compared to Japan or Australia that has gone through trial and error in their investment in programs for foreign students over the past 20 years, Korea has enacted policies for foreign students over a shorter period of time,” he said. “However, Korea has seen remarkable achievements in less than 10 years.”
According to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, the number of foreign students attending Korean universities topped 75,000 as of 2009, a four-fold increase from 17,000 in 2004 when the government began to collect data.
The government initially sought to attract 50,000 by 2010 but it achieved this goal three years earlier thanks to the “Study Korea Project.”
Now the plan has been adjusted to attract up to 100,000 foreign students by 2012. In this regard, the government will provide more dormitories for foreign students and extend medical insurance support as well as help them locate employment opportunities.
Ahn said that the Global Korea Scholarship (GKS), the Korean version of the Fulbright Grant Program in the United States, marks a shift of focus in national policies on foreign students from quantitative expansion to qualitative improvement.