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ing and mental-health first-aiders. Moreover, boarding-
school syndrome is posited rather than proved by hard data.
But critics say this is partly because no one has both-
ered to gather the information. Snobbery and a national
obsession with old stone mean that it is still a struggle to
see people in Palladian mansions as deprived. Webb thinks
he and his fellow-boarders weren’t privileged. “If anything,
the opposite… they should’ve been at home, having tea with
mum and dad.” To send him away was, he says, “a crime”.
The cruelty of this system was deliberate, not accidental.
Victorian Britons, believing that the battle of Waterloo had
been won on the playing-fields of Eton, set about creating
new fields and new Etons in order to mass-produce the up-
per-middle classes. Children, removed from the “softening”
influence of their mothers, were put in uniform clothes, in
uniform beds, in uniform dorms, where they spoke uniform Yonsei University: demographic decline threat
vocabulary (“Topping! Pax! Sneak!”) with an increasingly
uniform accent: the clipped tones of Received Pronuncia- before they face insolvency, it will have no choice but to
tion (RP) are thought to have emerged as part of this school- maintain its strict, numbers-based system for shuttering
led standardisation. the institutions. “The government could pay them a cer-
The empire might have been happy with the results, its tain amount of money to shut down. Otherwise, the only
children less so. Churchill wrote of a “life of anxiety” at his way is going down the draconian… quota route, but it will
prep school; C.S. Lewis called his first school “Belsen”. One then create major inequalities as Seoul schools will see a
of the best arguments in favour of boarding schools is the surge of students, and the countryside could become ghost
quality of the prose attacking them; one of the best argu- towns,” he says.
ments against is its content. After that beating, Orwell felt Stuart Gietel-Basten, professor of social science and pub-
that “life was more terrible, and I was more wicked, than I lic policy at Khalifa University of Science and Technology
had imagined.” and an expert in Asian demography, agrees that the moves
would cause a redistribution of students countrywide. “It
S. KOREA is pretty inevitable that we (will) see the rise and fall of the
University closures epidemic sector,” he says, noting that “place” will be a large factor in
which universities remain standing.
THE LOOMING CLOSURE OF DOZENS OF in- Federally and regionally-funded institutions would gen-
solvent universities in South Korea will change the erally fare better than their non-subsidised counterparts, he
distribution of students across the country, poten- predicts. “There will be a big difference between the private
tially furthering inequalities between its regions and capital and public ones. The market will dictate how long the strug-
city, say scholars. Korea’s rapid demographic decline has gling private ones will last.”
already resulted in university closures countrywide — and While most scholars Times Higher Education ap-
it is expected to get far worse. proached were reluctant to say that struggling institutions
This year, the ministry of education identified 84 finan- should throw in the towel early, Philip Altbach, research
cially insolvent institutions that need to close. According to professor and distinguished fellow at the Center for Inter-
recent figures compiled by the Korean Council for Univer- national Higher Education, Boston College, says it seems
sity Education (KCUE), the representative association of like the best course of action in a difficult situation. “‘As-
four-year universities, in 2040, there will be approximately sisted suicide’ might well be the best solution for surplus
280,000 students eligible to enter university — 39 percent private universities — and authorities need to provide re-
down from 460,000 in 2020. alistic plans,” he says.
Currently, universities are required by law to shut if a How Korea handles the oversupply of universities could
government audit finds they don’t serve enough students be instructive for other sectors, Prof. Altbach adds, because
to justify their existence. Many hold on as long as possible, other countries with falling populations and a large number
becoming “zombie universities”, with leaders keen to avoid of student seats will also need to devise a plan for closing
giving up their remaining assets to the local or federal gov- universities. “Korea is of course not alone in facing these
ernment upon closure, as required by law. problems,” he says.
Jun Yoo, a professor in the department of Korean lan-
guage and literature at Yonsei University, says that unless (Excerpted and adapted from The Economist and Times
the government incentivises struggling universities to close Higher Education)

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