THE South Korean government is expanding subsidies for South Korean universities to have more English-only lectures as part of a project to attract more foreign students, The Korea Times has reported.
The South Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced on June 19 that it would allocate a budget of 1.6 billion won ($1.5 million) to 27 universities for them to develop English-only courses and offer better Korean language classes. By doing so, the ministry seeks to minimize language barriers, provide a comfortable academic environment, promote internationalization of higher education and offer easily accessible educational opportunities of high quality.
The subsidy program has seen a huge increase in terms of budget and scope compared to the previous year when the ministry merely provided a financial aid of 400 million won ($386,000) for eight universities.
Each selected university will get approximately 50 million won ($48,000) to 100 million won ($96,000), with the agreement to secure a matching fund equivalent of or higher than the amount of government support. The financial resources will go into textbook development, curricular improvement, faculty recruitment and other necessities in program administration for foreign students.
The program comes as a part of the “Study Korea Project” launched by the ministry in 2005 to recruit 50,000 foreign students by 2010. The number of foreign nationals studying in South Korea increased to 49,270 last year, up from 32,557 in 2006, 22,526 in 2005 and 16,832 in 2004.
In order to help foster Korean language teaching in universities, the ministry has also opened bid for private companies to develop Korean language textbooks in foreign languages. The textbooks are expected to bring in a larger number of students from Arab States and Central or South American countries.
“Each selected university will use the funds to hire professors who can conduct lectures in English and develop various programs to attract foreign students,’’ said Park Seung-chul, a ministry official.
