`More IT high schools will create jobs for young people`

The chairman of the board of Korea Digital Media High School says he chose to make his school a specialized high school, or one that offers secondary vocational education, rather than a popular foreign-language designation because IT will become a leading industry in Korea and the core of job creation for future generations.

Kim Jong-hyeon, the school`s founder, said, “These days, an investment of 1 billion won (917,010 U.S. dollars) creates jobs for three in manufacturing. The same amount of investment in IT technology creates jobs for 20,” adding, “Just as former Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg founded their companies when they were around 20 years of age and created jobs for hundreds of thousands of people, I wanted to pave such a road for our children.”

After Kim took over the school, he turned what was an ordinary school into a U.S.-style upscale boarding school. First, he built an IT hall with state-of-the-art equipment, a multipurpose gym for both indoor and outdoor activities and a dormitory for all students. A baseball field and swimming pool will also be installed soon.

Korea Digital Media School keeps all of its IT equipment up-to-date so that students can experience the latest technology. The school has more than 6 billion won (5.5. million dollars) in its School Development Fund.

While Kim changed the school’s “hardware” as he intended to, numerous outdated regulations shackled academic curricula and teachers.

Hiring good teachers was hard. The Enforcement Decree of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act restricts the number of teachers a school can hire based on the number of classes. Education offices determine the standards for teacher placement. Normally, regulations allow a high school to employ three teachers per classroom for up to three classrooms and hire two more when opening a new classroom. The number of administrative staff is limited to a third of the number of classrooms.

Schools are banned, however, from offering incentives to attract talented teachers. Overtime pay is capped at 40,000 won (36.68 dollars) an hour, and bonuses are set by the government.

In a desperate attempt, Kim adopted corporate accounting standards to offer incentives to teachers, offering a bonus of 2 million won (1,834 dollars) to the 10 best performing teachers. He also selected five to 10 of the most diligent teachers every year to attend an education fair in the U.S.

The faculty positively responded to Kim’s efforts. Eight employees with a teacher’s license supervise the dorm, while teachers offers after-school classes for students. An e-learning studio is also opened to offer online classes.

Due to its high investment and interest in education, Korea Digital Media High School is among the best in getting its students to enter college. New students are usually in the top 15 percentile of middle school graduates. After three years of dorm life without private education, the average student scores among the top 3 percentile in the national college entrance exam.

Specializing in IT, the school`s performance in this field exceeds those of others. 630 students take four classes –- e-commerce, digital content, Web programming and hacking defense. They swept the top prizes in last year`s Korea Olympiad in Informatics and won the bronze medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics. The school also received an award from the government for business start-ups by its students.

Kim said high schools specializing in IT that are allowed to become specialized high schools should be allowed to become special purpose schools for more leeway in education.

Kim said, “Many science high school graduates flock to medical school after graduation and many foreign-language school graduates end up in majors not related to language but receive preferential treatments by the authorities. So schools teaching IT, the basis of all industries and academic research these days, are tied up in outdated regulations. All the Education Ministry has to do is to revise the enforcement decree." He added, "Special purpose schools for IT would put students on the fast track to founding business start-ups and studying convergence at university, creating jobs for young people.

If 22 IT special-purpose schools are founded, or the same number of science and gifted student schools, about 1,300 school jobs will be created based on the case of Korea Digital Media High School, which has 59 teachers and administrative employees.

Kim said allowing such schools more leeway in hiring teachers and designing their own curricula could lead to 100 new jobs per school and 2,200 combined.