By Kim Bo-eun
The education ministry’s university funding projects have come under public fire, following the recent conflict at Ewha Womans University over a government-funded night school.
The ministry has invested a total of 1.5 trillion won into about 10 such projects since 2010 with the aim of heightening competitiveness of universities here.
Among them, the projects implemented this year were devised for universities to restructure and find other sources of revenue in the face of a decreasing number of freshmen due to the low birthrate.
However, these have generated much controversy, as they involved disputed measures such as restructuring and adding new colleges yet did not sufficiently collect and reflect the opinions of students and faculty.
This resulted in the recent backlash from students at Ewha, who protested the school’s decision to set up the night school, resulting in the plan’s nullification.
The students are continuing their protest, demanding the school president step down over her role in the matter.
Critics say the ministry’s projects have caused conflicts as they lure schools to receive funding without taking sufficient time or proper procedures to review their actual needs and collect opinions from students and faculty.
For the night school project, Ewha and nine other universities were to receive 3 billion won each from the ministry. But for some projects, the funding reaches as high as 15 billion won.
Such large amounts of funds have blinded many schools, which have scrambled to be selected without sufficient preparation, according to the critics. The limited timeframes drawn by the ministry also contributed to the rush.
“The ministry is responsible for the protests at Ewha because it hurried the night school project for a 2017 launch,” said Kim Sung-su, policy director at civic group World Without Worries about Shadow Education (WWWSE).
“Initially, only six universities had been selected for the project, but in two months it hastily recruited additional schools, which made it impossible for the universities to seek agreement from students.”
Ewha officials said they had followed due process by including a student representative in the decision-making process.
Another project to merge majors and restructure colleges, known as the PRIME project, previously met with backlash at Ewha and other schools, which resulted in canceling the project.
The ministry selects schools for the projects based on an evaluation of various factors, but the factor of “agreement from members” of the institution takes up merely 3 to 10 points out of 100.
The ministry, however, said this was enough.
“We don’t see any problem with the current percentage. It is actually up to the individual schools to collect students’ opinions according to their own rules,” a ministry official said.
Meanwhile, critics say that the ministry’s funds for universities bear fundamental problems.
“Korea has a notably large percentage of private universities. This makes it difficult for the government to keep an eye on all of these institutions. This is one of the reasons the ministry is coming up with funding projects, to monitor them,” Kim said.
“Receiving large amounts of funding from the government can prevent the institutions from criticizing the ministry’s policies as well as exercising full autonomy.”