A professor at Seoul National University's College of Engineering recently urged a master's student to continue on to a doctorate and was turned down flat. The student said they would rather join a large corporation and work in data analysis than stay in the lab. "If you work two years at Samsung Electronics or SK hynix, your salary is far above a professor's — so why go through the hardship of studying?" the professor said with a sigh. "There are even cases where we win research projects worth hundreds of millions of won but don't have enough students to put on them."
Over the past five years, four out of every 10 graduate admissions units at Seoul National University's College of Natural Sciences and College of Engineering drew fewer applicants than the number of openings. As science and engineering students continue to shy away from graduate school, concerns are mounting that the foundation for basic science research could weaken.
According to data obtained by The Seoul Economic Daily on the 15th through the office of Rep. Jung Sung-kuk of the People Power Party, 376 of 909 science and engineering graduate admissions units at SNU, or 41.4%, had application-to-opening ratios below one-to-one from the 2022 academic year through this year. Applicants fell short of openings in 113 of 310 master's programs (36.5%), 136 of 313 doctoral programs (43.5%) and 127 of 286 combined master's-doctoral programs (44.4%). Over the five years, 79 programs received no applicants at all.
Final enrollment can come in below the allotted number of spots because applicants are eliminated during exams, interviews and other screening steps. But falling short of quotas at the application stage itself points to insufficient demand for graduate study. The shortfalls were most pronounced in basic science fields, which are seen as having weaker links to employment.
In this year's first-round admissions, the College of Natural Sciences' Department of Chemistry sought 10 master's students but drew only seven applicants. The Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences received just five applications for nine openings. The shortage was more severe at the doctoral level, where more than half of the college's 14 admissions units — eight in total — failed to fill their quotas. Three of them drew no applicants at all: the astronomy track in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the interdisciplinary genetic engineering program. "In the past, top science and engineering students were drawn away to medical school, but lately the mood has shifted toward wanting a job quickly," a professor in SNU's Department of Physics and Astronomy said. "Some students enter a doctoral program and then drop out, feeling demoralized by the salary gap with classmates who went straight to work."
At the College of Engineering, applicants clustered in popular fields such as artificial intelligence and semiconductors, producing what amounts to a polarization. In this year's first-round admissions, the hybrid materials track in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering all drew fewer master's applicants than openings. By contrast, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, viewed as an advantage in landing semiconductor jobs, posted a ratio of two-to-one. It had initially set 17 openings but expanded the number of spots to admit 20. The interdisciplinary artificial intelligence program attracted 48 applicants for 11 openings, more than four times the quota.
Analysts see a clear shift toward weighing job prospects over academic interest when deciding whether to pursue graduate study. "These days everyone sees a master's as the maximum," said Hong You-suk, a professor in SNU's Department of Industrial Engineering. "The reality is that most of the students who are serious about scholarship go to graduate school abroad." Indeed, at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering this year, the shortfall came at the doctoral level rather than the master's level.
Some argue that easing the shortage of researchers in Korea's basic sciences will require better treatment, including guarantees of stable jobs after graduation. "We need to expand the number of quality jobs that doctorate holders can choose from," Hong said. "Apart from a handful of large companies, there aren't many places in Korea with real research and development capacity, so investment in those firms is also needed." Another SNU professor stressed: "Graduates should be rewarded in line with the opportunity cost of the five or six years they put into a doctorate. Our generation had a sense of mission about advancing technology and scholarship, but we can no longer rely on that goodwill alone." The professor added that because basic disciplines rarely produce results in a short time, long-term research funding is essential to let scholars focus on their work.
"The fact that even SNU cannot fill its science and engineering graduate quotas means a red light has come on for cultivating talent in Korean science," Jung said. "We need to closely analyze why these programs are falling short and put in place substantive measures to train the next generation of researchers, such as expanding scholarships in basic science fields and improving the research environment."