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North Korea Higher Education
Institutions of higher education in the early 1990s included
colleges and universities; teachers' training colleges, with a
four-year course for preparing kindergarten, primary, and
secondary instructors; colleges of advanced technology with twoor three-year courses; medical schools with six-year courses;
special colleges for science and engineering, art, music, and
foreign languages; and military colleges and academies. Kim Il
Sung's report to the Sixth Party Congress of the KWP in October
1980 revealed that there were 170 "higher learning institutions"
and 480 "higher specialized schools" that year. In 1987 there
were 220,000 students attending two- or three-year higher
specialized schools and 301,000 students attending four- to sixyear colleges and university courses. According to Eberstadt and
Banister, 13.7 percent of the population sixteen years of age or
older was attending, or had graduated from, institutions of
higher education in 1987-88. In 1988 the regime surpassed its
target of producing "an army of 1.3 million intellectuals,"
graduates of higher education, a major step in the direction of
achieving the often-stated goal of "intellectualization of the
whole society."
Kim Il Sung University, founded in October 1946, is the
country's only comprehensive institution of higher education
offering bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. It is an
elite institution whose enrollment of 16,000 full- and part-time
students in the early 1990s occupies, in the words of one
observer, the "pinnacle of the North Korean educational and
social system." Competition for admission to its faculties is
intense. According to a Korean-American scholar who visited the
university in the early 1980s, only one student is admitted out
of every five or six applicants. An important criterion for
admission is senior middle school grades, although political
criteria are also major factors in selection. A person wishing to
gain acceptance to any institution of higher education has to be
nominated by the local "college recommendation committee" before
approval by county- and provincial-level committees.
Kim Il Sung University's colleges and faculties include
economics, history, philosophy, law, foreign languages and
literature, geography, physics, mathematics, chemistry, atomic
energy, biology, and computer science. There are about 3,000
faculty members, including teaching and research staff. All
facilities are located on a modern, high-rise campus in the
northern part of P'yongyang.
Data as of June 1993
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