Do you know if there is any realtionship between to the two events?

YISS does not have a firm date and admits on a rolling bases based on an ad hoc basis. I believe it is legal, but is it really accomplishing the goals set for the school? Could someone easily abuse the system?

1) family meets minimum legal criteria and works for a foreign company
2) family meets minimum legal criteria

any foreigner not working for a foreign company is put in group 2).

YISS will not disclose ANY information, including any general statistics, to the public on the profile of people admitted under group 2.

Does this seem okay?

At the end of the school year, they ask current students whether or not they will be continuing next year. They ask us this question every year. Presumably (unless you’re a conspiracy theorist), this information is used to project how many openings will exist in the coming year’s classes. First, they re-enroll current students, then they enroll students who’ve applied for admission.

There are categories of “eligibility” established by law, which basically correspond to how “foreign” the child is — is one or both parents a foreign citizen, and so forth. Some Korean nationals are deemed eligible to enroll in a foreign school by virtue of having been resident overseas and educated in a foreign environment.

Presumably, within each category of admissions eligibility, precedence is established by date of application file completion. That means submission of the application, payment of fees, and receipt of past educational record, plus testing if required. Once that’s all done, the child’s file is complete.

Foreign kids who want to go to an English-speaking school have abundant opportunities — there are in fact dozens of schools in Seoul. It’s just that most of those schools have crummy facilities, which is thought to be a turnoff to foreign investors.

Whether YISS is doing everything properly or not in my opinion is not the main issue.

The issue is whether there is room for easy abuse. In my opinion there is. YISS discloses very little information on class composition and admissions criteria. They do not interview students until they are accepted and they admit students on an ad hoc rolling basis.

For example, I believe their web site indicates that they will start accepting applications in March. When is the deadline for submission of applications? When will they make a decision. It only states that they will make a decision in May. I think the web site also states that admissions are rolling. Does that mean that someone that submits an application on Monday may get admitted before someone that submitted an application on Tuesday. So it is possible that a korean national that submits on Monday gets admitted and an Expat working for a local company does not get admitted because of a one day differential.

Do the admissions criteria really accomplish the goals of the school? For example a Korean national with a child born oversea’s who speaks very little english applies to YISS. In order to get the child in the school the father appies for a job at a foreign company for which there are 10 other qualified applicants. The father gets the job and the child gets into YISS because the father is working at a foreign company. But if the father is working at a local company the child has very little chance of getting in.

Your quotes:

“because frog-marching them back to the local schools would pose a hardship to the students”

“So fuck those kids”

What about the foreigners kids who have to go to Korean schools? Don’t you think they will have even more hardships just coming to a new country let alone going to a non english speaking school?

I have spoken to many people about this issue and in general the response is we understand the problems, but there is not much that can be done. Most are just willing to accept things as they are and state “trust me they are operating within legal guidlines.” Well I would like to trust them but it would alleviate suspision if they could give out at least some general information.

Most people I talk to which includes people who have students at YISS do not believe admissions is be handled properly. Whether it is under the legal guidlines is another question, but most are suspicious and do not believe the main purposes of the school are being achieved.

YISS found that it had been carrying forward eight teenage students (all children of long-serving YISS staff of Korean nationality) who had enrolled at the school between 1992 and 2000 — during which time the Liberty Christian School (predecessor to International Christian School, which itself morphed into YISS) was not subject to regulation as an international school.

Those students had been studying outside the Korean educational system (although not overseas) for longer than the time necessary to be eligible for enrollment in an international school. In 2000, ICS (now YISS) made a determination based on a reasonable good-faith reading of the statute, and consultation with the Ministry of Education, to continue to serve those few legacy students because frog-marching them back to the local schools would pose a hardship to the students.

The school correctly offers first priority to current students reenrolling for its next school year. After those kids are all accommodated, then new admits are made in compliance with the priorities established by relevant law and regulations.

The use of the word “unqualified” to describe this handful of kids is unfair and inflammatory. YISS does not “sell” admissions to children of chaebol families, as the conspiracy set would have us believe. Nobody other than these eight scapegoated kids, who all speak English and have been in an international-school environment their whole lives, has “jumped the queue” (and, to be fair, they did so in the 1990s).

This will make you happy, though, xyz (and, I presume, Itinerant Physicist) — those kids’ parents withdrew them from school this year, mortified that they had caused this flap. So fuck those kids.

It is frustrating that people know there is a problem, but nobody with any power is willing to do anything about it.

I have been contacting other offices to try to rectify the problem, but people seem to be willing to accept the situation.