Just last month, Korean Education Ministry announced revised admissions policies for local foreign-language high schools. Until now, admissions were based soley on foreign-language test scores and droves of hopeful candidates went to hagwons to focus on passing the test with high marks.

 

Now the changed policy states that admissions will be based solely on students' past grades. This change of policy from test scores to grades aim to drecrease students' dependency on hagwons and is extremely controversial.

 

But an immediate effect of such policy change is significant drop in new enrollments at hagwons that hires many  Native English speakers. On the average, enrollments has gone down 20 - 30%* and they expect this downward trend to continue for a while.

 

What does this mean? With demand for new Native English Speaking teachers already down due to poor Korean economy and H1N1 epidemic, this change of policy is another blow to candidates hoping to get a teaching position in Korea. Number of available positions are continuing to decline.

 

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* this stat is from an article on JoongAng Daily (Jan.20,2010)