Thursday, September 24, 2009

Excessive university’s application fee is another distinction.


As an early application to universities begins, many parents’ screaming gets loudly. If one pay for the fee to apply some universities, it’s over hundreds of thousands won easily. It is also easy to over more than one million won when they put four or five applications to universities as they feel nervous, so it is common that the poor reduce or waive their application opportunity. As a result, the heavy fee became a device discriminating many students even on the apply stage.


It is university that has the responsibility of this problem. Universities just care their own huge income from the application fee whereas the heavy burden of the parents who are hard to pay for the application fee is not their interest. To say, they don’t care about the publicity of education and the balance of society at all.


It is not the first time that the problems of universities’ enormous application fee have been suggested. Accordingly, many groups of parents have required for the universities to uncover where the money had been spent for. However, universities refused the request repeating that they had spent the money only for the university entrance and also persisting that the amount of the fee is not that large as it includes the depth interview which costs a lot on the early application. According to research reported by ‘한국소비자원’, though, some universities used the money to hold some tennis matches or to advertise themselves and very few universities returned the application fee when some students didn’t take the test.


The reason why ‘the Department of the Education Science Technology(교육과학기술부)’ started to find alternative plans in time was that the discuss related to the application fee was about to bomb. The Department of the Study(교과부) said that they will reveal the details of income and disbursement by amending the special law of the uncovering information regarding Education Institute at the end of this year. It is good to hear and I hope that the unreasonable application fee will be adjusted to a better one.


Nevertheless that is not enough because many companies don’t take any application fee when they hire new employees, rather most of them give appliers transportation fee. However, I wonder why universities charge the appliers for the money. It would be the greatest way to charge no money for them but if it is impossible, they have to take the least actual expense and find ways to exempt the application fee for the statue of the poor.

4 comments:

  1. I'm not very familiar with the application fees that universities in Korea charge. However, the fees that you describe don't seem all that outrageous. Simply processing paperwork and interviews would justify much of that expense.

    I do tend to agree when it comes to universities receiving public funds. If that is the case, they should offer to waive application fees for low-income families.

    Can you tell me what the fees are for some schools, if it's not too much trouble? I'm just curious.

    * Sangmyung
    * Seoul National
    * Kyounghee
    * Ewha

    Dan

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  3. I founded that the application fees that I searched are various depends on its class. For example, art course's fee is the most expensive one and ordinary selection is the lowest one in each university.

    *Sangmyung 80,000~90,000 won
    *Seoul Ntional 5,000~7,5000 won
    *Kyunghee 70,000~100,000 won
    *Ewha 80,000~120,000 won

    Seoul National University has a special application courses, application for the runners from North Korea and for the basic living recipients who pay 5,000 won.

    It is only Ewha Wemen's University which return the application fee up to 50% to applicators who fail to pass the application

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  4. SNU has a really cheap fee. Is this because it is a national university?

    The others seem a little expensive, but that's about what we'd pay in the US, more or less. So, I'm not complaining.

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