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Foreign students wearing Korean traditional dress.
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More seeking degrees than doing part-time language study
The number of foreign students who are studying at South Korean universities has passed the 30,000 mark. In addition, more of those students are enrolled in terminal degree courses rather than short-term language study than ever before. According to 2006 statistics released by the Ministry of Education and Human Resources, the number of foreign students at local universities and graduate schools totaled 32,357 as of April 1 this year, up 44.5 percent from the end of last year. The figure is a jump of 178 percent compared with 2001, when the number of foreign students stood at 11,646. This trend can be compared with the similarly growing number of foreign students in Japan, which started a campaign to attract foreign students nearly 20 years earlier than South Korea’s four-year-old campaign. In Japan, the number of foreign students was 117,302 in 2004 and 121,812 in 2005. Of the total foreign students at local universities and graduate schools, the rate of those enrolled in a diploma-granting program stood at 69.5 percent, compared with 37.2 percent five years ago.Most of the foreign students in South Korea were Asian, with them accounting for 89.8 percent of the total. In particular, the proportion of Chinese students out of the total foreign student body jumped to 61.7 percent, from 27.7 percent in 2001, followed by Japanese (11.4 percent), U.S. (4.5 percent), and Vietnamese (3.6 percent). By major, 45.8 percent were studying arts and humanities, while 19.9 percent were focusing on engineering and science. However, in the case of foreign students enrolled in a doctoral course, the rate of students who major engineering and science was 67.8 percent. In addition, 80.9 percent of the total number of foreign students were funding their own study in South Korea, while 12 percent were on scholarship, according to the data.
