Doctoral Education in South Korea: On the Way Toward Becoming an Independent Research Hub

Abstract

Policymakers and academic researchers have not paid much attention to doctoral education until recently in Korea because doctoral education was not well established prior to the mid-1990s until the Korean government launched the Brain Korea 21 project. Since then, doctoral education has become a major policy effort to enhance national competiveness through nurturing well-trained researchers in the knowledge society. However, before the mid-1990s and even at present, much of the training for the next generation of scholars has relied on foreign systems—mostly US universities. For example, about 40% of the professors at Korean universities earned their doctoral degrees from abroad. In addition, foreign doctorates are welcomed and highly regarded by Korean academia. However, these trends are changing with the government policy and institutional endeavors to upgrade domestic doctoral education programs. This chapter overviews the development of Korean doctoral education systems from a historical perspective and current status of doctoral education programs in terms of enrollment growth and doctoral degree grantees by fields and universities. In addition, using survey data this study introduces doctoral students’ satisfaction with their doctoral programs, their self-evaluated competency, and their job prospects in Korean major research university. Finally, the authors discuss some challenges confronting Korean doctoral education systems.