The main entrance of Kim Il Sung University. (Kim Il Sung University website)As high school seniors apply for spots at North Korea’s universities, bribery in the admission process is once more coming into the spotlight. Party officials are bribed to give certain schools more university slots, which often leaves students in rural or less developed areas unable to even apply.
A source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK that North Korea’s Ministry of Education had recently designated the number of students who can apply to university from high schools around the country.
In South Korea, third-year high school students are free to apply to the universities of their choice based on their academic records or their scores on the College Scholastic Achievement Test or universities’ own admission tests.
But in North Korea, the education ministry selects the number of students for each university and major each year and the number of students who can be admitted from each school in the country — a top-down process, with all decisions made unilaterally.
The education ministry communicates its decisions about university admissions to education bureaus at the provincial level, which pass them down to bureaus at the municipal and county levels, with individual schools being notified last of all.
Schools need slots to send students
Third-year high school students in North Korea cannot apply to the university of their choice unless their high school has been allotted slots there. As a result, graduating seniors and their parents are keenly interested in whether their school will be granted admission to the most popular universities.
The admission slots assigned to each school are supposed to be totally confidential, so that information is impossible to learn without the right connections. As graduation approaches, an “information war” breaks out with families scrambling to learn that information, the source said.
Ordinary high schools generally aren’t given slots at universities administered by the Central Committee. For those schools to secure some slots at provincial universities, they have to offer bribes to powerful people, such as senior secretaries on municipal or county party committees, the source said.
Simply put, parents have to bribe well-positioned officials to ensure their children’s schools are granted spots at popular universities.
As a result, parents waste no time in preparing their bribes.
A bribe of 300 to 1,000 Chinese yuan is needed to lock in admission at a vocational college, while 2,000 yuan is needed for a provincial university. Basically, money is key to getting into college, the source said.
Under these circumstances, students with good grades often have to give up their college dreams when their parents lack the means to make such arrangements, the source said.
Rural students shut out
In Hoeryong, for example, a third-year high school student whose grades ought to have been good enough to apply for a provincial university did not even sit for the university preparatory exam — North Korea’s college entrance exam — because his family could not afford to send him to college.
The student’s principal and homeroom teacher urged him to at least sit for the test, but he refused, pointing out that the school had not even received many university admission slots.
Officials tend to funnel university admission slots to certain high schools. The result is that even the best students in rural areas and other backwaters rarely make it into university, the source said.
The government often forces teachers and doctors to move from cities to the countryside given the shortage of professionals there. Instead, it ought to help rural students make it into teaching and medical schools. Then those students could naturally be assigned as teachers and doctors in their hometowns, the source suggested.