7 local governments to supervise universities

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7 local governments to supervise universities

A student walks up an empty staircase on a university campus in North Gyeongsang. [YONHAP]

A student walks up an empty staircase on a university campus in North Gyeongsang. [YONHAP]

Seven cities and provinces will be part of the Education Ministry’s pilot project delegating central government authority over universities to local government offices.
 
The governments of Daegu, Busan, South Gyeongsang, North Gyeongsang, South Jeolla, North Jeolla and North Chungcheong have been chosen for the ministry’s RISE project, officials announced Wednesday.
 
Through RISE, which stands for Regional Innovation System & Education, the local governments will make efforts to cooperate with universities within their jurisdictions to devise ways to improve their educational systems, thus preventing young students from flocking to the Seoul metropolitan area in search of better career prospects.
 
RISE is President Yoon Suk Yeol’s core policy for universities outside the greater Seoul area of Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi, which in recent years have struggled from a dwindling number of student applicants amid the country’s population decline.
 
Through the initiative, the Yoon administration essentially hopes to transfer the central government’s powers of management and supervision over universities to local governments by 2025. Local governments will be in charge of allocating more than half the Education Ministry’s financial budget for universities, about 2 trillion won ($1.5 billion) in total.
 
Over the next two years, the Education Ministry said that the seven local governments will have to assemble a team of officials who will solely be responsible for supervising the universities within their areas. Busan and South Gyeongsang already have such teams.
 
By June, the local governments will also have to draw up a five-year plan detailing how they intend to cooperate with universities. Their budgets for putting those plans into action will be later determined by the ministry.
 
To ensure that the local governments don’t abuse their power, the ministry said it will separately establish so-called RISE centers, which will be tasked with overseeing the local governments and monitoring their funding for universities.
 
On concerns that local governments lack expertise for supervising universities, an Education Ministry official explained Wednesday that the ministry was considering dispatching some of its own officials to local governments to help out, on top of providing training opportunities.
 
Still, some are skeptical.
 
In an interview with the JoongAng Ilbo, the head of a planning office at a private university in North Gyeongsang complained that most of the central government’s budget is already going toward major universities. “I’m highly concerned whether the budget will be fairly allocated by local governments, and I think the RISE project will only intensify the hierarchy among universities within the region," said the official.

BY LEE SUNG-EUN,CHOI MIN-JI [lee.sungeun@joongang.co.kr]
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