ON JULY 14, the Ministry of Education (MOE) released the results of its first-ever comprehensive audit of Yonsei University. In a massive 257 page report, the ministry detailed 86 instances of violations uncovered by the auditing task force. The audit was conducted in two phases last year, from July 17 to 30 and again from November 11 to 15. It is the most thorough audit into Yonsei University and Educational Foundation of Yonsei University*, covering the university’s financial operations, human resource management, admissions, and academic affairs. The report also lists penalties and sanctions of individuals and institutions by the Ministry of Education. In total, 421 punitive measures were taken, including 26 cases of heavy sanctions, 59 moderate sanctions and 336 warnings. Among the 86 cases, 12 deemed more serious by the MOE will be investigated further for crimes such as fraud and embezzlement, and could result in civil and criminal actions. The media focused extensively on these particular cases, and its coverage prompted massive public backlash. All four general student councils in the Sinchon and Mirae campuses jointly released a public statement on July 21 condemning the school for its actions in an unprecedented show of solidarity against the administration. Their statement expressed a “profound sense of neglect and humiliation” stemming from the school’s “complete lack of remorse” and demanded several remedial actions be taken.

Leading up to the audit

   The recent 2019 audit of 16 major universities represents the latest chapter in a series of reform efforts headed by the Moon Jae-in administration. In November 2017, the administration unveiled its plans for MOE in a report titled, “New Administration Higher Education Vision and Goal.” The plan promised a three-pronged approach to advancing the quality of university education: through improved diagnostics, increased financial support, and reformation of the education system. The first of these goals was aimed at restoring a “sense of obligation [to public interest] and democratic spirit” in our higher education by decreasing corruption within private universities through increased regulations, harsher penalties, and oversight.

   The concerns noted in the report, as well as its prescribed solutions, were welcomed by the public who for years have come to view private higher education with suspicion. Until a few years ago, the MOE, and its preceding agency, The Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology, mostly conducted special investigations of private universities through its complaint mechanism. However, such mechanisms were not only rarely used but were plagued by weak punitive measures and irregular oversight. As a result, private university operations have been opaque, allowing some individuals in positions of power to treat private universities as their personal bank. In 2013, the prosecution of educator Lee Hong-ha who founded four universities uncovered an embezzlement scheme involving approximately 89.8 billion in student tuition.

   The reform efforts were slow to begin with but were spurred on in the National Assembly in 2019. The push was a result of a separate investigation into private preschools, which revealed rampant corruption involving misspent state funds and embezzlement amounting up to 38.2 billion won. Following on the coattails of the private preschool audits, the calls for similar investigations and legal reforms to be conducted on private universities gained popularity. As it was argued, the case of private universities demanded an even more urgent response than the private preschools. According to an analysis of MOE’s activities from 2008 to 2019 submitted by Rep. Park Yong-jin, while “the cases of corruption in private universities involve money…effectively 5.5. times that of private preschool,” the punishments in 90% of the cases only amounted to simple warnings. Eventually, as a response to popular demand, MOE announced on July 9, 2019, that it would investigate 16 major universities from 2019 to 2021. Yonsei was the first to be investigated.

Diverging perspectives

   But the call for increased oversight has not all been met with fanfare, especially within universities. Even before the announcement of the comprehensive audit in July, some professors have voiced their concerns about “excessive” focus on government regulation of private education.

   The concept of direct state oversight on private education is unique to Korea, reflective of the exceptional nature of private education in the country. In the United States, private universities provide approximately 25% of higher education; by comparison, in Korea, they provide approximately 80% of higher education. As a result, while the universities are legally private, they are also understood as having public characteristics.

   The problem is that since 2012 private universities in Korea have been prevented by law from raising tuition. To ameliorate the financial strain on the universities, the government allocated around 7 trillion won of state subsidies each year. But these measures have been widely deemed as woefully inadequate. Tuition is the main source of income for private universities, averaging around 53% of the total income. Observers in universities see inadequate financing as the biggest obstacle—itself a problem caused by state interference—to improving the quality of education in the university. For them, the prospect of an increased state involvement via oversight in private education is an uncomfortable one.

   The Moon administration has stated that they intend to preserve “autonomy” while increasing “responsibility to public interest” of private universities, but with so much media and political focus on the auditing and investigation of private universities, detractors have pointed out that there was a disproportionate focus on the latter—in controlling private universities. During a session of congressional debate on private education reform made open to members of the public, Professor Song Joo Myung (Prof., Dept. of Political Science, Hanshin University) expressed the dissatisfaction of some professors, noting that if the government intended to make private universities more public, that policy should “be commensurate with the degree of its financial support…for [the policy] to bring about constructive change.” Others were more scathing in their remarks. “[The government] has foisted the responsibility of education squarely on private citizens,” Lee Min-pah, a concerned citizen, remarked.

   The objections have only amplified as MOE announced its decision in July. Comprehensive audit is the most thorough investigation that MOE is allowed to conduct on universities, and under MOE’s own Investigation Guideline, does not require a specific motive other than to inspect the “legality and validity of university operations.” Many saw this as an unwarranted intrusion into operations of private institutions. In an interview with The Yonsei Annals, the head of the Office of Planning & Management, Professor Kim Kabsung (Prof., Dept. of Urban Planning and Engin.) explained that the audit took place “in the absence of clear reason to investigate.”

Details of the audit

   The report contains copious documentation of the records and incidents involved in the violation of the MOE regulations relating to Yonsei’s operations from 2016 to 2019. The report presents evidence of violations and irregularities occurring on a systematic level. The admissions and academics portion of the audit, or the human resource and organizational management portion found respectively 22 and 15 counts of violations, some of which are widespread within respective departments.

   Regarding admissions, all 49 graduate departments are required to maintain complete records of the four major documents required in the standard regular admissions process. However, among the records of 5,789 applicants from 2016 to 2019, certain departments had as many as seven semesters' worths of incomplete documentation—amounting to 1,080 missing documents. In addition, many admissions records were not filed correctly according to regulation, and 12 department heads of 7 graduate colleges were found to have not completed their formal evaluation paperwork for the regular admissions process in a manner consistent with the regulation. Instead, 2,012 applicant records were substituted by faculty meetings records and informal paperwork.

   Most notably, the report cites an incident in 2016 involving an individual, whose daughter, student A, applied to a graduate college in Yonsei. The applicant was initially ranked ninth out of the 16 applicants but was given the full 95 points for the recommendation on the documented application review while those with a similar or higher GPA were given lower scores. In the subsequent oral test, the five professors on the admissions committee were found to have secretly “discussed prioritizing student A’s selection beforehand,” resulting in the student being given a perfect score of 100 points. As a result, student A was chosen over the applicants who had originally ranked first and second in the evaluations; they were given 47 and 63 points respectively on the oral test. Two days after the audit report was made public, Yonsei University revealed that student A was none other than the daughter of the former vice president of Songdo Campus, Professor Lee Kyung-tae (Prof., School of Business). Faculty members involved in the scandal were given heavy sanctions and are expected to face investigation by the prosecutor’s office.

   In the HR and organizational management category, the violations mostly concerned excessive academic inbreeding and lack of procedural compliance. Unlike the case in the United States, academic inbreeding in Korea is defined as hiring professors who have earned their bachelor’s degree in the same university and not their doctoral degree. The primary legislation concerning academic inbreeding, articles 11-12 of the 2005 Public Educational Officials Act and Public Education Official Appointment Order, exist to prevent overrepresentation of alumni on a school’s faculty. Fundamentally, these legislations try to reduce the traditional emphasis in hak-mek** within the elite Korean private universities to ensure that the professors will be appointed fairly based on qualifications and not discriminated against. As a result of these regulations, private universities are not allowed to fill more than two-thirds of its department vacancies with undergraduate alumni. However, Yonsei nevertheless continued to hire alumni in 12 departments that were already over the two-third limit − some of which were composed exclusively of Yonsei alumni.

   Some academic appointment committees were also faulted for bypassing standard protocols in appointment procedures. As per Yonsei’s guidelines, appointment committees are to be chaired by more than five members, a third of whom must be from other departments. However, in one instance, the committee was not formed at all and the appointment decision was made during a department meeting. In a separate case, the committee was chaired with 4 members of the faculty who were graduate or doctoral advisors for some of the applicants − a clear violation of the Basic Ethics Code (BEC) of the university which bars such conduct due to potential conflict of interest.

   Other violations occurred on a more individual level. Under article 11 of BEC, faculty members should exempt themselves from duty concerning those of “[close] familiar relations.” However, in 2017, a professor allowed his daughter to take his course and created the midterm test at home; his daughter scored A+ on the said test. No records of the midterm or final exams were kept. As a result, the professor was found in infringement of the school’s own BEC for admitting his daughter into the class and failing to follow guidelines on maintaining grading records.

   The Yonsei University Health System (YUHS), which includes the Severance Hospital, was also implicated in numerous violations. In total, 67 cases of violations were found in Yonsei’s hiring process, with more than half of the available points in an evaluation being given based on an applicant’s undergraduate university’s ranking. Such explicit bias violates articles of the Basic Employment Law and falls under “discrimination…based on educational prestige.” Numerous staff members at YUHS were found to have also misused corporate cards. Yonsei’s internal regulations, as well as the MOE’s guidelines on corporate cards specifically, ban the use of corporate cards for personal reasons (drinking, leisure activities, gambling…etc.) and requires the appropriate documentation with approval by the department head. According to MOE, however, 15 staff members of YUHS paid using corporate cards at saloons and bars on 45 separate occasions. 24 other staff members used the cards to pay for their golfing expenses, with the total sum of the outing amounting to 256 million won.

   While the facts of the cases are quite clear, the interpretations and characterizations of the findings by the media have upset the members of the faculty. With headlines such as “Rampant Corruption in Yonsei,” the mainstream media conflated violations occurring at an individual level with those occurring at a systematic level, allowing the actions of the unscrupulous few to color the reputation of the entire institution composed of thousands of faculty members. They also did not distinguish between the operations of Yonsei University and YUHS, which has its own governance and run separately from the rest of Yonsei.

   The faculty members also expressed dissatisfaction with the MOE’s handling of the audit. In March, when the punitive measures resulting from the audit were handed out to Yonsei, 69 professors implicated in the mishandling of admissions records submitted a formal objection to the MOE arguing that the punishments were too harsh. Professor Kim explained that “graduate school admission records were filed, but not for long depending on the departments.” He pointed out that much of what was cited in the report as violations were “regular practices [within Yonsei]” and that many who were simply following the norm and will now be punished “felt that the situation was rather unfair.”

   The audit also points to problems in the university’s accounting practices, noting 25 instances of violations of private university accounting regulations. According to the Private School Law, private universities in Korea are required to have a separate legal foundation responsible for managing various school-related business and its larger assets (real estate, investment holdings…etc.). To prevent the improper use of school tuition and state subsidies, the MOE requires a strict separation accounting between school and foundation operations. However, the audit found that educational expenditure accounting, which falls within school operations, was sometimes misclassified or merged with the foundational operations of the Education Foundation of Yonsei University. For instance, the accounting associated with Yonsei Co-Op from 2016 to 2018, a 72.2 billion won income, and 71.8 billion won expense, was unaccounted for in the educational expenditure income statement. Private School Law also prohibits loans between educational and foundation accounts, but in 2016 Yonsei loaned out 1.6 billion won from the educational expenditure to pay for the condolence and severance pay of its employees.

   On the other hand, the Education Foundation of Yonsei University is responsible for supplying the school with money through its basic assets. Articles 7 and 8 of the University Establishment Operation Guideline make it mandatory for 80% of the income from such assets to be used in educational expenditures. Yet from 2016 to 2018, only 62.0% to 70.1 % of the recorded income was transferred to the school balance sheet, meaning that the sum of approximately 255.9 billion won that should have been re-appropriated by the school was instead managed by Yonsei foundation. Numerous media outlets characterized this accounting mismanagement as examples of student tuition and state subsidy being siphoned into the foundation’s coffers. Professor Kim expressed his disagreement with such interpretations. “The income and expenses for Co-Op were simply calculated on a separate [income statement] with the net income being deposited back into educational expenditure.” He also told the Annals that it was the Education Foundation of Yonsei University’s position that they had exceeded the 80% requirement on basic asset income to be used as educational expenditure when calculated over the duration of a few years, and not yearly.

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   Since July, Yonsei University has promised to further investigate and develop solutions for the problems noted in the report. The president of Yonsei, Suh Seong-hwan (Prof., Dept. of Economics) has vowed in his email to the alumni to “sincerely reflect upon the administrations’ actions” and “to use this opportunity to enact reforms and improve [the university].” President Suh has since ordered the creation of the Solution to the Ministry of Education Audit Committee (TFT), with the goal of re-examining school operations. In addition, the university will update MOE regularly on their progress. This is undoubtedly a tumultuous period for Yonsei. But steps are being taken to address the problems uncovered by the audit, providing hope that the present tensions can be the impetus for change towards a better future.

*Educational Foundation of Yonsei University: the legal foundation for Yonsei University

**hak-mek: Korean word for academic network