[2022 National Audit] Even with Full Scholarships for Freshmen, Regional Universities' Enrollment Rates Decline

85 Universities Provided Unconditional Scholarships from 2020 to 2022
14 Universities Fully Cover Tuition Fees This Year, 10 More Than Two Years Ago
35 Universities Out of 85 Saw Enrollment Rates Drop by Over 10%

Students passing by the job posting board at a university in Seoul. Photo by Mun Ho-nam munonam@

# A university in Daejeon provided all incoming students with a scholarship of 300,000 KRW in 2020, 1,000,000 KRW last year, and full tuition this year. The average scholarship amount per student was about 2.6 million KRW. The university's freshman enrollment rate was 78.2% in 2020 but dropped by 20.4 percentage points to 57.8% this year.

More regional universities are offering scholarships to all freshmen to prevent under-enrollment. Nevertheless, the enrollment rate continues to decline.

According to the status of scholarship support for freshmen by university from the 2020 to 2022 academic years, submitted by the Ministry of Education to Seo Dong-yong, a member of the National Assembly's Education Committee from the Democratic Party of Korea, about 85 universities operate scholarship systems that provide scholarships to all students without conditions such as grades or income level.

Among them, 19 universities are located in the metropolitan area, including Gyeonggi and Incheon, and 66 are non-metropolitan universities. By type, there are 36 general universities and 49 vocational colleges.

The number of universities providing full tuition scholarships increased from 4 in the 2020 academic year to 14 in the 2022 academic year.

The average scholarship amount per freshman receiving scholarships increased from 945,682 KRW in 2020 to 1,018,099 KRW in 2022. The scholarship amounts provided by universities vary from tuition fee reductions to fixed amount support and full tuition coverage.

Despite regional universities implementing aggressive scholarship programs to recruit freshmen, most regional universities' freshman enrollment rates are on the decline.

Among the 85 universities operating unconditional scholarship support systems, 35 universities experienced a decrease in freshman enrollment rates of more than 10%. Thirty-four universities saw a decrease of less than 10%, and 16 universities either maintained or increased their enrollment rates.

The university with the largest drop in enrollment rate saw a 44.4% decrease this year compared to two years ago.

Assemblyman Seo Dong-yong said, "While more regional universities are recruiting freshmen by providing full tuition scholarships, the freshman enrollment rates at regional universities are sharply declining. To prevent the outflow of local talent to the metropolitan area, strong enrollment regulations on metropolitan universities centered in Seoul must be prioritized, and the Ministry of Education must also prepare special measures to save regional universities left on the brink of collapse."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.