On 16th October, a forum for discussing how to improve the quality and the status of Korean national universities was held in the national assembly, attended by chaired by the CBNU president. The main attendees of the meeting were presidents of 10 flagship national universities and government officials, who shared the view that the present situation that primary national universities have remains many challenges.
  CBNU like other flagship national universities is an educational, socioeconomical, and cultural center in the state. CBNU is now achieving substantial accomplishments. CBNU will get 5.8 billion KRW for total 11 research teams via the 2013 BK plus program, which makes CBNU ranked in top-12 universities of Korea in terms of BK plus fund. Also, CBNU has recently sealed 4 billion KRW support via ACE project. Another good news is that CBNU received 'A' grade in evaluation of 11 major national universities with more than 10 thousands students, where CBNU is one of the only 2 universities with the 'A' grade and 1 billion KRW support. Numerous prestigious prizes have been awarded by CBNU faculties and students. Yet, CBNU still has a long way to go to be one of wold-class universities.
  One big challenge is the too much centralization and selectively focusing on just few universities. Although the Korean university ranks have been rapidly improving for the last 2 decades, most of the stories are only applied to a few leading universities such as SNU, KAIST, and POSTECH. All other flagship national universities except SNU are suffering in every aspect compared to SNU. Korean government's public expenditure for the higher education is about 22.3%, which is far below the OECD average 69.3%. Moreover, the government's support is too selective considering the overall Korean economy scale. For instance, in case of the recent BK 21 plus program, 43% of total budget has been awarded to top-5 universities. In brief, public spending for the higher education, far below the OECD standard, is streaming to only handful universities, which might definitely harms the national competitiveness and potential growth capability of Korea.
  World-class universities cannot be simply categorized by a single model but what is common is that they received the 'real' support. That simple. No support, no dreaming. Systematic investigation and benchmarking world-class universities might be needed but, again, no innovation is possible without the support even in the best university system. We expect to see lots of on-going healthy discussion about how to make the flagship national universities be world-class universities. We have seen many problems and drawbacks caused by short-sighted education policies so far. Sudden one-sided driving for innovation has been found to fail at the end. New policies should practically reflect the demand of national universities.