Last updated on August 16, 2024
Since 2008, Korean universities have been pursuing globalization at breakneck speed. Foreign professors have been hired in large numbers across a wide range of academic fields. The number of classes taught in English has increased rapidly to the point where KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) now teaches all its classes in English. The number of foreign students, either degree students or short-term exchange students, has increased rapidly as well.
These efforts follow the typical pattern in Korea of putting large goals first and worrying about the details latter. The pattern follows a predicable cycle of broad action followed by problems followed by revised action followed by success. Three years into the period of broad action to globalize universities, a number of problems have appeared that suggest that amendment is on its way.
Some foreign students and professors have had trouble adapting to the life in Korea and have left Korea early. The problems range from material issues such as food and housing to emotional ones such as a feeling of membership in the university. None of these problems is particularly new or unique to Korea, but they have gained greater prominence as the number of foreign students and professors has increased.
For Korean students and professors, the forced use of English in teaching has become a major source of stress. The most common complaint is that the use of English lowers the level of the content and harms the classroom atmosphere. Many foreign students find classes boring because there is little interaction among students and between students and professors.
To move from the period of problem discovery to revised action that will lead toward success, Korean universities need to rethink the reasons for globalization and develop more creative ways to achieve their goals.
Efforts to globalize universities began in the 1990s during the Kim Young-sam administration. A number of universities set up international graduate schools that have a large percentage of foreign students and teach classes in English. Many universities expanded exchange programs with foreign universities at this time and built residences for foreign students and professors. National attention on English education in the 1990s stimulated many universities to hire a large numbers of native-speaking language instructors for the first time. A higher standard of living made it possible for Korean students to go overseas for travel and language learning for the first time in history. The 1997 economic crisis caused a short setback in these efforts, but they resumed quickly as the economy recovered.
The driving force behind globalization during the 1990s and early 2000s was educational: the improvement of English proficiency and the development of a broader perspective. This remains the most important today, but sensitivity to international rankings of universities in the late 2000s added an institutional element. As Korea continued to develop and gain prominence in the world community, it began to look more closely at national competiveness, one element of which is higher education.
Leading Korean universities ranked low in various international rankings that came out in the 2000s, and ranked particularly low in categories related to international exchanges. The earlier paradigm, based on language lecturers and short-term exchange students was now considered inadequate. To rectify the situation and improve the rankings, universities began to hire foreign professors for tenure-track positions and increase the number of foreign students pursuing degrees.
Rankings of subjective concepts such as “best place to live” and “best university” are difficult and often inaccurate, but two recent rankings of universities by The Times Higher Education (THE) suggest that globalization to improve rankings may not be very effective. The rankings were redesigned to be more accurate and differ from previous rankings by the same organization. The 2010-11 THE overall ranking of 200 universities shows POSTECH (Pohang Institute of Science and Technology) at 28, KAIST at 96, Seoul National University at 109, and Yonsei University at 190. Korean universities fare even worse in the THE 2011 ranking of 100 universities based solely on academic reputation: Seoul National ranks highest at 51-60, followed by KAIST at 91-100. No other Korean university made the top 100.
What does all this mean? Clearly globalization as a way to improve rankings has its limits because it is not a major component of the rankings to begin with. For better or worse, the core of ranking universities remains academic reputation _ name value _ as viewed by other academics. A university’s reputation comes from education and research, the two cores of university activity. That only two Korean universities rank in the top 100 in academic reputation suggests that Korean universities have a long way to go.
None of this is to suggest that globalization be abandoned because it contributes to improving the educational atmosphere by bringing much-needed diversity to university campuses. Rather, it suggests that the current efforts be integrated into something larger, more concrete, and more purposeful: improving education and research. To do so, creative approaches, not one-size-fits-all mandates, are needed.