Ban Ki Moon may have landed the UN’s top spot, but most of Korea’s homegrown aspirants to IR careers can’t even get their foot in the door at the Asian Development Bank. This from a recent report on the sorry state of the country’s nine graduate programs in international affairs, assessed one decade after their founding:
According to the report, only 63 graduates or two percent of those who graduated from the nine schools have made it into international organizations, including the UNDP and ADB. Also, only 459 or 14.5 percent of the graduates have joined foreign companies, which are bigger employers than international organizations.
[Italics mine.]
That’s right, folks, 2 percent. SNU’s performance has been particularly pathetic:
Although it received the fourth largest sum of assistance of 9.9 billion won for five years, Seoul National University has sent only three of its graduates to international organizations, ranking sixth among the nine schools.
Having concluded that their degree isn’t worth much more than the hanji it’s probably not even printed on, many students simply drop out. Of those who finish the degree, according to this report, 34.2 percent end up at Korean companies with jobs they could have gotten with a standard BA. (For comparison, check out these employment stats for GW’s Elliott School, a solid–but not exactly elite–institution whose graduates do quite well in the IR job market).
In fairness, a decade isn’t a whole lot of time for a program to establish its international credibility. But reform looks less likely than some good old-fashioned spin:
Such schools have recently changed their original goal of fostering Korean experts of international affairs, and kept their doors wide open to students from developing countries, including China, Vietnam and India…Professors of such graduate schools stress that the function of their schools is changing into fostering pro-Koreans or those who know Korea in developing countries.
Read: Foreign currency welcome!
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7 Comments
I did a little checking once - though not too extensive. I googled around for some think-tank and similar orgs related to Asia and/or Korea, and at least from the staff they had info on, it seemed they hired people from only a handful of elite US schools or former high ranking military people (and usually those guys had a degree from one of the upper crust DC area universities or one of the Ivy League schools).
Maybe it is different further from the top, but I also got the feeling these orgs only had a cream-of-the-crop top and then fillers for the mundane tasks who would rotate in and out fairly regularly…
Don’t know, just my impression with a quick look…
And if you looked at the Korea-related facaulty as resources in programs, U of Hawaii and U of Washington seemed to have many more than Harvard, Columbia, or Berkeley….
I can only remember the earlier posting on Korea University’s step backwards into mediocrity — at the expense of future generations of Koreans — and the lack of vision at the institutional level, if not governmental level, in Korea.
A young Korean national, newly graduated with a degree in International Relations, could check out US Army recruiting! That’s one way to get some practical on-the-ground “international” experience, while getting fairly well paid; after a 4 year “hitch”, he’d have absolute working proficiency in English — surely something that would serve to enhance his future employability in the field of IR.
Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that most graduates don’t want to get their hands dirty working for an organization in the field. They think that because they went to SNU they should be shot to the middle or top of the ladder immediately. I am sure if you looked at the resumes of those who attended upper crust schools in the States, you’d find a lot of people who had done a couple of years in Africa, Central America, etc. Of course there are institutional problems, but isn’t the fundamental problem the idea that if you attend a SKY school, you are afforded the prestige and honour of having attended a SKY school?
Is is past time to pull the plug on the GSISs, or at least most of them. Students take graduate degrees because it increases their job prospects, pure and simple. So - let’s see: Yonsei, KDI, Sungkyunkwan and Sejong Universities all offer MBA degrees in English, SNU is building one now, and there’s also the Helsinki school of economics operating around Iwha-dae. Most of the chaebol have their own in-house MBA programs, too. The course offerings in an MBA are virtually identical to GSIS requirements. Where are you going to find the teaching talent to offer all those classes - in English - and still offer quality education? The schools will of course take the government money that backs the GSIS, but they I’ve no doubt that they allocate their teaching talent more heavily toward the international MBA programs, where their graduate placement stats will be better, and where demand from the vitally important international students is higher.
Maybe it is the case that these graduates eventually get there but not through the graduate program.
I hear that with the current job problems in Korea many experienced workers are snapping up places on what should be new graduate only programs.
Not to get on these people’s cases, but…..if these Korean students knew the odds of landing a nice IR job were gonna be so much against them, why get a Master’s? I know I would figure out the chances of my getting a job in a certain specialty if I were going to devote two years and tons of money for a Master’s degree.
BTW, I know plenty of Master’s in International Relations graduates here in DC. Not that many landed jobs in their field unless they passed the civil service exam and got into State Dept. or something like that (which does NOT require OR even recommend that you have a Master’s in IR as I have plenty of friends in the State Dept. who have law degrees and MBAs).
We recently hired a few folk with Master’s in IR where I work to handle some of our LIMITED international activities. But how do I say this…….their basic skills at using programs like Excel and Powerpoint suck. We would have been better off hiring more MBAs. I think that WILL be the trend now with MANY organizations. As a result, I guess even MORE IR grads are gonna have a harder time here in the US.
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[...] is already well underway; this new policy will be the final nail in the coffin. And look at the quality of international graduate programs, which already conduct all their courses in English. Only 2% of them actually have entered [...]