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Stephanie K. Kim, "Constructing Student Mobility: How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul" (MIT Press, 2023)
00:53:07
An interview with Stephanie K. Kim
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Leslie Hickman
Hello everyone and welcome back to to the New Books Network or New Books in Korean Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Leslie Hickman, one of the channel's hosts. Today we'll be talking to Dr. Stephanie Kim about her book Constructing Student How Universities Recruit Students and Shape Pathways between Berkeley and Seoul. The book was published by MIT Press in April of this year and received the award for Best Book from the Council on International Higher Education of the association for the Study of higher education. Dr. Kim is Associate professor of the Practice and Faculty Director of the Master's in Higher Education Administration in the School of Continuing Studies at Georgetown University. She's also an affiliated faculty member with the Asian Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service. Constructing Student Mobility is her first book. Okay, I wonder if you could begin the interview by telling us a bit more about your background and how you came to write this book. Also, thank you for joining us today.
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Well, thank you so much for having me. I came to this book through, I guess my long history in working in various higher education institutions. It was a 10 year process. I started this process as a doctoral student when I was at ucla, when I was a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea and I was affiliated with Yonsei University at the time and then of course working at UC Berkeley after my PhD and doing a research project there. So it really is, you know, a journey of basically studying, working within and just being immersed in the day to day life of these different campuses that I have profiled in the book.
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Leslie Hickman
Right. And I'm especially interested because I attended Yonsei University. So I have a lot of questions about your book. So, getting started, your book places universities at the center of student mobility flows. Can you describe the two university systems you highlighted in your book and why you focused your research there?
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah. So, you know, I mentioned earlier that I worked at UC Berkeley. So I was there for about four years right after my PhD. So I was there from 2014 to 2018. At the time, I was working as first a postdoc and then I moved into an administrative staff position. So on one level, why I focused My research on UC Berkeley was practical because I was in a 9 to 5 job where I had to be on campus every day. I couldn't necessarily leave for long periods to do field work elsewhere. So I'm a scholar of higher education. I started to really think about my immediate surroundings as a research site, and that's what I did. I looked at UC Berkeley for that reason. But, you know, I mean, beyond the practical reason, there's a really, you know, there's a really interesting motivation behind that. I mean, UC Berkeley, of course, is part of the California higher education system, which is the biggest higher ed system in the us. It's also host to the largest number of international students. And especially at that time I was there, there are all these tensions around who gets in and why into UC Berkeley. And. And there's this really strong discour. International students were supposedly taking seats from California students. And so I was very interested in understanding the international student experience at a campus, UC Berkeley, that experienced this very rapid influx of international students, but also this increasing bubbling tension around their very presence and really extrapolating how and why those tensions came to be. Tensions of access, equity, racism, xenophob, and so forth. So that's why I focused on UC Berkeley, switching gears a bit, you know, to understand the American higher education system and the international students experience within it. As a comparativist, I also wanted to look at something completely outside of the US context because in many ways I find that that's a very useful way to better understand what's actually happening in the us. And so I also looked at Yonsei University, where I affiliated for a year in South Korea as a Fulbright Fellow. And I focused on this university for a few different reasons. It's considered the most global university in South Korea in large part because it's launched an international college, the Underwood International College. And you mentioned you studied at Yonsei University. So happy to dive into this Goal a bit more. And so Yonsei started this international college, presumably to recruit more international students. And it was a really interesting dynamic because South Korea historically has been a major sending country of international students. But this endeavor tried to do something a bit different by bringing in international students to Yonsei. So I was really interested in understanding what it means to be the most global university in South Korea, especially in a context that often sees its domestic students leave for other countries, particularly the United States. On that note, how I even connected these two very different universities, UC Berkeley and Yonsei, is through the lens of Korean students. Korean students pursue study abroad at these incredibly high rates, of course, for college, but also as early as high school and middle school, elementary school, and so forth. And at the college level, Korean students per capita actually go to the US Roughly at three times more so than students from China do, and roughly six times more students than students from India do. When you adjust for population, it's actually one of the largest contributors of international students to the US Higher education sector. And so that's why I thought it was really interesting to look to Korean students as almost an analytic category to think through these larger questions of how universities are navigating these challenging financial conditions by their student recruitment efforts. That's why I looked at a university in California, UC Berkeley, where there are large numbers of South Korean students, and also this university in South Korea, where, at least in that context, there are large numbers of Korean students who leave to study elsewhere.
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Leslie Hickman
All right, thank you. Yeah, I remember seeing a lot of students from, actually from California schools when I went to Yonsei, and they had an entire little area set up just for students from California schools. So I was really interested in that. But moving on to my next question. International students make up a large percentage of many US University student bodies, but this wasn't always the case. Can you explain how and why international student population increased at California schools in particular?
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah, happy to do so. So, you know, there. It wasn't always the case that there were lots of international students, at least at the undergraduate level, in California colleges and universities, but there were still a significant number at the graduate level. And this would be pre. Great recess. So Pre, you know, 2007, 8, 9. Before those years, you actually do see international students, but primarily at the graduate student level, mostly as doctoral students in STEM fields, because at that time, international students were recruited as sources of talent to ultimately fill these openings in doctoral programs and ultimately become STEM researchers. But after the Great Recession, there was this massive budget, budget cut in The California higher education system, the UC system in particular, lost over $800 million of funding in a single year starting in 2009. And so with that extreme and very abrupt budget cut, the UC system started to turn to international students, not necessarily as sources of talent, but as sources of revenue. And so it started to focus on recruiting undergraduate students who are mostly full fee paying students, as opposed to graduate students. And so that's why you see this rapid increase of international Undergraduate students after 2009 in the California higher education system, as well as an overall growth in international students in general. So, I mean, just to give an example, I was actually studying for my PhD during those years. I entered UCLA as a doctoral student in 2009, the year of the budget cuts. Great, great timing on my part, I guess. And the proportion of international students at UCLA amongst the incoming freshman class in 2009 was only 3%. And it's roughly stayed that way even prior to that, but it rapidly increased after that. And so by 2012, just a few years after, 3% actually jumped to 18%. So that's just to give you an example of how fast things changed in those years.
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Leslie Hickman
Wow. How many students are there around now, do you think? Or the.
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Of the proportion of. Yeah, international students. Yeah, it's a tricky question to answer because at least as of about six or so years ago, the UC system actually implemented a strict cap on how many non California students can be enrolled at the undergraduate level. And so a campus like UCLA or UC Berkeley, I believe they're currently capped at leave at 18%, if I'm not mistaken. Or it might be slightly different, and each campus has a slightly different cap. So. And a lot of these caps were implemented in response to this public backlash against international students supposedly taking seats away from California students.
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Leslie Hickman
Wow. Okay, so my next question is, South Korean universities have gone through multiple reforms to adjust to a shrinking student pool. So these are about South Korean schools and institutional needs. What are some of these changes and why did they occur?
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, South Korea has historically been a sending country of international students, but for about the last decade or two, at least at the government level, there has been this push to also recruit incoming international students. And this is really to offset the shrinking pool of domestic students. I mean, there's, it's no secret, there's birth dearth in South Korea, lowest fertility rate in the world, so there are just fewer young people. And that really affects enrollment of South Korean universities. So Beginning in the mid-2000s, the South Korean government established a Number of different policies that would ultimately attract international students. So some of these policies were things that focused on scholarships, providing scholarships to international students. Others were focused on reforming the curriculum of South Korean universities so that a large portion of classes can be offered in English. Some of these policies were geared towards attracting foreign faculty members, because when you have a large presence of foreign international faculty members, that increases a university's global ranking, and by increasing your standing in the global rankings, that looks more attractive to international students and therefore attract them. And really, all of it had the underlying rationale of allowing universities to recruit as many international students as they could. And in fact, even the admissions policies were relaxed a bit. So, typically, universities are given a very strict quota and how many domestic students they're allowed to enroll every year in South Korea, but international students can fall outside of that quota. So universities really had an incentive to recruit as many international students as they wanted. An interesting flip side to all of this is that while these policies worked, essentially, I mean, we did see an increase in international students in South Korea, it also had a dual purpose of retaining domestic students who might have otherwise studied abroad. So when you take these campus environments, turn a large portion of their courses into English instruction, you know, recruit international students from overseas, etc. Whether intentional or not, they became very attractive alternatives to studying abroad for domestic students who might have gone abroad elsewhere like the United States. And so, in many ways, that's what they also did, was retain domestic students who might have gone overseas.
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Leslie Hickman
All right, so continue discussion about domestic students who did go overseas. You say in the chapter the contradictions of choice, you can test the assumption that international students are wealthy and carefree globetrotters. So what are the major factors you found through your research that influence where Korean students eventually attend university, besides just being affluent and. Yeah, sure.
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah. So, you know, throughout my research, I interviewed a large range of college students from South Korea, and these were students who were either studying abroad in California or who decided to stay at home in South Korea. And they were very different in terms of where they were from, what they were majoring in, what, you know, their class backgrounds and socioeconomic status, their previous K12 educational histories. But despite all those differences, they. They shared this one commonality. And the commonality was that their choice to study abroad or. Or not was not necessarily a proactive choice, because when you choose to do something, it means that you have viable alternatives to do otherwise. But for a lot of these students, you know, whether they went abroad or stayed at home, it was a little unclear whether they actually had these viable alternatives. And instead they were making these very strategic calculations out of very particular life circumstances. And they didn't necessarily have this large range of choices when they did choose to study abroad. And oftentimes their choice to study abroad really wasn't a choice at all. Because if they wanted to pursue a college education that would give them a reasonable chance at middle class status, then study abroad was ultimately their only choice for that. So in this particular chapter, this was the Contradictions of Choice, which is chapter four of the book. I go into a number of different examples of students, and these students represent both typical cases of many of the students whom I met, as well as more extreme examples to showcase this particular point. So I just wanted to highlight two examples that I highlighted in the book. One of them is a student named Jihoon. So Jihoon is a South Korean student. He's from a middle class family. His parents are both professionals with advanced degrees. He had a lot of advantages growing up. His parents were very invested in his education when he was young, when he was in elementary school, he actually pursued two years of early study abroad in upstate New York. So he had moved there with his mother, attended elementary school there, and then returned to South Korea after two years. When he returned to South Korea, though, he actually couldn't keep up with the more rigid school system. And so he started to fall behind in school. And when I talked to Jihoon about this, he described how once you fall behind, you kind of just get left behind by the teachers, and it's really hard to catch up once that process starts. And that's what happened. He fell behind. He was this lackluster student in high school. His grades were not that great and so forth. And when he graduated high school in South Korea, he didn't get into the universities that he wanted to go to in South Korea. So what ended up happening was that his mother arranged a visiting scholar appointment at UC Berkeley, and she brought her son Jihoon with her when she came. And then Jihoon enrolled at a local community college that was about 30 minutes away. And actually that's how I met both of them. So I met Jihoon's mother first because she was a visiting scholar in the same department where I was working as a staff member. And so once Jihoon started community college, he caught good grades. He started finding a renewed passion for school. Ultimately, after two years, he transferred to a UC school and thrived there and graduated there and so forth. And so when you look at a case like Jihoon in many ways, I see study abroad as this form of redemption. He was pushed out of these very rigid South Korean educational tracks that don't allow much room for deviation. And he found this second chance in California where he was able to thrive and found academic success. And I highlight him in the book because he's kind of a typical case. I mean, he did have many advantages and was from a comfortably middle or upper middle class background. But nonetheless, he and many of the other students whom I met didn't necessarily have this unlimited array of choices and instead studying abroad was really this calculated choice choice because they were pushed out of other choices, including staying at home. You know, switching gears a bit. I'll also mention a different example, and this is a more anomaly case, but I think it also really brings the point home. So I also met another student named Tae Ho and he was studying in California. He was a college student at UC Berkeley. He was a first generation college student, meaning both his parents didn't graduate from college. He was born and raised in Seoul. He attended public high schools and public schools in general. He didn't necessarily score very high on the Suneh, the Korean national entrance exam. And so his low score prevented him from getting into the universities that he wanted to go to in South Korea. And so. Right. So he actually didn't go to university right away. He instead started his compulsory military service. And while he's stepped, while he's serving in the military, he had a different group of military friends and they told him about study abroad opportunities in America. And prior to this, he knew very little about navigating this. I mean, certainly his parents knew very little and he himself didn't know very much either. And so he learned about the community college pathways into four year universities. And so once he was discharged charge from the military, he decided to enroll at a community college. At that time, though, he told me that his English language skills weren't that great to take college level coursework. You know, unlike Jihoon, for example, he never studied abroad at an early age. He didn't necessarily have private English tutors and all of that. So he actually enrolled at a private language school just outside of Los Angeles for a couple of years. Once his English fluency got to a point where he could enroll at college, that's when he went to Santa Monica College, which is a community college in Southern California, and then eventually transferred to UC Berkeley. So by the time he graduated, he was, you know, a little bit older. He was almost 30. He was, you know, older than his peers. And at that time, he was. That's when I met him, and he was preparing to apply to a PhD program in chemistry somewhere in the United States. So, I mean, for someone like Tae Ho, really, I see study abroad as a way of pursuing this promising educational opportunity that he didn't necessarily have in South Korea. And again, similar to Jihoon, but to a different degree. The choice to study abroad really was his only choice if he wanted to find academic success. But I think both these examples really puncture the stereotype of those rich international students as these wealthy globetrotters, because, you know, oftentimes that's a stereotype that people hold who work in colleges and universities and why colleges have gone to great lengths to recruit international students because they're assumed to bring profit and prestige.
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Leslie Hickman
I remember when I was an undergrad as well, those stereotypes floated around. I would hear them because I also worked with international students. So you would hear domestic students comment on, like, oh, you know, like, it costs so much more for them to be here, and so they're probably really rich, something along those lines. But I think it can certainly degrade the students. And maybe that's a too strong word, but it sort of makes the students seem like they're not. That they didn't work as hard to be here. They're just playing around, which I also felt when I was an international student myself. So, yeah, I'm very thankful that you kind of punctured, as you said, like, that assumption that it's not just like, there are lots of factors that go into where people end up going to school, whether abroad or at home. So, yeah, thank you for your answer. And yeah, absolutely. Oh, go ahead.
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Oh, no, I was just going to say absolutely. And I think for, you know, anyone who's worked in a higher education setting who's invested in the educational success of students, I mean, oftentimes you have to look to their actual experiences to best serve them, rather than relying on these tropes that we're often faced with.
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Leslie Hickman
Right, Good point. All right, so moving on to my next question. Can you describe the global student supply chain that you mentioned in your book and the role recruitment agency agents play in the student supply chain between specifically UC Berkeley and Seoul?
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah, absolutely. So I. I'm really glad you asked this question because it really gets to the most experimental chapter in the book and the one I'm most excited to have put out there in the world. So, yeah, so let me back up a little bit. So when I was doing a lot of the background research for this book, I realized that a lot of the higher education scholarship often focused on government policies that would encourage international students to stay or go or whatever, AKA the macro level, or on the experiences of individual students and why they would choose to study abroad in one place or another. So, AKA the micro level. Occasionally some of the literature would focus on what happened within the university, so the meso level, and that's actually where the focus of my book primarily lies. But I also realized that there are these multitude of actors that constitute this much larger industry of global higher education, and they don't neatly sit within our macro mezzo and micro analyses. And so at the center of this much larger global higher education industry, you have, as you mentioned, education agents. They're also known many other names. So education consultants, study abroad consultants, et cetera, they often work for these for profits study abroad student recruitment agencies. In South Korea, they're commonly known as yuhakwon. Of course they're profit driven. They provide services to the students, so they help them with their applications, they provide admissions advice, they do test preparation. They also provide services to colleges and universities. So for example, they will often set up contracts with specific schools where they will get a percentage of first year tuition, typically around 10 or 15% for each student that they can enroll into that specific school based on their recruitment acumen. And they set up these multiple contracts and really there's no oversight. And that's why they get kind of a bad reputation, because they're profit driven. They're motivated by very different factors than what a student might be motivated by or even what a college necessarily would be motivated by. And there's no oversight around conflicts of interest. So I really take a deep dive into the work of education agents in the book. How they got started in the business, what motivates them, what their work looks like. And then I also fit it into this much larger structural analysis of all the other stakeholders who are connected to the agents. So of course, on one side you have the actual colleges and universities where they're directing students to, and that relationship actually is really complex because some schools do set up contracts. Other schools have explicit policies where they won't set up contracts for ethical reasons. You also have of college recruiters who are technically hired by the college that, that, that they recruit for, and their job is to manage a portfolio of agents. But these college recruiters can also juggle multiple affiliations with different colleges as well. And so they themselves act as these kind of profit driven, you know, profit driven players within this larger ecosystem at the Same time, on the sending side, you know, you have these high schools that send large numbers of South Korean students overseas to US colleges and universities. And oftentimes the people who work in these high schools, like the guidance counselors and you know, people who are responsible for students college application process, they often work in, in tandem with agents in a, because ultimately if a student goes to an elite or selective college university, it enhances the reputation of that high school. And then sitting on top of all of that, you have these professional organizations. So in the US you have organizations like nacgac, the national association of College Admissions Counselors, or in South Korea, yivcosa, the Korea Overseas Study Association. And these are like quasi regulatory bodies that try to set some kind of ethical boundaries and regulations, but ultimately they have no enforcement capability. So I also look at how they fit in with all of this going on and what role they play in all of this, including their relationship with embassies. And speaking of embassies, I also then show how all these different players fit in with these larger government organizations that do have legal authority over education agents. So federal agencies in the US like the State Department or the Commercial Service, Customs Border Protection, how all these different entities sit within this and their role in managing this larger ecosystem of, of the global higher education industry. And so all of these different entities, they form this, what I call the global student supply chain, which ultimately sorts students in one direction or another based on market demands. And the really fascinating thing about all of these different entities is that oftentimes they don't even have a formal affiliation with whatever university that they're sending students to, but they nonetheless are very much an important part of that university student recruitment efforts.
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Leslie Hickman
So if they are not, if they don't have like a formal agreement with that university, do they still get a cut? Or perhaps I misunderstood that part of like, how do they benefit from that?
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah, so I think a really good example would be, you know, the foreign language high schools, for example. So foreign language high schools in South Korea are well known as, as, you know, feeder schools into US colleges and universities. But they don't necessarily have a formal relationship with whatever college or university they're sending students to, unlike the agent, which does get a contract and an official, you know, cut or percentage of the first year tuition. But they nonetheless also work in tandem with agents, even in this kind of implicit way, because they are benefiting by enhancing the reputation of their school when these students get in.
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Leslie Hickman
All right, you asked the following questions in the last chapter, Lessons from a Turbulent decade? What are the consequences of international student recruitment practices on the students themselves? How are students understandings and sensibilities shaped by the very universities that brought them there in the first place? I wondered if you would discuss your thoughts about the answers to those questions.
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
So what I mean by that is that how universities go about recruiting international students profoundly shapes their student experience on campus. So when I look at UC Berkeley, for example, there's a strong economic rationale on why the university wants to recruit international students. And in fact, the former UC President Janet Napolitano would often say international students allow us to subsidize the tuition of California residents because the higher tuition that they pay allows us to, you know, increase our enrollment of California students. That was a common trope that she would use in speeches. And so, so this stereotype emerged all over, but particularly in the UC system that international students are ultimately valued for the dividends that they bring in. And because of that, there's this idea that there's a zero sum competition between international students and domestic students. But that idea that international of these rich international students supposedly taking away seats, that's also become internalized by the international students themselves. And that they have also adopted this idea that they are only valued in their very university for the tuition dollars that they bring in. And so how I saw that affect, for example, the Korean student community at UC Berkeley was that some Korean students would try to offset the stereotype on themselves by pointing to other groups of Korean students who they think are richer than. Oftentimes I would see Korean students call other Korean students those rich international students, even though they are technically all international students together. And they used very complex markers to distinguish who was a supposedly rich international student and who was not. And it was very much related to certain admissions policies that UC Berkeley would adopt on, you know, know, that's related to things like what percentage of international students were allowed to be admitted through this strict quota system that they adopted a number of years ago, or, you know, what percentage of international students came in through the community college transfer pipeline. And you saw these really complex intra ethnic tensions amongst the Korean students in particular, and the ways in which they found legitimacy within UC Berkeley. And I saw a very similar dynamic happen at Yonsei University, though for slightly different reasons. So at Yonsei University, there's also this rationale that international students are valued, yes, on one hand, for the economic dividends that they would bring in, but also because it would increase the prestige of the university, it would increase its ranking, its place in global university rankings. But as you know, in digging a little further, I talked earlier about how a lot of internationalization reforms didn't necessarily always bring in international students, but retained domestic students who might otherwise study abroad. And so really, at Yonsei University and specifically at Underwood International College, oftentimes we saw, or I saw Korean students who had international experiences, but were nonetheless South Korean citizens. And they actually made up the majority of the student body at this international college that was presumably for international students. And in fact, at the time I was there, about 3/4 of the students were South Korean citizens as opposed to international students. And so because the way Yonse had framed, you know, the, the reasons why they would bring in international students, because it would, you know, being international increase the prestige. This idea of foreignness within yanza became entangled with a student's educational history as opposed to their actual citizenship. Especially because the majority of these quote unquote international students were actually South Koreans, but who may have had extensive international experience before coming to Yonsei University. And so there was a stereotype that someone who had international experience was only valued for the tuition dollars that they brought in. And so then you see, within yonse, some Korean students assert their legitimacy by pointing out how Korean they are as opposed to how international they are. And again, the boundaries of what distinguish someone as a quote unquote native Korean versus a quote unquote internationalized Korean were very ambiguous. And so ultimately, all these understandings and sensibilities, they were ultimately shaped by the universities that brought students there in the first place and really affected how students understand their place within their own university.
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Leslie Hickman
Wow, thanks for your answer. And if I could add a bit of my own experience, which is sort of like the mirror of the students that you looked at, international students in Korea, there was a different sort of stereotype that is often felt where you're just kind of playing around, you like Korean pop culture, and so you're. You're going to school, but you're not serious about school. So I would feel this in myself as well and in some of my friends where we would try to distance ourselves from pop culture culture and really throw ourselves into academic study to show like, we're legitimate students, like we really want to be here and we're serious about our studies. So I thought I was thinking about that as I read the chapter. Yeah, the different stereotypes that follow different groups. That was really. That was really interesting to me.
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Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah, that's actually interesting. So when. When you were an international student at Yonsei, I mean, were. So was it like you were treated as a kind of visitor, so to speak, or I guess what was the motivation behind that?
- [41:37]
Leslie Hickman
It was, it's sort of like interactions with Korean students which were actually few and far between. We're like, why are you here, K Pop? It was sort of this tacked on to the end, or also somehow some professors might mention things like that, you know, a lot of you probably know about this sort of thing. So I would feel kind of defensive, like, oh, yeah, that's interesting. However, I'm also. I'm very serious about these studies. So it was. Yeah, it was just sort of like this feeling not just within the school, but in like, wider society, how, how you kind of feel as a foreigner. Sometimes, but I might just be putting my, my own experience or experience of people next to me, me on other people. But yeah, I thought there might be something to that. So I might, I might look into that later. Yeah. But moving on to my next question so that we can get through them all, what future do you see in store for the student supply chain linking South Korea, especially Yonsei and UC Berkeley, or South Korea and other overseas universities? Because I know from talking to South Korean students that there's also interest in, in universities outside the US especially like Canada or some places in Europe are very popular these days. So, like, what do you see about the future in store for those universities?
- [43:06]
Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah, that's a great question. That's a really hard question to answer. What my predictive future will look like. No, but I've been thinking about this a lot. Certainly there's a diversification in study abroad destinations amongst Korean students, as you mentioned. So increasingly, although it's changing more recently, but increasingly we have seen a growing number of South Korean students choose to study abroad in China over the United States. But there is one caveat. Most often these students are there for temporary one year or one semester exchanges or language study, whereas the degree seeking students still predominantly choose to study in the United States. So there is a bifurcation, even though we see a broader range of study abroad destinations for Korean students. But in thinking about the future, and especially our post Covid future, because that's where I've been really putting a lot of thought into this is what happens next. Because I wrote the bulk of the book during the pandemic and at the time I was thinking, oh no, everything's going to change after this. And I'm writing about the 2010s, but the 2020s are going to look so different. So a lot of that was in the back of my mind as I was writing it. And I've been thinking about even the work that I do at Georgetown University, where I am involved in a lot of applied work with student recruitment, at least for graduate degrees and whatnot. And I've been thinking about how we've been shifting much more to a virtual learning environment with the proliferation of online education. There used to be a much stronger stigma against online education, but I think with COVID a lot of that has dissipated. And with online education, it serves a very different student population. So oftentimes these are not 18 to 22 year olds, these are older adult learners. Oftentimes they work full time, oftentimes they have families. And so there's this idea that what was previously imagined of international students as young and mobile is not always the case, and that international students are now also being thought of as older and more settled. And so when I think about what kind of supply chain is emerging now, I'm seeing more effort around capturing this older, more settled student population as, as newly formed international student markets. So it's not just about creating novel pathways to draw in more international students. It's actually creating new student markets that didn't previously exist because they weren't previously recognized as such. So I think there's a shift in even thinking about who international students even are around the world.
- [46:12]
Leslie Hickman
All right, thank you for your answer. And, and my next question, it sort of goes off of some things I've already asked, but I want to know, like, what is your experience with the international students who do come to Yonsei University or Korean universities? Like, do you, have you also looked into that or have you mostly been focused on the Korean students?
- [46:36]
Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah, for sure. So certainly that came up in my research. I just didn't necessarily choose to focus on that student population for the book. But in general, typically international students who are studying in South Korea for the most part come from other parts of Asia, So mostly from China, increasingly from Vietnam, and then a handful of other Asian countries. But that's primarily for the degree seeking students. And then for those who are there for short term or language study, there's a much wider range of students who come from, from all over, so Asia, North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa and so forth. Certainly Yonsei in particular has put in a lot of effort to, you know, to make a welcoming environment for these students. So increasing its proportion of courses taught in English. I think now about a third of all courses at Yonsei University are taught in English, which is kind of wild when you think about it. It's a, you know, not, it's within a country that is not a native speaking, English speaking country. So, you know, that also links to a lot of government policies that I had mentioned earlier that really try to encourage international students to come. And I think even, you know, the government, the South Korean government just announced this new policy. It's called the 300k policy. And the idea is to bring in 300,000 international students to South Korea by a certain benchmark date. And then it's newly launched. It just was announced maybe a month or two ago. So I mean, I think it shows on one hand a national level interest in doing this and then also growing interest from overseas students in Seeing South Korea as an attractive study abroad destination, I was even thinking about, about here, where I am in the US amongst the top 10 most popular languages that college students study over the last five to 10 years, most of the languages have remained flat or declined in popularity, with one exception, and that is Korean. More students are learning Korean than ever before, and that's the only language that's actually growing in popularity, as the others are not. So I, I think it just shows the increasing popularity for, of Korean, for whatever reason, whether that's K pop or any, any other reason at all.
- [49:24]
Leslie Hickman
Thank you. So my last question is, what would, what do you hope that readers will take away from your book?
- [49:31]
Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah, I, I, I think there are two big takeaways that I would want readers to leave with, and the first is when. And the first is understanding just how flexible universities are in their reach and constitution. I mean, they have gone to great lengths to aggressively recruit international students in the case of Berkeley, or quote, unquote, international students in the case of Yonsei University. And they do this by creating these novel pathways that allow students to be internationally mobile in the first place. And so the flip side of that and the other takeaway that I hope readers will leave with is that there should be a reconsideration of who international students are, that they're not these rich globetrotters who have unlimited opportunities and are only valued for their tuition dollars. I mean, they are there because universities recruited them in the first place, and they have the same hopes and anxieties as any other student. And so, you know, if universities are indeed actively recruiting international students, whatever the reasons they may be, you know, I strongly believe that they also have a responsibility to best serve their needs. And a large part of that is paying close attention to the actual student experience on campus and what role that their student recruitment efforts have contributed to that very student experience.
- [51:09]
Leslie Hickman
Experience. Thank you for your answer. So we've been talking for about an hour, and so we won't take up too much more of your time, but we thank you. Thank you so much. Especially to give up some part of your evening to talk with us. And oh, also, if you're working on any projects right now or plan anything for the future, if you would briefly let us know about that and maybe we can, maybe in the future we can have another interview about that.
- [51:39]
Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah, yeah, actually, I am working on a new project. It's still really in the early stages, but it takes a little bit of a different turn than what I've been doing for the past decade. So I've moved away from looking at international students and looking actually at international funding. So I'm looking at how universities seek out foreign funding from overseas governments and how that affects the operational logics in what they do. And more specifically, how this very sort of anti Chinese sort of fear in the United States is affecting how money from Asia is being received or not, and how that affects how US Universities operate. So, again, very early stages, but but really excited to get this one off the ground.
- [52:37]
Leslie Hickman
Great. Yeah. I look forward to the work that you do in that area. But thanks again for joining us today, and I hope you have a lovely evening.
- [52:46]
Dr. Stephanie Kim
Yeah. Thanks so much. It was my pleasure to do this, and it was a lot of fun. Thanks so much, Leslie.
- [52:51]
Leslie Hickman
Good thing.