A student of Cheongju University was taking a part-time job for tuition

 The rate of twenty-somethings, especially university students, among credit defaulters has highly increased in Korea. According to the Ministry of Educational Science and Technology, the number of university students who are credit defaulters was about 25,000 in 2010. It was more than six times bigger than the 3,800 defaulters of 2007. 

 This situation occurred due to many factors like the high interest rates of the loans and the hardships of finding jobs, and the main factor was college tuition. According to the research of the OECD, the college tuitions of Korea were the second highest in the world after the U.S.A.  

 The people who have to bear the burden of the tuition are students. Students who are not able to pay the tuition for themselves take out a loan from the banks, and they have to pay back the burdensome principals and interest every month after graduating from the university because of the large amount of money that they borrowed. If students cannot pay back their debt, they become credit defaulters.

 Many students take part time jobs to pay for tuition, but it is hard to pay all of the tuition because tuition has increased continuously. In the case of Cheongju University, one student complained about the situation where students couldn't study due to a lack of money, saying he would take next semester off to earn money for tuition.

 Some students choose extreme actions such as committing suicide because they don't have the ability to pay for tuition. Actually, in the case of one university in Jeonbuk, one student hung himself at the university building with a note saying that he chose suicide due to poverty.  

 The government has not found an obvious solution yet in this situation. The government established the Korea Student Aid Foundation, which is a semi-government institute to lend money to the students at low interest rates. However, it has not produced an outstanding outcome yet. Many students criticized it, saying, "What we wanted was a reduction of tuition, not a loan service."

 Students have been demonstrating against the government and universities in the streets. In Sungkyunkwan University, graduate students have been holding a relay of one-man protests against the increase of tuition for about 400 hours, and students also have been protesting in front of Cheongwadae demanding the government to execute the pledge that they would cut tuition by half.

By Kim Seung-hwan

sh31@cbnu.ac.kr