As the scale of foreign students in Korea continues to expand, many Korean universities frequently experience “dormant wars” before new semester, exacerbating conflicts over accommodation resources.
According to various Korean media outlets such as the Associated Press, the Korea Daily and the Korea Economy, in mid-January this year, the All-North University reduced the allocation of native student dormitories by nearly 40 percent compared to last year, prompting strong protests of “reverse discrimination against native students.” The university ultimately retracted the decision, changing two-person rooms to three to four-person rooms and lowering management fees, only allowing about 1,530 Korean students to be accommodated.
In 2023, the South Korean government launched an education plan to “attract 300,000 international students”, relaxed student visa restrictions and conducted targeted enrollment in Southeast Asia and Central Asia. In this context, the surge in the number of foreign students became an important catalyst for the intensification of the conflict. According to data from the Ministry of Justice, as of December last year, there were 310,000 foreign students in Korea, more than half of whom were concentrated in the capital area. However, last year, the success rate of application for dormitory accommodation in the capital area was only 17.8%. Among Seoul‘s 10 key universities, 6 had a success rate of only about 10%, making accommodation shortages a common problem.
In order to raise the internationalization index, many Korean high schools have greatly expanded the recruitment of foreign students and prioritized them in dormitory allocation. Korean students who have been squeezed out of campus dormitories flood into the one-bedroom market around the school, further pushing up rent, falling into a double dilemma of “not being able to live in the school and not being able to afford to rent outside the school.” At the same time, foreign students who have not been assigned to dormitories also join the room-grabbing army.
According to Korean media reports, before school started in late February, foreign students crowded in front of real estate agents in the Shinchon area of Seoul. A Filipino student studying at Yonsei University lamented that finding a place near the school was “harder than ascending to heaven”, and many people moved into cheap exam halls instead.
Rent increases further exacerbate the conflict. In January this year, Seoul‘s dedicated one-bedroom small household with an area of less than 33 square meters had a deposit of up to 10 million won (1,000 won is about 4.7 yuan), with average monthly rent rising 6.1 percent year-on-year to 609,000 won. Many Korean students have been forced to move to regions further away from their schools.
Residential pressure has also exacerbated group antagonism. Posts have appeared in the online community of Yonsei University criticizing the university for providing better dormitories for foreign students than those for domestic students. Former dormitory administrators at Sungkyunkwan University said that differences in living habits such as noise and hygiene add up to accommodation competition, further exacerbating the dissatisfaction of some Korean students with foreign students.
Although some Korean high schools have tried to relieve pressure through the construction of new dormitories and leasing off-campus facilities, the construction of new dormitories has been slow due to multiple factors such as long-term tuition freezes, fiscal tensions, declining school age population, and residents‘ opposition. A dormitory project at Hanyang University capable of accommodating 1,198 people was delayed for years due to local residents‘ opposition, and was only officially launched in March last year.