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Find ways to draw excellent foreign students

Published: 21 Feb. 2024, 20:26

Yeom Jae-ho
The author, a former president of Korea University, is the president of Taejae University.

Yale University Law School Professor Amy Chua’s bestselling book “Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance — and Why They Fall” defines generosity and embrace of external forces as two major features of superpowers in history. The author attributes the prosperity of Tang Dynasty — the golden era of Chinese arts and culture — to its inclusive stance toward foreigners. At that time, capital Changan had the largest population around the world, and boasted rich racial diversity.

The Tang Dynasty’s second emperor, Taizong, accepted 70,000 people from Silla Dynasty and recruited a number of aristocrats and officials from the ally. During the Unified Silla period (668-935), more than 100 sons of mid-level officials went to China each year for a decade of study. A Buddhist temple even ran a scholarship program, providing food and clothes to excellent foreign students on behalf of the Tang court. A total of 80 students from Silla passed the state-administered exam through 925. Choi Chi-won, one of Korea’s greatest writers and poets, also passed the exam, served as an official in the government and returned to Silla after staying in Tang for 17 years.

The United States was a paradise for immigrants with the American Dream. As many as 130,000 European intellectuals fled to the country between 1933 and 1950. Some 22 million Asian Americans now account for 6.8 percent of the total U.S. population — the fourth largest racial group after African Americans at 12.4 percent, Hispanics at 18.7 percent and whites at 57.8 percent.

The United States and China are similar in physical size, but only the former became a superpower. The U.S. population is 330 million, while Brazil’s is 210 million and Canada’s is 34 million. Some 73 percent of Canadians are European descendants. 47.7 percent of Brazilians are whites and 43.1 percent are mulattos, or people with mixed African and European ancestry.

Knowledge-based work in the U.S. economy relies heavily on Asian Americans from Korea, India and China. In Silicon Valley, 36.2 percent of software developers and 29.6 percent of computer engineers are Asian Americans. And states like New Mexico, California and Texas, which count large portions of their populations as Hispanic or Latino, would grind to a halt without the labor of those communities.

Korea currently faces a bleak population cliff. Its working-age population is decreasing after peaking at 37.6 million in 2022, and its total fertility rate fell to 0.78 that year. The nation’s population is also declining after peaking at 51.8 million in 2020. If this pace continues, Korea’s population will plunge to the 20 million range. The time has come for the government devise effective strategies to lift the pitiful birthrate.

What attracts my attention is an interesting analysis by Hyuncheol Bryant Kim, a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and an expert in labor and public economics. According to Kim, the rate of female college graduates participating in Hong Kong’s labor market surged by 25 percent on average after the city had introduced the system to use foreign domestic helpers since 1974. In 2022, there were 340,000 foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong and 270,000 in Singapore. Some 100 Filipina domestic helpers will arrive in Seoul in March as a pilot program. If that program gains momentum, we might expect our pitiful birthrate to rebound.

Certainly more important than brining in “simple labor” is attracting excellent foreign talent. The government must devise policies to draw workers systematically beyond the level of private universities’ efforts on their own in response to the government’s policy to curb college tuition increases. If these excellent students settle in Korea as a high-caliber workforce, it will surely helps our country.

Nearly one million foreign students are studying in America, and 350,000 are doing so in Japan. About 160,000 foreign students are currently studying in Korea, and the government wants to increase that number to 300,000 by 2027. But quality matters more than numbers. The government can get a tip from the Japanese government, which built a village for international college research and exchange on Odaiba, an artificial island in Tokyo Bay, to draw top foreign students and researchers. Japan also established housing facilities for foreign students and researchers in the Tokyo International Exchange Center.

Labor migration will accelerate in the future. Korea’s successful elevation to the level of an advanced country depends on how effectively it can build a system to acquire excellent manpower. The country must embrace diversity and multi-culturalism beyond traditional boundaries. As the history of the empire shows, national competitiveness depends on the power of embrace.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.