Fulbright U.S. Education Center

The Korea Times reports that education authorities have issued a disciplinary warning to Yongsan International School of Seoul (YISS) for admitting unqualified students. They confirmed an earlier report by The Korea Times (Aug. 25) that the school admitted eight unqualified Korean students who were children of the school’s Korean staff. The students in question have now transferred to other Korean schools.

“We’ve issued a stern warning to the school,’’ said O Nam-bum, an official of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SMOE). “The warning means that if the school accepts unqualified students again, it will face a suspension of operations.’’ Koreans are ineligible to attend the school unless they have lived overseas for more than five years.

There are some 50 foreign schools operating in Korea with about 10,000 enrolled students. Among them, Seoul has 20 and the city plans to build three more by 2012.

Seoul National University and dozens of other universities will expand the use of admission officers to recruit students.  The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced Wednesday that the schools will admit at least 3,000 students next year under a state-supported ”admission officer” system. The ministry last year began subsidizing 10 universities for recruiting admission officers with two billion won ($2 million) and has selected 30 more schools for the program this year. “Universities could introduce a more advanced recruitment system with admissions officers and overcome their old practice of evaluating students with a uniform yardstick,” ministry official Hwang Hong-kyu told reporters at the Central Government Complex in Seoul.  See the complete report in The Korea Times.