Introduction of Domestic and Foreign University Joint Degrees

It seems like the introduction to professors of foreign universities’ domestic online lectures and joint degrees between domestic and foreign universities are highly likely.

Furthermore, research-only professors and researchers, who only concentrate on researching without any lecturing, will be recruited.

The Office for Government Policy Coordination’s regulation improvement planning department announced this yesterday in their “University administration regulation improvement method” and said that they are planning to make it official today in a ministers’ meeting related on regulation improvement supervised by Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan.

Until now, foreign university professors could only directly lecture and could not give out joint doctoral degrees.

An official in the planning department explained, “Although collaboration in the education administration’s area with foreign universities will expand, the administrating method and whether or not they give out degrees and the name will be freely decided by each university.”

The OGPC (Office for Government Policy Coordination) allowed each university that had used the professors’ foreign organization dispatch system one extension per dispatch year in order to facilitate independent operation and introduce a temporary rest system for public research institute work.

The OGPC also decided to provide a “University Statistics Unified Database” to reduce universities’ load of providing statistical data to the National Assembly, Ministry of Education and Human Resources and Korean Educational Development Institute separately each year.

Yong-Gwan Jung yongari@donga.com