Research On Educational Service Trade Competition Of Republic Of Korea

Along with the reinforcement of economic global trend and development of educational service trade. Cross-boundary educational trade, especially higher educational service trade, having become an important emerging area of global service trade and getting general attention of many countries all over the world. In Republic of Korea (ROK), educational issues are popular. Although the higher educational service of ROK get great progress in recent years. It still fall behind developed countries. The ranking of ROK university is not high and lacking of attractiveness to foreign students, which cause serious unbalancing of higher educational service trade. The 21st century is knowledge economy era, the human resource competition play an important role in global comprehensive competition of a country. For the sake of increasing quality of higher educational service, attracting genius to ROK is significant. Based on this background, the paper chose higher educational service trade as research subject, aiming at finding new path of educational service trade development through analyzing current development situation, trend and existing problems of ROK educational service trade. According to General Agreement on Trade in Service (GATS), this paper classified educational service trade to four types:cross border supply, consumption abroad, commercial presence and presence of natural person. The main content of this paper included four parts: trend of educational service trade, related policies and regulations of government, features of current development, influential factors and problems. Both the number of students studying abroad and the number of students who come to ROK are increasing significantly. The problems of educational service trade are:low degree of international market share, unbalancing distribution of import and export, serious loss of talents and unbalancing volume of trade. The reasons of these problems are:lack of competitive educational service products, lack of government investment, the deterioration of natural environment, unperfect social security system.Because western developed countries have highest quality education resources, ROK is at unbalance of payments in educational service trade aspect. After 2005, government of ROK have released various policies to attact foreign students especially Asian students. The measures which include increasing subjects taught in English, creating special courses etc. Moreover, in recent years, ROK have strengthening cooperation with foreign countries, through establishing Korea school, Korean school and joint school to recruit foreign students directly. All of these measures alleviate unbalancing problems in certain degree.To deal with current situation, this paper propose some measures:increasing government financial investment, supporting professor visiting study, formulating laws and regulations of foreign students recruitment and management, building school-enterprise cooperation mechanism, improving quality of university faculty, increasing teaching quality, rising international ranking, increasing subjects taught in English, establishing professional foreign students management organization, developing foreign students management mechanism. Through the above measures, this paper hope to handle with the unbalancing problems ultimately, to maintain a competitive advantage.