A 19-year-old KAIST junior committed suicide Thursday, becoming the prestigious school’s fourth student to kill himself in as many months. He suffered from depression stemming from relatively poor performances at the engineering college for the nation’s best and brightest.
Grading and competition are inevitable even for elite students if schools are to produce the super-elite. But what KAIST has done to its students since Suh Nam-pyo took presidency in 2006 goes too far to say the least.
Suh, who studied and taught in the United States, rightly broke the ``iron-bowl” tenure of the national university’s professors.
But it is hard to say the same about the other two of his three reforms. The KAIST head demanded all classes be in English, resulting in imitators at other schools. Yet far too many professors and students say the English-only lecturing makes classes superficial and keeps them from pursuing academic depth.
Even more controversial was the so-called disciplinary tuition system, in which he slapped _ with a scientist’s precision _ 63,000 won ($58) per 0.01 credit below the average grade of 3.0 out of 4.3, to a maximum of 7.5 million won a semester. Since the introduction of the reverse scholarship system, some students have had to pay 6 million won in tuition, twice as high as at other state-funded universities.
Faced with a series of suicides, the KAIST head backed off, easing the penalty rates and vowing to have assistant professors help students struggling with English. Would that solve the problems? We doubt it, because at stake is not just money or a language problem. It’s the culture of unlimited competition even at the expense of students’ most basic rights, never forgiving once one failure. So the first thing the 75-year-old scholar and his followers should do is to drive their competitiveness-at-any-cost thinking out of their minds.
One cannot talk about the Korean society without mentioning competition, proper or excessive, but what matters should be its objective or content. The current education at KAIST _ and Seoul National University (SNU) for that matter _ focuses on winning good marks rather than upgrading academic levels. There has long been controversy about students flocking to subjects or professors easier to get inflated grades in a symbiosis under the two-way evaluation system. Coincidentally or not, five SNU students also took their own lives in recent months.
Suicide rates at KAIST and SNU are not particularly higher than at other schools, where many students find it hard to keep studying because of the second highest tuitions in the world after the United States.
The supporters of a neo-liberalistic education system call for benchmarking from U.S. schools. But the current development here stresses the need to learn more from Europe. The June 8, 1968 student revolution in France helped to sharply ease school cliques, excessive adherence to university rankings and exorbitant tuition. Finland, a country of depression three decades ago due to cutthroat competition, introduced a national suicide prevention system for its youth.
It should be apparent to all which is ``more” urgent for Korea today.