The Network of Higher Education System in Korea's National Human Resource Development : The impact of "marketization" and "internationalization" in the transition of knowledge-based society

After 1990's, many trials have been promoted for globalization and marketization of higher education in the world. These are performed while seeking for an international framework as follows: promoting the education for sustainable development (ESD) by UNESCO, making cross-border higher education quality provision guideline by OECD, and negotiating for free trade of international educational services, etc. However, there are so many correspondence approaches of globalization and marketization by state or region. After modern times, education had been a important "device" for the formation of nation state. But, it can't be changed radically with unitary value, even if the present society has been transforming to the knowledge-based society. Each country and the institution affecting educational reform are conscious of the continuity by a background of politics, society, and culture. In other words, there are so many kinds of "nationalization" for educational circumstances strategically in each country, being conscious of global standard at the same time. It is very important to create a framework of concrete comparative analysis about correspondence strategy to globalization and marketization when Japanese higher education policy makers or institutions consider to them. In this article, I focused two points that analyzed higher education system of each country: concrete network construction policy to contribute for national or regional sustainable development, and its case of educational strategy formation. The former is the most important element of constituting sustainable development, and the latter is also important to analyze how higher education institutions form the concrete strategy and provide a premise of its curriculum management. I selected Republic of Korea as a field of case study, where has close international exchange with higher education institutions in Japan, and is our neighboring country. Korea established "Basic Law for National Human Resources Development" in 2002, and changed the definition of administrative participation with education fundamentally, and established "The Special Act for Balanced National Development" from 2003, what the government is promoting the decentralization and globalization policy at the same time. Present President Roh, Moo-hyun has carried the banner for fostering regional university as the core organization of balanced national development system in a pledge of his administration. This pledge became a policy as NURI (New Universities for Regional Innovation) Project, and it is enforced from 2004. In this article, I consider three points as follows: how Korea institutionalized the network construction about higher education as a national policy, how they were reflected concretely by the formation of educational strategy in a university, and what kind of impacts Korea's higher education system received about the reform for sustainable development in the circumstances of globalization and marketization. As a result, the Korea government has guided to construct cooperative network for bringing up local human resources of competitive industries with universities, local government, companies, and research institutes. For example, Daejeon metropolitan city in South Korea makes a network for training human resources of mobile communication business, for which Hanbat National University have a leading role. It may be said that a "horizontal network" for higher education with local institutions begins to be designed. However, in South Korea, developing this "horizontal network" has been led by the national government policy. In this mean, the "vertical network" created by the development process of a nation state has been left in South Korea at the same time.