Fulbright U.S. Education Center

South Korea rose from the ashes of the Korean war to its current status as an advanced, industrialized economy on the strength of hard work and technology development.  However, most analyses of Korea’s development over the past half century point to education as a key.  The World Bank’s extensive study of Korea’s emergence as a Knowledge Economy came to this conclusion.

Most recently, during the current global financial crisis, Korea is among a handful of major industrial nations that have continued to boost education spending, despite the recession.  The others are China, Taiwan, Germany, France and Brazil,, according to research conducted at U.C. Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education and reported in The San Francisco Chronicle.

Today’s Joongang Daily has an interesting article summarizing the results of a recent study by the Korean Educational Development Institute (KEDI).  KEDI surveyed 6,600 students at 116 high schools across the country who also attend a hagwon (private institute) and asked them to rate hagwon and public school teachers in fourteen different dimensions.  Students were asked, for example, if they were satisfied with teachers, how much teachers were devoted to teaching, how well teachers were prepared for class, and so forth.

The ratings showed that students gave higher scores to hagwon teachers for preparing them for college entrance exams, and for trying to maintain closeness with students.  Some school teachers complained about the results of KEDI’s research, suggesting it was not appropriate to compare hagwon and public school teachers since their purposes were different.

Fulbright Korea’s U.S. Education Center (link to Korean home page)  ( Link to English home page)  is part of a global network of more than 400 “EducationUSA”  advising centers supported by the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.  Our activities in Korea place us at the cutting edge of the information revolution as it re-shapes academic advising.  Consider the following.

• South Korea has the most advanced and extensive digital networks in the world, both fixed (fiber optic) and mobile.  Such innovations as broadband internet, social networking and 3G mobile communication arrived in Korea years before they came to the U.S. , Europe and other parts of the world.
• Korea continues to send far more students to the U.S. on a per capita basis than any country in the world, and continues to rank near the top in absolute numbers.

All organizations in Korea are adapting to this rapidly changing media environment.  For example, the U.S. Embassy has launched a very popular internet cafe (Cafe USA) on Daum, one of Korea’s leading portals.  The current ambassador to Korea, Kathleen Stephens, a former Peace Corps volunteer here, authors a very popular blog which is published simultaneously in both Korean and English.  The Embassy public affairs office operates an information center blog and posts information to the web about the Embassy’s American Corners.

In relation to all of these efforts, the Fulbright Commission’s U.S. Education Center plays a unique role.  Fulbright Korea became involved with “student counseling” back in the 1960s, and its efforts expanded in parallel with the growing numbers of Korean students going to the U.S. for study abroad.  The purchase of the Fulbright Building, which was dedicated in January of 2000, augmented our ability to provide web-based advising and information services in the Korean language, to prospective Korean students and their parents, and in English, to U.S. colleges, universities and other educational organizations seeking to recruit Korean students.

• We encourage U.S. colleges, universities, and other educational organizations to “Partner with Fulbright Korea in Cyberspace,” by using our services to enhance their exchange activities with Korea.  As a binational commission, we have unequaled credibility in the Korean education sector.
• We offer high quality localization services to translate materials into Korean and adapt them to Korean user preferences.
• We maintain a technical support staff, alongside our educational advisers to support a growing array of web services.  We operate from the Fulbright Building in Mapo, which is owned by the Korean American Educational Commission.  This blog exists to support activities of the U.S. Education Center.  Jim Larson maintains a related blog on Korea’s Information Society which frequently touches on education issues.

In April of this year we are pleased to be hosting  a U.S. State-Department sponsored workshop on “Social, Mobile and Visual Media” with the theme of “Advising in the Digital Age.”  Fifteen advisors from other EducationUSA centers around the Asia region will join staff from the U.S. State Department and our Fulbright web team  in Seoul to explore cutting-edge issues that are transforming the nature of advising in the digital age.   More on this topic in later posts.

The Korea Times is carrying a series of articles on private tutoring in South Korea.  Today’s article focuses on the difficulty of enforcing laws against such tutoring.   According to an official at the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, “It is hard to control tutoring due to privacy matters, especially when it comes to foreigners.  Moreover, many of those who seek out such tutoring are well connected, leaving little room for authorities to uncover their illegal transactions.”

Reportedly, no foreign tutors have been caught by the authorities for violation of the Private Education law.

The recent scandal affecting SAT testing in Korea has taken a new twist with reports that at least one much sought after SAT instructor was kidnapped and beaten after he tried leaving his private academy for another one.  According to a report in the Joongang Daily, police say that he reported being taken against his will to a villa in Gyeonggi and threatened after he tried to leave the academy last December.   Several private institutes tutoring for the SAT in southern Seoul are reportedly engaged in overheated competition for top lecturers in order to attract as many students as possible.

The Korea Times today published an interview with Vice Minister of Education Lee Ju Ho, that provides a good overview of the current administration’s education policy.  It’s goal, as the headline proclaimed, was to keep Hagwons (private institutes) at bay.  The Vice Minister was quoted as saying “Simply put, our goals are to enable students to be home by 10 P.M. rather than in cram schools, and to help them become rational thinkers rather than receptacles of rote knowledge.”   Lee, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University is considered one of the architects of the Lee Myung Bak administration’s education policy and now leads its day-to-day operations.

The administrations reform measures are being implemented in three steps.

• First, colleges and universities are being given greater discretion in selecting new students, allowing them to decide how much to weigh the college scholastic ability (CSAT) test scores.
• This is to be followed by a reduction in the number of subjects tested on the CSAT.
• The third and final step allows schools full authority in student selection through admissions officers.

The government’s reform efforts are viewed as a remedy for the “education fever” that many people think may negatively affect the country’s future.  Currently, hagwons in Seoul are barred from offering classes after 10:00 P.M.  That ban is set to spread to the rest of the country after the Constitutional Court’s rejection of a petition against the ban.  Also, the cram schools are being closely monitored to see whether they are following guidelines on fees.  South Korea leads the world in expenditures per capita on private lessons, spending about $30 billion per year on them.

Some days ago the press reported a scandal in which a Korean language institute instructor was arrested by police after providing copies of an SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) test taken in Bangkok, Thailand,  via e-mail to Korean students who were to take the same test hours later in the United States.  Now The Korea Times is reporting that four more Koreans have been apprehended for attempting to leak SAT information.   Reportedly, police are widening their investigation, in cooperation with the U.S.-based Educational Testing Service, the administrator of the SAT, to check whether the four in question had previously leaked papers to “clients” at home and abroad utilizing time zone differences.

According to the Suseo police department in southern Seoul, the four –including a 36 year old SAT preparation instructor–were suspected of leaking exam sheets they obtained from a high school in Gapyeong, Gyeonggi Province, where the SAT test was administered last Saturday.

The SAT scandal is a lead item on Korean television news these days and is in all the newspapers.  For further detail, you may wish to read the Joongang Daily’s account of the latest developments.

According to an article in The Korea Times, university and college tuition in South Korea has doubled over the past ten years.  According to the government statistics agency, the tuition of state-run universities increased 116 percent from 1999 while tuition for private four year universities and two year colleges jumped 81 percent and 90 percent respectively during the period.    Moreover, the consumer price index has increased 36 percent over the past decade, imposing an even heavier financial burden on parents and students seeking higher education.  Tuition for graduate schools also surged by 114 percent for private institutions.

The steep rise began when the government gave autonomy to raise tuition to private universities in 1989 and to state-run universities in 2003.   The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced Thursday that it will receive applicants for the new “study now pay later” program from today through March 31.  The program provides students with long term state education loans.

English education and English testing have perennially been high profile topics for public discussion in Korea.  That, in and of itself, is not surprising in this country which has built a modern education system almost from scratch in the span of just over half a century.   However, the public discussions these days are especially intense, as outlined by a report earlier this week in the Korea Times, entitled “Can Ahn’s English Education Overhaul Succeed?”

The lead sentence of the article points out that Minister of Education, Science and Technology Ahn Byong-man has been fighting against increasing private education costs since he took office in 2008.  One key part of his effort to cut these costs is a new evaluation program for teachers.  Under his leadership, the Ministry will conduct teacher evaluation programs at all elementary and secondary schools, starting from the Spring semester this March.  Minister Ahn believes the quality of teachers is pivotal to public education and hopes it will help parents and students to break from their reliance on private education institutes or hagwons.

A second project within the Ministry aimed at containing private education costs is the development of an English proficiency exam.  Last week, Ahn announced that colleges can use the results of the state-developed English tests in selecting students from 2012, when the exam is scheduled to debut.  Ahn said, “I am trying to persuade college and university presidents to discontinue the use of TOEFL and TOEIC scores for admissions as soon as possible.”

On Monday, January 4, the first workday of the new Year, a representative of Alamo Colleges, a group of five community colleges in the greater San Antonio area of Texas, visited the U.S. Education Center.  Steven Lewis, Director of the Service, Trade and Industry Center (STIC) braved Seoul’s heaviest snowfall in a century to make the visit.  (the snow is visible in the photo accompanying this post–click on the photo to see a full size version).

Mr. Lewis met with U.S. Education Center and web team staff, including Fulbright Deputy Director Jim Larson.  He also met with Executive Director, Shim Jai Ok.

Discussions centered around Alamo Colleges Korean students, its alumni in Korea, strategies for future recruitment, and possible partnership with Fulbright’s U.S. Education Center.  It was a snowy day, but a warm start for the New Year thanks to this visit!