On low birthrate, yet again
As many issues are swirling around, I’ll talk about the one that we, as educators, get to feel by our skin: the dogging issue of low birthrate in the country. The reason I say “feel by the skin” is because this year most universities have run into issues of all sorts all around the country. Even here, in the capital, the well-known SKY universities felt the pinch of reduced enrollment. If it was a pinch here, for some provincial universities it has been a full blow — some universities are on the verge of or are actually closing down. Just last month, Gangwon Tourism College declared the suspension of new admissions due to the falling number of students, causing an uproar from the locals.
Some businesses in the neighborhoods close to universities are slowly disappearing, unable to generate enough income for one sole reason: not enough customers, i.e., students. Four or five years down the road, the regional economies will dwindle as they will be unable to fill orders due to the lack of workers, which would have been supplied by those universities.
The current administration, seemingly worried, is trying to fix the situation by throwing money at it. Recently, political parties began to publicize their policies, promising apartments or actual hard cash, trying to entice young people to have more babies, but all that effort looks way off, as no one really believes that it will eventually happen.
To me, the low enrollment numbers are rather symptoms in the chain of cause-and-effect events that we are currently experiencing. It is hard to say if it is a major demographic “correction,” as some scientists are arguing, or if there will be a future “bounce back” in the number of babies; the only answer to that would be numbers. And those I have yet to see.
Take the government’s approach to education today. Earlier promises to fight “educational cartels” are dead; all things are back to normal. In fact, some chains and schools have jacked up their prices to counter any future “possible hunts” by the government. Another example of worsening access to education is directly connected to government policies. Lack of government spending has forced many open services to become “paid for.” For example, EBS, the public educational broadcasting channel, was doubled by the government’s decision to fight private tutors because of a public education business scheme, in which students would still have to pay money. The intent was good, but due to the lack of good teachers, the government had no choice but to hire teachers from private schools, in effect taking the issue from one pocket and putting it into another. The goal of making education accessible to everyone without any limits of age or location still remains a dream, and it has just been put behind a steep paywall, put up by the government rather than the market.
The issue of the low birthrate is much more complex; it will require an orchestrated effort by many actors, not just financial offers from the Ministry of Finance or audits from the Ministry of Education. Let me just give you one episode where I learned firsthand about the complexity of the issue. So here is the primary data, as the saying goes in science, I collected myself. One family with two children, the youngest of whom is just over one year old, all of us spending a nice pre-New Year’s Eve at home in South Chungcheong Province. By a fluke of misfortune, the youngest one fell and twisted her arm. The baby wouldn’t stop crying for another half-hour despite the efforts of the whole family and even wouldn’t let us touch her hurt arm. As it was past 10 p.m., her frantic mother, worried it might be a fracture, called the emergency services. To her shocking surprise, an operator said that no hospital in the province would accept a child under the age of two when it came to an emergency and that she needed to seek help in another province!
The situation became even more disparate when the disheartened mother was told to call various hospitals herself directly instead of being transferred, meaning that there was no procedure in place where the operator could quickly help a baby in distress to receive emergency care. The family had to drive their car in the middle of the night and in the snow all the way to Hanlim University Hospital in Giheung, Gyeonggi Province. It pains me to realize the words I heard over ten years ago told by one doctor, who said, “If you want to have babies and receive proper human care, you must live nowhere else, only Seoul or in Gyeonggi Province. Luckily, there was nothing serious; it was just a dislocated joint. The most appalling fact that this incident highlights is that the situation has not changed, not even 10 years on.
The issue here is much deeper. From the perspective of young people, there is simply no hope for a better future, neither for themselves nor for their future children. If you ask young couples today, after having realized their parents’ dreams of getting an education and landing proper jobs without much money, to start having babies, they will say no. For them, the social contract is broken.
Eugene Lee (mreulee@gmail.com) is a lecturing professor at the Graduate School of Governance at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. Specializing in international relations and governance, his research and teaching focus on national and regional security, international development, government policies and Northeast and Central Asia.