Korea to get tougher on admission scams at foreign schools

The government will toughen punishment on admission fraud by foreigner-only schools in the country in an effort to uproot the nagging problem, the education ministry said Wednesday.

Under the plan, foreigner-only schools caught for admission fraud more than three times can be forcibly shut down, with more information about their irregularities to be available online.

The move comes after a series of recent cases where several foreign schools in the country were found to have admitted students in violation of rules governing their nationalities. 

Since last October, dozens of students caught for irregularities were kicked out of the schools, and their parents have been on trial after being indicted on charges of acquiring unlawful admission for their children with fraudulent documents, with 21 of them receiving suspended prison terms.

Under the envisioned measures, schools caught for granting admission to unqualified students can be banned from recruiting local students for up to one year, with the term to be doubled in case of their second offense. Those caught for irregularities for a third time will be completely banned from the recruitment.

Under South Korean law, local students can be enrolled at international schools here only if one of their parents is a foreign national. Admission is also allowed if a parent and their child have resided overseas for at least three years, but this demographic should not exceed 30 percent of the school’s total enrollment.

“The ban on recruiting local students would lead to the schools’ shutdown considering the fact that a large number of local foreigner-only schools have been lacking enrollment,” a ministry official said.

In case schools fail to abide by the authorities’ order to correct admission-related errors, they can also be stripped of rights to recruit local students for a few months, the ministry said.

To push for the toughened measures, the ministry plans to revise relevant regulations and to submit them to the National Assembly.

The ministry will set up a system to check suspicious documents issued by foreign countries and submitted by applicants via South Korea’s diplomatic missions overseas.

On the website about foreign educational institutions and foreign schools here (http://www.isi.go.kr), the government plans to make public diverse information including the institutions’ enrollment, tuition fees and track records about irregularities. (Yonhap News)