For Higher Education Policy, the Answer Is Structural Reform, Not “Copying”

The government is promoting a higher education policy called “Creating 10 Seoul National Universities.” The idea is to elevate regional flagship national universities to the level of Seoul National University in order to ease concentration in the Seoul metropolitan area and achieve balanced regional development. However, given the nature and realities of higher education, the effectiveness of such an approach is bound to be called into question.

A university is not a signboard. Imitating a brand does not replicate a university’s quality. Competitiveness emerges only when a complex, high-level ecosystem is at work, including research capacity, faculty excellence, industry-academia cooperation, international networks, and autonomy. If the government pushes ahead with an administrative approach that prioritizes support for regional national universities, it will only result in wasted tax money.

Uniform equalization inevitably leads to downward equalization. Dividing up financial resources does not enable every university to grow. Even among regional flagship universities, there are clear differences in capability, and if these are ignored in favor of uniform support, efficiency will instead decline.

Non-flagship universities will be marginalized even further, and regional imbalances may actually worsen. The view that universities are merely “training centers for local talent” is also outdated. Universities do not exist for the sake of regional equality.

The problem with Korean universities is not the gap between the Seoul metropolitan area and the provinces. The real problem is a lack of competitiveness. In global research institution rankings, Korean universities consistently remain outside the top 50, and talent in advanced fields such as AI (artificial intelligence) continues to flow overseas. Under these circumstances, the idea that simply increasing the number of such universities will solve the problem ignores reality.

It is not only regional universities that feel the crisis. Major universities across Korea as a whole are facing a complex crisis of declining global competitiveness, talent outflows, and poor research performance. Even so, rather than pursuing structural reform of the university system as a whole, the government is focusing its policy on creating multiple symbolic marquee universities.

Expanding outward appearances cannot solve the fundamental problems of the university ecosystem. What is needed now is not “quantitative expansion” but “qualitative innovation.”

The policy direction must change. It should move not toward “replication” but toward “reform centered on autonomy and competitiveness.” Each university should cultivate its own distinctive research fields and strengthen industry-academia cooperation and internationalization. The government must not assume that fostering multiple national universities in the provinces is sufficient. A flexible operating system must also be put in place, one that allows for selection and concentration based on performance. Policy should also recognize differences in performance among national universities.

A policy that gives priority to national universities carries a high risk of driving all private universities in the provinces into decline. The existence of countless national universities in the provinces is itself a problem, but if government support becomes even more concentrated on national universities, the crisis facing private universities will inevitably deepen. The support system centered on national, provincial, and municipal universities should be reformed, and policy should shift in a direction that allows private universities to flourish, as they do in advanced countries.

Higher education is not a tool for regional balancing. Universities are a source of national competitiveness and the cradle of creative talent that competes globally. Accordingly, higher education policy must now move beyond the framework of “replication” and “equalization” and advance toward structural reform centered on competitiveness through autonomy.

Sung-no Choi, President of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

---

Original title: 대학정책, ‘복제’가 아니라 ‘구조 개혁’이 답이다

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2025-07-24

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=press&idx=27923