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Top South Korean University Is Accused of Financial Improprieties

April 13, 2011, 11:41 am

South Korea’s Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology has accused the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, known as Kaist, of providing illegal financial payments to its president as part of a series of administrative and financial improprieties at the institution, reports Yonhap News Agency.  The ministry conducted an audit in February of the elite institution and released a report on Monday, detailing 23 misdeeds.

The ministry said Nam Pyo Suh, Kaist’s president, was improperly enrolled in the country’s pension plan for teachers and also received $51,751 in “special incentives” without a formal evaluation. An unnamed Kaist official said the university did nothing wrong in how it compensated the president, reports The Korea Times.

Mr. Suh has been criticized for a recent string of student suicides, which have been attributed to his tough academic policies. In addition to the student deaths, on Sunday the body of a professor, another apparent suicide, was discovered. The scholar was facing an investigation over research expenses as part of the audit by the ministry, reports The Korea Times.

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  • lmaddington

    Having recently conducted my dissertation on students’ preferences for information sources during the college search process, I found that the majority of students at highly selective institutions on the East Coast are not using social media like Facebook to gather information. Therefore, I question how admissions officers in this study gauged its importance.  I have multiple speculations as to why students are not using these tools. First, students may prefer to keep their personal and social lives separate from the admissions process. Second, perhaps institutions are not using the tools effectively, which calls into question this study’s measure of effectiveness. We need to continue to hear from students about what information they need and how they prefer to receive it in order to help them successfully navigate the college admissions process.

  • http://www.facebook.com/kris.isaacson Kris Isaacson

    Agreed this seems less than scientific and more than a little self serving for Varsity Outreach. That being said, I work as a Director of Web Marketing for a midsize public university, which means social media is a big chunk of what I do. Our admissions department has a Facebook page that they use to connect with prospective students. It is a difficult audience to connect with and, I think lmaddington may be right as to why. I don’t know that students use Facebook as a tool to learn about they schools they are thinking about. I still think the actual university website is a better tool as it provides the valuable and needed information (application deadlines, tuition, housing, financial aid, etc.). 

    We do however allocate some of our advertising budget to Facebook ads that are age and geographically targeted and we run them at key times of year. It is difficult to prove effectiveness in the sense of increased campus visits or applications, but it certainly increases traffic to our website.

    However, I, as administrator of our primary university Facebook page use it to engage current students. According to Facebook’s Insights roughly 60% of our audience is 18-24 which strongly indicates that the primary users of our Facebook presence are already here on campus. I also complete my Master’s thesis recently which looked at the effectiveness of Facebook as an engagement and retention tool for first-year students. I truly think the bigger impact is on existing students and not in recruiting.

  • http://www.moneyaftergraduation.com/ Bridget

    I’m not sure how “likes” translates into successful recruiting. Successful recruitment is measured by enrolment, and this article offers nothing that suggests facebook is increasing enrolment — only that schools are increasing their use of facebook. I agree with Kris who pointed out that facebook seems more a tool for engagement for current students, rather than a method to recruit new students.

  • http://www.facebook.com/voutreach Mark B Rothbaum

    I think everyone here has made fair and valid points about our survey results.

    (1) We didn’t intend to represent this data as a scientific study. We’re sharing the results of a survey we put out there and encouraged admissions officers to participate in, letting them know we would share the aggregate results publicly. We wanted to get a sense of the trends for how admissions offices were using Facebook and their general perceptions of it’s effectiveness.

    (2) I would be the first to agree that students do not use Facebook in their college search process. There’s no real functionality that would serve this purpose on Facebook. Moreover, I have first-hand experience with this since I was involved with a team at CollegeToolkit.com that was the first to build a college search on the Facebook Platform. We quickly realized high school students did not use Facebook as they were searching for what schools to apply to and that making the experience more social had very little appeal. That being said, I think prospects that are very interested in a particular school do use Facebook to stay connected with the school, express their interest, interact with admissions counselors, and get a more authentic perspective. And admitted students definitely use Facebook. Like we stated in our white paper, we believe the #1 reason admits use Facebook is to meet each other. As an admissions office, there are things that you can do to encourage and facilitate these interactions. For some, it may be as simple as setting up an “Official Class of 20XX” group and pointing admits to the group. For others, it may involve a lot more.

    (3) I also agree completely with the difficulty in measuring the impact of Facebook efforts on recruitment and yield. Bridget raises a great point “How does a like translate into successful recruiting?” That’s something we explicitly discuss in our white paper. Measuring the impact of a school’s Facebook efforts can be very challenging. We specifically added questions in this year’s survey about this issue. When you think about the environment many schools face right now with shrinking budgets, making sure your resources are allocated efficiently is important. Even though creating a Facebook Group or Page is free, it takes time and effort to maintain it. Is this a better use of resources  than visiting high schools or setting up a booth at a college fair?

    –Mark Rothbaum, Varsity Outreach

  • mes27

    I am as rabid a college football fan as anyone I know – but this is really getting out of hand. Higher education institutions are sending the wrong message to everyone – except certain alumni, other elite donors/supporters, athletic equipment/apparel companies, and sports agents – about the core mission of their respective institution. In short, those who prioritize this direction are turning their colleges and universities into sports franchises, plain and simple, instead of promoting them as institutions of research, teaching and learning, and/or simply higher education. (Certainly, similar things happen in the corporate world with certain CEO salaries, benefit packages, myriad perks, etc. However, one would hope that with all that is going on today in our society, throughout the world, in the global economy, and with all of the other IMPORTANT things we engage in, that higher education would not follow THAT lead.)

  • 4206dinty

     Isnt this math fuzzy??

  • manoflamancha

    Two of the lowest academically ranked major universities are the top ranked in football coaches salaries. Marvelous, just marvelous.

  • badger74

    With that performance Miles should be busted downward by 50%. They looked unprepared and bored. QB would not start on most BCS teams. Terrible.

  • pianiste

    I know badger74′s comment is supposed to be one of those jocular uniters that enables academics of all stripes concerning college “revenue sports” to clink glasses, chuckle, and say, “How ’bout that Tide.” (Hey, we’re all regular guys, and no matter what we think about the huge, smelly, festering, spreading sore that is college “revenue sports,” we put aside our differences while we watch the champeenship game on a nice flat-screen TV in the dean’s den.)

    But Miles’s contract provision–indeed, the salaries of D-1 football coaches (including assistants) and men’s basketball coaches–are obscene. So are D-1 “revenue sports” as a whole, especially that amalgam of low-ranked major universities that wins the football championship every year. (Rank and football prowess, a coincidence?)

    Ostrich, head, sand, etc.

  • bogartz

    And all this is going on while states dramatically decrease their funding of public higher education.

  • 11182967

    There is still a market, I suspect, for writers willing to pen such letters for others to send, or even to speak directly on their behalf.  I got the part of Cyrano on stage as a senior in high school in part because I had been known for polishing up the sweet nothings of classmates–the Abe Burows of love notes.   But more than the words themselves, the decline of love letters has probably been a consequence of the decline of penmanship.  These days hardly anyone (myself included) can “write a good hand,” and a typed love letter, even converted to a fancy font, just won’t do.  Even in those old high school days when guys copied my suggestions in their own handwriting for authenticity they were often so struck by the disjuncture between the sentiments and penmanship that they couldn’t go through with sending the note.  I did make sure I got my dollar first.  

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