The Globalization of Korean Universities and Chinese Students: A Comparative Analysis between Universities in Seoul and a Provincial City

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, the Korean government called for educational reform to improve its competitiveness in the increasingly globalizing world. As a result, many Korean universities set university reform as their central goal and carried out strategies of internationalization. These schools began to focus on university evaluations conducted by third parties, as they came under pressure by government policies that emphasized international competitiveness. University assessments included a variety of indexes that measured the universitys level of research, education, as well as globalization. The index of globalization was generally determined by the percentage of foreign instructors, foreign students, and lectures given in English in each university. This article analyzes the increasing number of Chinese students in Korea from the perspective of macro-dynamics of Korean universities and Chinese students' motivations and experiences, while comparing one university in Seoul with another in a provincial region.