The declining number of students has placed many universities under intense pressure for restructuring. The Korean government has implemented a series of programs to facilitate their restructuring, mainly by evaluating their performance, assigning them targets for cuts in enrollment, and offering financial supports. The heavy government involvement, however, has had several drawbacks, including the efficiency principle compromised during the restructuring process, further encroachment on the autonomy of universities, their increased dependency on government, possible distortion in the sectoral supply of manpower, and the decreasing size of individual academic departments in many universities. The sources of the problem can be found, on the supply side, in the resistance from professors toward restructuring and weak governance within universities, and on the demand side, in the under-utilization of information (e.g., on job prospects upon graduation) by students when choosing universities and fields of study. This research monograph analyzes the data from the Education Statistics Service to study the behavior of suppliers and consumers in the market for higher education and proposes three ways to facilitate restructuring: (1) Scaling down the over-sized public universities and dismantling their soft-budget constraint; (2) eliminating the legal ceilings on the number of students in the capital area; and (3) providing better information on individual universities and academic departments. The aim of the latter two is to encourage students to pursue 'voting by feet' and let their selections, not the government's preference, decide which universities will survive and expand and which ones will exit.

Publisher's Note
Summary

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Data

Chapter 3: The Current State of Restructuring in General Universities

Chapter 4: Causes for Delay in Restructuring

Chapter 5: Problems Caused by Delays in Restructuring

Chapter 6: College and Department Choices of Incoming Students

Chapter 7: The Direction of University Restructuring Policies

References
Appendix
ABSTRACT