Scapegoating international students misses the real problems

In Seoul, a provocative banner recently declared: “High-Scoring Koreans Miss Out on Med School, Lower-Scoring Chinese Students Get in with Scholarships”. This banner encapsulates not only xenophobic sentiment but also long-simmering discontent with how higher education is administered and perceived in South Korea.

The banner is clearly politically motivated, having emerged amidst societal turbulence primarily sparked by last year’s declaration of martial law. As such, its message may not reflect a broader public consensus, but rather a calculated attempt to stoke nationalist sentiment during a politically sensitive moment.

However, far from being an isolated provocation, the banner’s message taps into core anxieties within South Korean society, ranging from demographic shifts and ‘educational fever’ to policy volatility and cultural insecurity.

South Korea’s multicultural turn

Until recently, South Korea prided itself on its ethnic homogeneity. Today, it is undergoing a quiet demographic revolution. Foreign nationals now constitute over 5% of the population and the number of international students surpassed 200,000 in 2024.

Top source countries, including China, Vietnam and Uzbekistan, reflect the changing face of Korean campuses. What was once a rarity two decades ago has become a daily reality in classrooms, dormitories and neighbourhoods.

This shift is partly strategic. With the world’s lowest birthrate and a rapidly shrinking youth population, the Korean government has encouraged universities to recruit international students to fill empty seats. Many regional universities now rely on this influx for their very survival.

Initiatives such as the ‘Study Korea 300K Project’ aim to attract 300,000 international students by 2027. In regional areas, even major metropolitan cities, students from Central and Southeast Asia are no longer anomalies, but necessities.

Yet this multicultural transformation has not occurred without friction. Public unease lingers. In this climate, the banner’s claim that “Chinese students with low scores receive scholarships” may resonate with segments of the population predisposed to narratives of unfairness.

Rather than seeing international students as collegial members of an increasingly cross-cultural society and as partial solutions to pressing demographic challenges, critics often portray them as outsiders encroaching on limited opportunities. The broader multicultural shift has thus exposed deep-seated insecurities about national identity, equity and social cohesion.

Medical school fever

The banner also targets a particularly sensitive nerve in South Korean society: the cultural obsession with elite education and medical school admissions. Few professions are as revered or as strongly associated with upward mobility as medicine. Consequently, entry into medical programmes has become intensely competitive, especially in recent years.

Students frequently begin preparing as early as elementary school and may retake the College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) multiple times. A majority of those admitted to medical schools are repeat test-takers, underlining the high-stakes, high-pressure nature of the process.

Within this crucible, the figure of the ‘undeserving foreigner’ emerges. Social media has amplified rumours suggesting that international students, through special admissions tracks or lenient criteria, bypass the gruelling competition faced by Korean applicants. Though such claims are largely unfounded, they gain traction precisely because they offer a convenient scapegoat within an opaque and unforgiving system.

The banner thus draws its rhetorical power from the convergence of two potent undercurrents: educational desperation and nationalist resentment. It reflects a society that prizes academic achievement yet increasingly doubts whether its educational system fairly rewards it.

The true tragedy is not the existence of such a banner, but that political operatives have found such messages to be effective in persuading a disillusioned public.

Policy instability and erosion of trust

Beneath these cultural anxieties lies a deeper governance issue: the volatility and inconsistency of South Korea’s higher education policies. Each new administration tends to introduce sweeping reforms that often reverse or undermine those of its predecessors.

The CSAT is alternately emphasised and de-emphasised; elite high schools are abolished and then reinstated; admissions criteria shift without warning. For students and families, the education system has become a disorienting maze with constantly changing rules.

Nowhere is this instability more evident than in the ongoing controversy over medical school quotas. In 2023, the Yoon administration abruptly proposed an annual increase of 2,000 medical school seats beginning in 2025, without engaging in meaningful consensus-building or adhering to an evidence-based policy-making process.

The response was swift: thousands of medical trainees protested, culminating in mass walkouts, significant disruption to the national healthcare system and, more recently, a proposal to row back parts of the policy.

Such back-and-forth policy-making has severely eroded public trust. A familiar pattern emerges: top-down decisions provoke backlash, leading to partial reversals that satisfy no one. The public grows weary, perceiving an education system governed less by long-term strategy than by short-term political expediency.

Internationalisation policy is similarly inconsistent. While South Korea publicly aspires to attract more international students, its implementation of that aspiration has been erratic. Some universities enrol large numbers of foreign students without providing adequate academic or community support, resulting in high attrition rates and mutual resentment.

This inconsistency breeds suspicion: local students and families feel that international students are unduly advantaged and sometimes report experiences of discrimination and neglect. Ironically, many international students leave Korea due to poor treatment despite public narratives that portray them as coddled. It appears that the perception gap is vast, and widening.

Beyond the banner

The crude message of the banner reveals more than mere xenophobia; it exposes a profound disillusionment with a system perceived as opaque, unstable and unjust. It reflects the anxiety of Korean youth and their families, who feel ensnared in a relentless competition only to find that the rules keep shifting.

It exploits resentment towards international students, particularly Chinese students who have massively contributed to higher education enrolment, portraying them as symbolic representations of an unequal system. More worryingly, opportunistic politicians weaponise such narratives to sabotage social trust and derail efforts at genuine integration.

Blaming outsiders or ill-intended politicians, however, is not a viable solution. South Korea’s real challenge is structural: it must find a way to balance internationalisation with fairness, prestige with access and growth with global citizenship. Equally essential is the cultivation of honest and inclusive public discourse, one that dispels harmful myths before they metastasise into broader hostilities.

In the end, hanging a banner is easy. Confronting the systemic conditions that give such a banner its persuasive power is far more difficult.

South Korea’s multicultural future is not optional, it has already arrived. The nation’s educational institutions must evolve accordingly, not through scapegoating, but through building equity, accountability and trust. Only then can both local and international populations perceive the ladder of opportunity not as rigged, but as genuinely within their reach.

Kyuseok Kim is a PhD candidate at Korea University and centre director of IES Abroad Seoul. E-mail: ks.kyuseok.kim@gmail.com.

This article is a commentary. Commentary articles are the opinion of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of University World News.