Octubre 17, 2012, Blog de José Joaquin Brunner
Lección coreana vistas las cosas desde Canadá
Breve reflexión del colega canadiense, experto internacional en estudios de la educación superior, Alex Usher, sobre el desarrollo del sistema coreano, de especial interés en Chile que tiene un sistema con un grado similar de privatismo. Más abajo traducción automatica (Google) al castellano.
Korean Lessons
Posted on October 18, 2012 by Alex Usher
http://higheredstrategy.com/korean-lessons/
http://higheredstrategy.com/korean-lessons/
I’m in Seoul this week, studying some aspects of the Republic of Korea’s system of lifelong learning (picture me Gangnam-dancing if you must). But the country’s overall system of higher education is so flat-out amazing, I thought it would be worth a post or two.
How amazing is it, you ask? Well, they kick our behinds in terms of access and success – 90% of their high school graduates attend university or “junior college” right after high school and the graduation rate is very high. They went from having an essentially vestigial system of higher education in 1960 (100,000 students) to a universal system (3 million students) in a little more than 40 years. And while they focused initially on quantity, they’ve done a heck of a job on quality in recent years as well: Seoul National University (SNU) is one of only a handful of universities anywhere to have been founded after World War II and achieved true global status for academic excellence, particularly in engineering.
All this isn’t due to some massive dumping of public money into the system, either. In fact, no one in the OECD spends less public money on higher education than Korea (about 0.43% of GDP). They manage this by having a massive system of privately-owned and financed higher education institutions (rather like Japan) which educate about two-thirds of all students and which are nearly entirely financed by tuition. But hold on there, free-market types – as in Japan, private universities are so tightly regulated that in many respects they have less autonomy than do most public ones in our neck of the woods (though government oversight has been very gradually receding over time).
Public universities receive government assistance, but even here tuition is substantial – slightly higher than in Canada. More to the point, perhaps, Korea’s government is at the forefront of tying public money to specific activities. Virtually all of the new public money put into the system since about 1998 has gone into targeted programs like the World-Class Universities program (hiring foreign faculty), Brain Korea 21 (spending bazillions of won on graduate students) and the like.
Even more so than us, they’re facing the effects of a declining youth population on university enrolments and finances. Their solution? International students! They’ve gone from essentially zero to 90,000 in the last decade, mostly from China and Mongolia. Intriguingly, they don’t treat them as cash cows the way we do. In Korea, international students are actually charged slightly less than domestic students, with government top-ups covering the difference. Why? Basically, government sees some “soft power” benefits to having more international students.
There are lessons for Canada here, if we care to look.
Más lecciones de Corea
Continuación de una anterior reflexión sobreb la educación en la República de Corea.
More Korean Lessons
Posted on October 19, 2012 by Alex Usher, October 19, 2012
Posted on October 19, 2012 by Alex Usher, October 19, 2012
Higher education is an inherently conservative industry – it’s extremely rare to come across something genuinely new and unique in the field. Which is precisely why Korea’s so interesting: it has a number of genuine system innovations, particularly in lifelong learning, from which a lot of countries could learn.
Koreans have what some commentators call “education fever”; as in many Confucian countries, the sacrifices families make to ensure their children get an education are almost incomprehensible to North Americans. But until the early 1980s, the opportunities to obtain higher education were quite limited. As the system began to expand, there was an enormous explosion of pent-up demand, and not just among the young: people in mid-career also wanted to get the education that was previously unavailable.
Institutions couldn’t cope with the demand, and even if they could, they were wedded to an elite cohort intake model, and the idea of working people coming in to study part-time sat uneasily with that. So the Korean government came up with two alternatives. One was to create a number of “self-study” degree programs; essentially allowing the individuals to get a degree from the ministry by simply writing a set of challenge exams. The other was to create a “Credit Bank” – essentially a degree-granting organization of last resort, which would allow individuals unable to attend regular university and college programs to obtain Bachelor or associate degrees by piecing together credits from multiple institutions, both physical and online (though, interestingly, the credit bank’s biggest current problem is policing online learning providers, the worry being that inadequate invigilation and the potential for fraud will eventually devalue the credit bank’s degrees if they keep accepting such credits).
I know, what a great idea, right? Such a neat solution to the problem of credit transfer. But though this system bears a lot of resemblance to the fantasies of DIY higher education fanatics in that it breaks the monopoly of traditional education providers, it’s not exactly a majority taste. Despite being able to provide degrees in a manner which is cheaper and/or more convenient than the alternatives, only about 6% of all degrees provided last year in Korea came through the credit bank and the self-study Bachelor’s.
The reason for that is pretty simple, and one that the Great Disruption types need to keep in mind: people prefer the prestige of a regular degree from a regular university. Just because someone invents something new and cool doesn’t mean people’s preferences are necessarily going to change, even if it means lower costs and/or more convenience. Korea just goes to show that in a battle between educational innovation and educational prestige, one should always bet on the latter.
Annyeong hikyeseyo!
Publicado por jjbrunner
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