[보도] Broken Promise of Greater Autonomy for University

The kernel of the education policy pursued by most developed countries is that the government grants a freedom of choice to learners and a freedom of management to education service suppliers only to intervene as a supervisor.

From this perspective, the latest government efforts to give greater autonomy to universities are nothing more than a broken promise, defying the people’s wish and back pedaling the development of education.

To improve the people’s quality of living standards and boost national competitiveness, the government should drop its stubborn regulations on the university admission process and instead allow more leeway for student recruitment.

The three pillars of the education policy in developed countries are that the government acts merely as an accountability supervisor, with earners enjoying a freedom of choice and suppliers taking responsibility for management.

On August 2, the Ministry of Education and Human Resources Development announced 33 new policy measures as part of its deregulation efforts to give more autonomy to universities. But the autonomy over student recruitment, one of the major shackles that have aroused strong public calls for liberalization, was dropped from the list of the reform package on the grounds that a freedom over student selection is not in line with the so-called “three-don’ts,” the strict admission guidelines that the hard-fisted President Roh has pushed for relentlessly. The latest deregulation efforts are of little substance, only to hamper the advancement of the education service.

The government has decided to withdraw the state-imposed basic guidelines for university admission in a bid to promote the autonomy over student recruitment and academic management. However, the ministry has made it clear that it had no plan to eradicate the “three-don’ts” policy for the sake of the normalization of public education and equity in higher education.

Under this dogmatic policy, universities are prohibited from conducting an individual entrance exam except for essay test, accepting donations in return for student admissions, and ranking high schools by academic performance. Instead, the ministry has pledged to empower the Korean Council for University Education and Korean Council for College Education or a separate entity to administer the university admission process.

The government insists that the “three-don’ts” are the basic principles for normalizing public education. If this is the case, then how can you explain the fact that parents and students, dismayed by the poor qualify of the public education service, scurry to private academic institutions, with their private tuition bills registering the highest among the OECD countries, even when the three-don’ts policy has been implemented so strictly.

A policy that causes suffering to people is not a good policy. Even if you launch a policy with good will but its results are so disappointing as to give hard times to people, the best solution is to amend the policy in a way so as to not trouble them further. Now we need to stop the fruitless and wasteful debate over whether to uphold or eliminate the three-don’ts and rather search for a better way that is mutually beneficial to all the interested parties - the government, high school, university and the entire population.

High school graduates are outnumbered by the entire university enrollment quota, leaving some universities even in need of new students. But competition is still cutthroat, especially for a few prestigious university. I expect that universities, if granted the freedom to recruit whomever they want, will be able to develop specialized academic programs and introduce a variety of admission tests, which should help reinvigorate the public education system.

The best possible solution is to eliminate the College Scholastic Aptitude Test (CSAT) and allow individual universities to develop their own admission system. If then, some universities may only refer to applicants’ high school grades and others may screen students through their own tests. A diversified recruiting system will have a number of benefits. It will significantly cut down private tutoring costs for students and their parents.

In order to push through its current ban on ranking high schools based on students’ academic performance, the government should demonstrate that all the high schools across the nation have the same level of scholastic ability.

To more forward their case for a high-school ranking system, universities need to verify that the scholastic achievements of those who graduated in the past year are not different from those of this year’s graduates.

Students are still in a dilemma due to the whimsical government stance over university admission guidelines. The best possible solution is to allow universities to freely decide how much to reflect the high-school GPA in their recruitment standards to the benefit of applicants, depending on the requirements of individual departments.

Heralding the ban on donation for admission as one of the three pillars of the public education policy is nonsense. Entering a university with kickback money is itself a criminal act.

Has the public education achieved any feasible improvement in its normalization effort after the government reiterated the ban on contribution as one of its “three-don’ts,” which was already stipulated by the law? To legitimize its dogmatic stance over donation, the government should have banned anything against the law. Leaving other illicit activities largely intact, the government has incorporated only the donation ban into its “three-don’ts.” This move is far beyond our comprehension and too political. For the donation issue, developed countries offer a good reference in a sense that they have waited for a nation-wide consensus to build up before making any final decision.

By Kwon Dae-Bong Contributing Writer

ljh@cfe.org

Kwon Dae-bong is a professor at Korea University an adviser to the Korean Society for Human Resources Development. This article appears on the web site of www.cfe.org., the center for free enterprise, affiliate of the Federation of Korean Industries.