Finally, a fire fell on the back of the foot. It’s about local colleges. According to the Korean Council for University Education (hereinafter referred to as the Daekyo University), 162 of the 198 universities affiliated with the Daekyo University are four-year colleges that did not fill the quota after additional recruitment in the 2021 regular admissions. The number of additional recruits at these universities alone was 26,000, three times higher than last year. 91% of the underachievers were local, and some local national universities were also shocked by the lack of capacity.
lately <조선일보> According to a report by’Crumbling Local University’, there are more than 30 universities with 100 or more undergraduates this year, and 18 of these have over 200 undergraduates. Considering that most of the local colleges rely on their student tuition fees, their existence is in jeopardy.
As is well known, this crisis in local communities is due to a decline in the school-age population. The number of eligible students for college admission in 2021 as estimated by the University Education Research Institute was 414,000, which is 78,000 less than the 492,000 admission quota for 334 domestic universities and colleges. This trend is expected to intensify in the future. The number of students admitted to the university will decrease to 384,000 in 2024, and to 315,000 in 2037. Therefore, if the current enrollment quota is maintained, 34.1% of local universities in 2024 and 83.9% in 2037 are expected to drop to’less than 70% of the fill rate’.
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| ▲ Due to the rapid decline in the school-age population, 34% of local universities in 2024 and 84% in 2037 are not expected to meet the 70% fill rate. | |
| Ⓒ University Education Research Institute |
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In this situation, is the public sympathetic and worried about the crisis of the local community? It doesn’t seem like that. “Because there are useless colleges, such a thing (less than local colleges) will happen. We have to get rid of the trash at the beginning of a poor university.” “Schools that deserve to be destroyed are falling apart. A similar educational group that sucks up youth money without competing.” These are the posts that received the most recommendations among the comments posted on the aforementioned article. Rather, many people are hoping that the local community will quickly collapse.
This is because of the idea that local colleges are usually’poor colleges’ and’virile colleges’. Of course, it is true that there are universities like this, and we can admit that there is a need for some degree of university restructuring, but nevertheless, it is not right to sell the entire local university. According to the results of the Ministry of Education’s government financial support limited university evaluation (2010~2014), university structure reform evaluation (2015~2017), and university basic competency diagnosis (2018), universities that received evaluations such as temporary’caution’ and’warning’ 10-20% and 2-6% of universities were evaluated as’poor’, among which universities in the metropolitan area such as Seoul are also mixed. It is only a prejudice that the majority of local colleges are insolvent enough to be destroyed.
Even worse than that, it is the evil of’meritarianism’, which constitutes the core principle of the Korean social resource allocation mechanism. In order to teach and grow talent, a small number of’specific talents’ are selected through multiple-choice tests, excessive rewards are given to them, and the rest are alienated or excluded. However, as many intellectuals in recent years have argued, meritism is unfair and unfair in that it ignores inheritance, chance, luck, and diversity, and gives unreasonable justification to excessive rewards for winners and excessive punishment for losers.
A vicious cycle where winners get more, losers lose more
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| ▲ When looking at the government’s general financial aid for universities nationwide in 2019, the amount of support per local university was only half that of the metropolitan area. | |
| Ⓒ University Education Research Institute |
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What does it mean that local colleges are damaged by meritism? A typical example is the huge gap in government financial aid. According to the report on the’Government University Financial Aid (2021)’ report by the University Education Research Institute, the average amount of support per university in the metropolitan area was 225 in’general support’, excluding school expenses support and ordinary expenses support for national and public universities, as a result of analyzing the state of national university financial support in 2019. It was 100 million won, but the local university was 12.1 billion won, which was only a half. In particular, the gap in support for R&D projects was remarkable, and the amount of R&D support per university in the metropolitan area was 14.9 billion won, compared to 5.2 billion won for local universities, which was only a third.
In other words, more resources are concentrated in Inseoul University, which is proved to be a winner through a merit-based filter, and very few resources are distributed to local universities that are found to be losers. In this case, even if local colleges want to innovate their curriculum and infrastructure for higher-level education, they can’t even try because they don’t have resources. The winners have more and the losers lose more. The damage is passed on to all local college students intact. This is the reality for over 60% of Korean college students in local colleges.
Then, what is the alternative that can overcome the principle of resource allocation according to meritism? Basically, it provides opportunities based on ability and effort, but by reforming the talent selection and government financial support system to a more public direction, unreasonably narrowing the excessive gap and giving more opportunities to the relatively weak. Through this, the structural injustice and inequality of meritism can be further alleviated.
To this end, the representative reform measures discussed so far in the field of higher education are’public private universities’ and’university integrated networks’. First, public-private universities are a model that enhances the publicity of the university’s operation and significantly expands national financial support by appointing half of the board of directors as external public interest directors.
Since private universities occupy 80% of universities in Korea, the merit-based ideology has been further strengthened amid the competition to raise the ranks of one’s own university. Accordingly, the public-private university is an initiative to increase the overall level of education and research by stably investing funds in local private universities that have established public governance.
The University Integrated Network is a plan to jointly confer entrance examinations, education, and degrees by creating a horizontal network in which regional national universities, regional national universities, public-run private universities, and independent private universities participate. Experts who advocate this say that if higher education is leveled upward through the integrated university network, the effect of easing the ranks among universities can be expected. In this case, the number of competitive schools that can be attended increases, and the effect of loosening the intense competition for entrance exams may also occur.
Reviving local zones is a change in the principle of resource allocation.
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| ▲ Sangji University in Wonju, Gangwon-do, held the’Declaration of the Inauguration of Democratic Engineering College’ in the square in front of the main building last November. | |
| Ⓒ upper limb |
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The common point of these policies is that it promotes solidarity, cooperation, and distribution of resources by managing the higher education version, which is dominated by’self-study’ and’winner-take-all’ through the private realization of meritism, through a public system (public governance and network). will be. Of course, in order to realize this, it is necessary to increase the national education finance, and for this, it is necessary to find a method such as establishing a’higher education finance grant’ or adjusting the elementary, middle and high school budget, which is expected to make room due to a decrease in the school-age population. All of them require poor social consensus.
Of course, it is also necessary to cut the bones of the fat zone. Financial transparency, administrative accountability, and operational democracy should be enhanced so that citizens can trust local universities and agree to public support. To this end, it is necessary to accept changes that the private academy has been extremely rejected, such as establishing a’financial committee’ at the national university level or opening the board of directors. In addition, public education reform that can contribute to the society and the region, such as the development of curriculum and technology in connection with the local industry, reinforcement of basic academic education and research that has been declining, and improvement of lifelong education tailored to the local community must also be realized.
In addition, education reform must keep pace with other related social reform tasks, such as labor polarization and resolving regional imbalances. Gap-jin Hwang, Professor of General Social Education at Gyeongsang National University, <사회 불평등과 교육>In (2018), “In a society with severe inequality, admission to a prestigious school that gives opportunities to obtain social scarce values such as power, money, and honor is overly emphasized. “I pointed out. Korea’s overheated competition for entrance exams and academicism are also largely attributable to increased inequality as representative jobs, housing, and regional development have become polarized.
This, too, has the commonality of improving and supplementing the principle of simple meritism in all areas of society. It is necessary to create a system that will close the gap between excessive wages and employment between regular workers in large corporations who have the ability to pass bonds and non-regular workers in subcontractors who do not, and those who can buy Seoul brand apartments even if they are’permanent’ and those who do not. It is not feasible to try to reform only the field of education without mitigating these problems.
Why should we save the perishing region? Saving local colleges through reforms in the public direction is because it fundamentally changes the mechanism of distributing educational resources, such as’meatabilityism’,’self-development’, and’winner-take-all’ that have dominated our society since the founding of the country. Allocating educational opportunities according to a system in which public solidarity, cooperation, and consideration are alive is a very important task for us to tackle right now. There are less than a few years left when the dozens of local colleges, who have been nurturing local talents by breathing with the local community, will collapse.