Signal Universities with enrolment below 95 percent rose 3.6-fold and those below 50 percent about 17-fold from 2018 to 2024

Summary

The education-system overview reports that Korea's university-age population has nearly halved in twenty years. Comparing 2024 with 2018, the number of universities filling less than 95 percent of their places rose 3.6 times. Over the same period the number filling less than half of their places increased about seventeenfold. Regional universities are responding by abolishing departments, cutting quotas by half and closing dormitories, putting normal operation at risk. The survey reads these figures together with the growing concentration of higher-education students in the capital region as signs of widening gaps and declining competitiveness in higher education.