South Korea’s ministry of education has been accused of encouraging universities to launch “ghettoised” courses for foreign students after it announced a new strategy to achieve its goal of attracting 200,000 foreign students by 2023.
Earlier the ministry had announced that it would push to revise the higher education law to allow universities and colleges in the country to create specialised departments or courses consisting of only foreign students, according to The Korea Herald. These would be in fields in which South Korea is a high achiever, such as shipping and information technology.
The proposals are designed to help the government achieve its target of increasing the proportion of international students among the general student population to 5 percent by 2023, up from 2 percent in 2014, and to increase foreign student spending from 796 billion won (Rs.4,497 crore) to 1.5 trillion won by 2020. Government data show that the number of international students in South Korea has declined since 2011, when it peaked at 89,537. There were 84,891 foreign students in the country last year, dropping from 85,923 in 2013.
However, the plan for specific courses for foreign students has been criticised by leading academics in international education who argue that international students should integrate with, not be isolated from, domestic students. Philip Altbach, director of the Centre for International Higher Education at Boston College, says that the proposal “flies in the face of current thinking about effective international education policy” and is “not only unlikely to succeed, but is bad policy”.
Allan Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education, agrees. “It’s important that institutions allow access to the wider offerings of the university for those international students fluent enough in the local language to do so,” he advises.
However, he points out that the ministry of education has also introduced a number of effective initiatives to allow international students to take part in South Korean higher education, including “offering scholarships and increasing the number of courses taught in English, improving study and living conditions for foreign students, building efficient administrative support systems, and offering long- and short-term exchange programmes”. “Enrolling international students, as the US has already experienced, has a positive impact on the domestic students, in broadening the classroom dialogue and internationalising the campus community,” says Goodman.