In the aftermath of four student suicides, and, most recently, a professor’s suicide, at the extremely competitive Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, students and faculty are calling for changes. In particular, they want the punitive fee system (you pay a lot more if your GPA starts slipping) ended.
[T]hose who failed to get a grade point average better than 3.0 out of the total 4.3 faced up to 6 million won ($5,520) in fees from the second semester. For international students, the system was implemented from their third semester.
Of the total 7,805 students enrolled last year, 1,600 students, or 12.9 percent, paid an average of 2.45 million won. And the figure has been on the rise recently, with 4.9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2009.
The school’s president isn’t handling things well – he seemed at one point to be accepting this and other reforms aimed at cooling the competitive intensity, but has changed his mind.
Meanwhile, John Rodgers, an English language teacher in Seoul, reviews the startlingly high suicide incidence in Korea generally, and suggests that the country take advantage of the attention being paid to the deaths at KAIST to begin reckoning with aspects of the culture that contribute to the problem.