Chonnam National University Decides to Freeze Undergraduate Tuition Fees This Year

16 Years of Frozen Tuition at 9 National Flagship Universities
"Urgent Need for Government Policy and Financial Support"

The nine national flagship universities, consisting of Chonnam National University, Kangwon National University, Kyungpook National University, Gyeongsang National University, Pusan National University, Jeonbuk National University, Jeju National University, Chungbuk National University, and Chungnam National University, have frozen undergraduate tuition fees for this year.

Chonnam National University (President Jung Sungtaek) announced on the 11th that it has decided to freeze undergraduate tuition fees for the 2025 academic year.

This decision to freeze tuition fees was made as a broad gesture to share the burden of the people and students who are currently suffering from high exchange rates and inflation.

Currently, national universities, including flagship national universities, have frozen tuition fees for 16 years, resulting in significant financial difficulties for education and research. Chonnam National University stated that even with the tuition freeze, universities will make every effort to reduce budgets to ensure there is no decline in the quality of education and research.

At the video conference of the Council of Presidents of National Flagship Universities held the previous day, the presidents agreed to request policy and financial support from the government to raise per-student educational spending to the level of Seoul National University, so that regional universities can contribute to balanced regional development and secure global competitiveness. They also expressed the opinion that if such support is not provided, a tuition increase will be inevitable from next year.

Additionally, there were complaints that, in the case of “scholarship payments” used as a university evaluation indicator, only the amount paid within the scope of tuition is considered. As tuition at national universities is only about half that of private universities, national universities receive lower evaluation results simply because their scholarship payments are lower compared to private universities.

The presidents of national flagship universities stated, “Taking into account the difficult economic situation faced by the government and the people, we made this difficult decision after in-depth discussions,” and added, “We ask for the government’s active financial support so that national universities can maintain the public nature of higher education, contribute to regional development, and secure global competitiveness.”

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