hankyoreh

By Eum Sung-won, staff reporter
Worries about her ninth-grade son have kept a mom surnamed Kim, 48, a resident of Seoul’s Seongsu neighborhood, tossing and turning at night.
Kim thinks her son is smart enough, but he just doesn’t study hard enough. She is concerned that his English ability may not be adequate for high school, which is right around the corner. She thought about sending him abroad to study, but abandoned that idea because of the cost.
It was then that Kim learned about alternative schools. Now, she is making plans to send her son to one. The school she is considering may not be officially accredited, but she was impressed by the international education that it offers along with immersion English education taught by foreign teachers.
The school that Kim has chosen charges around 5.2 million won (US$4,667) per semester for tuition. Including lodging fees, the annual cost tops 15 million won.
“We have five foreign teachers who are as highly educated as a professor,” an unidentified employee at the school said. “It’s basically the same as sending students to the US to study.”
70-80% of the students who graduate from this school go on to universities overseas.
On May 22, the South Korean Ministry of Education published a report on 185 unaccredited alternative educational facilities. According to the Ministry’s data, there are six unaccredited alternative schools that were established to provide international education and foreign language instruction. The annual tuition at five of these six schools was reported to be above 10 million won, while tuition at the sixth school was around 7 million.
The education that these schools provide is not recognized as regular schooling by the Ministry of Education. Since these schools do not have to report what they teach or register with the government, they are not subject to any regulations. In effect, they are being operated as prep schools for the upper classes.
“A lot of our students come from families where both parents work,” said an employee with an unaccredited alternative international school in Gyeonggi Province. “The parents seem to prefer having their children staying in a dormitory where they can be thoroughly monitored, instead of having them bounce between school and private institutes.” When asked about the cost, the employee pointed out that if you break it down there is not a big difference between the school tuition and the cost of sending children to private institutes.
Parents in South Korea commonly send their children to private institutes to supplement their normal education.
There are indications that there are in reality more unaccredited alternative schools than the six listed in the Ministry of Education’s report.
At Handong Global University, students who graduate from alternative schools are selected through a separate process. “With graduates of unaccredited alternative schools, we used to conduct a review of their school before allowing them to apply for admission,” said an employee with the university. “Lately, though, there has been a huge increase in the number of unaccredited alternative schools that have made this kind of request. It would be difficult for us to review all of them, so at the moment we are not able to process any new requests.”
Even among more conventional alternative schools that do not offer international education or immersive English education, there is a considerable number that charge high tuition. The average total cost of the 185 unaccredited alternative schools surveyed by the Ministry of Education was 6 million won. This cost includes tuition, room and board.
“Whether we’re talking about an international school or a regular alternative school, pretty much any decent school is going to cost a lot of money,” said Ha Byeong-su, spokesperson for the Korea Teachers and Education Workers‘ Union (KTU). “This means that such schools are simply not an option for low-income families.”
“The government needs to find some way to regulate excessive costs, just as it regulates private institutes. Of course, the ultimate goal is to improve the quality of public education.”
“We intend to satisfy the demand for alternative education through public schools,” said Park Seong-su, head of student welfare policy at the Ministry of Education. “We are also planning to look into ways to help unaccredited alternative schools become places that can serve the interests of the entire public.”
　
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