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| Kim In-chul, chair of the Korean Council for University Education, speaks during a seminar of university chancellors at the Paradise Hotel in Busan, July 1. Korea Times photo by Kim Jin-joo |
By Bahk Eun-ji
Universities are protesting the provisional results of the Ministry of Education's triannual certification and competency evaluation process, announced earlier this week, claiming that the government-led evaluation process may create overheated competition among them and leave them underfunded, while undermining their autonomy.
They also urged the ministry to come up with a remedy for universities that failed the evaluation process, which will lose out on financial support in the form of government subsidies.
The protest came from the Korea Council for University Education (KCUE) and the Korea Association for Professional University College Education (KCCE), following the education ministry's competency evaluation results, released Tuesday, announcing its selection of 136 four-year universities and 97 two-year colleges that will receive financial support.
Twenty-five universities, including Sungshin Women's University in Seoul and Inha University in Incheon, along with 27 colleges, were excluded from the list of beneficiaries of government support.
The selected institutions must set up their own plans for scaling down admissions of new students, in order to receive the billions of won in funds for three years until 2024.
Those universities excluded from the list will receive financial support only for national scholarships and student loans.
The excluded universities are expected to face difficulties attracting new students, given the fact that the evaluation results came out the month before the admissions process begins for the 2022 academic year.
The ministry will finalize the list of selected universities receiving general financial support by the end of this month.
In October, the ministry will disclose the amount of financial support and the specific details of the projects under which it will be provided, which is currently under discussion with financial authorities.
However, the KCUE said that the ministry's evaluation results will result in heightened competition among post-secondary education institutions.
"What the ministry has done will only rank universities and colleges, as they evaluated them based solely on reports submitted by the schools," KCUE Chairman Kim In-chul said.
"Even universities that are healthy have received restrictions on government funding based on this evaluation."
Kim then said that the Ministry of Education should work with the Ministry of Economy and Finance and the National Assembly to increase the amount of innovation support project expenses for universities to 2 trillion won ($1.7 billion), and to grant universities autonomy over how that money is applied.
"The ministry must come up with a separate way to provide relief for the universities that have been excluded from government financial support due to the unreasonable evaluation process," Kim said.
If its demand is not accepted, Kim said the council will take collective action, such as increasing tuition fees at individual institutions.
He said university tuition levels have been kept frozen for the past 13 years according to the "half-price tuition" policy, based on the expectation that government funding will offset the lack of tuition revenue.
"But the ministry has undermined this effort," he said.
"If the government and the National Assembly do not accept our demands to expand financial support to higher education institutions, we will have no choice but to review the possibility that universities will exercise their autonomy in setting their own tuition fees."
The KCCE also said that the number of students accepted under admissions quotas has been drastically reduced by about 60,000 or 27 percent over the past 10 years, in accordance with the government's restructuring reforms for universities.
"It is very unfortunate that there was no evaluation of the universities' autonomous quality control and efforts according to the characteristics of each region and major," KCCE Chairperson Nam Sung-hee said.
"If government support ends up getting reduced based on the results of the evaluation process, the damage will be passed on to the students. Rather than ranking two-year colleges in a standardized way according to evaluation criteria meant for four-year universities, we request that the financial support for the colleges be greatly expanded so that they can strengthen their roles as lifelong vocational educational institutions."
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