The Program for Industrial needs-Matched Education (PRIME Project) is a project that is going to be implemented by the current Ministry of Education of Korea (MOE) starting in 2017. The project aims to fulfill the industrial needs as the demand for science, IT and engineering, which has been increasing. This means that the MOE is restructuring universities’ standards such as the entrance quota, budgets and departments for new engineering jobs. These changes will be prevailed in the future. It will also subsidize universities which are designated for the PRIME Project with around 170 million dollars over three years.

That subsidy is quite important to universities; however, there are severe conflicts in the processing of the project between the universities and students. The students argue the project is going to interfere with the nature of academic study, causing universities to fit the demands requested by the government. The universities dissemble many departments and establish a new one in the short term to be chosen as a recipient of the PRIME Project’s funding.

The students attending these schools suffer adversities due to such unilateral actions. The departments they create newly due to the project may disappear suddenly before the students who are in those departments graduate. In addition, their curriculum is not structured at all since those are usually made up in a short period. Moreover, the evaluation indicators of universities suggested by the MOE stipulate that a university does not need to consider students’ needs when it makes decisions.

The MOE officially announced that the PRIME Project will be ‘for students,’ but in reality, the students suffer damages of negative effects of the project, and their opinions are disregarded. If the PRIME Project is really ‘for the students,’ it should be rolled out over a longer period of time, preparing some countermeasures and being implemented in a way that deeply considers students’ needs.

By Jang Eun-ae
Editor-in-Chief