Korean Higher Education on the Rise: Time to Learn from the Success - Comparative Research at the Tertiary Education Level

Abstract

This research paper highlights a number of important lessons that international universities and university systems - particularly those in Austria and Ontario, Canada - can learn from the South Korean higher education model, in terms of policies, practices, privatization, eligibility and mentoring. Effectively, while modern South Korean universities have short post-war histories since their establishment, in comparison to more developed countries, they can nonetheless offer viable blueprints, in terms of policies, practices, privatization and mentoring to university administrators worldwide. To demonstrate this, a comparative framework and an empirical comparison are used to assess the contrastive qualities between Austrian and S. Korean as well as between Ontarian (of Canada) and S. Korean tertiary educational environments in the fields of Business Administration and TES/FL1, correspondingly. In the first chapter of the paper, a contrastive assessment between the Austrian and South Korean tertiary education systems is made, with a specific focus on the undergraduate level. Suggestions to facilitate the current transition of the Austrian tertiary education system in accordance with the Bologna Process are consequently made. This process has been introduced to ensure comparability in standards and to foster the mobility of European students in an increasingly globalized world that requires diverse cultural awareness from students to raise their employability worldwide (Reichert &Tauch, 2004). The paper’s suggestions are inspired by the experiences of the South Korean educational system that has evolved over a period of six decades. The following study will also show that the traditional values of Confucianism – such as harmony, community, strong morality and respect toward older family members – have been preserved in Korea.  They still influence Korean society in general and higher education in particular, playing a major role even in the recent rise of Hallyu (Yang, 2012).  In the second section of the paper, an empirical analysis and comparison of tertiary level ESL in Ontario, Canada and EFL in the Republic of Korea, are conducted on a systematic and empirical basis. It aims to highlight the advantages of the Korean EFL system over that of ESL in Ontario, Canada in the areas of policies and practices. Essentially, the Canadian Language Benchmarks is shown to give way to extreme linguistic regionalism that is built on a disproportionate reliance on the concept of Canadianism. In general, as a result of the outcome of the comparative analysis, it is suggested in the scope of this paper that Ontarian tertiary ESL providers and administrators have specific lessons to learn from the university EFL model in the Republic of Korea.