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University tuition bills uploaded by students to social media

“One look at this bill and you’ll know. Is this supposed to be half-price tuition? I didn’t get any kind of scholarship. I don’t get how my family’s income bracket is going up while our financial situation gets worse and worse.”

A university student recently added this post to Unfinished Half-Price Tuition Bamboo Grove, an anonymous community on Facebook.

Attached to the post was a bill for tuition, which said that the student owed 3,298,000 won, or about US$2,800.

The bill, which was posted by a user named “A student at Hanshin University who is ticked off while eating a 1,600 won [US$1.36] rice burger,” who is just one of a number of university students who have posted bills of their tuition for the first semester this year to Bamboo Grove.

Bamboo Grove was set up in February by an independently operated coalition of university students calling themselves the Network Movement for University Student Participation in the April 13 Parliamentary Election.

“The administration is making it sound as if it kept its campaign pledge about half-price tuition, but that isn‘t how things actually feel to university students. I thought that the most accurate way of showing this was through bills,” said Kim Seong-min, 26, the administrator of Bamboo Groove, when asked why community members have started posting pictures of their bills.

When university students saw an advertisement by the Ministry of Education and the Korea Scholarship Foundation at the end of last year containing the phrase “half-price tuition was achieved through the effort of the government and universities,” they were “indignant,” Kim said.

Kim says that, since only 41.7% of students (as of the second semester of 2014) were receiving government scholarships, according to the Korea Higher Education Research Institute, the reality experienced by students was much different than what the government claims.

In fact, Kim himself was kicked out of Hanyang University this semester, because he was unable to make money to cover the tuition. Since he was in an extra ninth semester, he did not qualify for a government scholarship, and he had trouble getting a student loan as well.

“When I see a tuition bill, the first thing I do is sigh. The government needs to understand that we won’t have really achieved half-price tuition until the actual tuition on the bill is cut in half,” Kim said.

“I have two older sisters. Even though the cost of schooling is considerable, our family doesn’t qualify for a government scholarship. And it’s not like we’re from a privileged background, either,” one university student wrote, attaching a tuition bill to the post for 3,302,000 won.

“My dad’s self-employed, and since the economy hasn‘t been very good recently, he’s lost a lot of his clients,” wrote one student from Duksung Women‘s University. “His income has gone down, but his income bracket has gone up one level. The income bracket has gone up for all my friends, too. How did they come up with this middle class with no household income boost?”

By Ko Han-sol, staff reporter

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