It seems that all this fake degree nonsense has finally registered with lawmakers. According to the Korea Times, businesses employing instructors with false credentials will face a seven-day suspension. Better, however is this: the institutes hiring workers with false credentials will be listed online. I don’t know how this will play out with the libel issues of Korea, and if we’ll have hakwons suing the government for loss of reputation and business, but it may get interesting along the way.
Hakwon owners, of course, aren’t taking this lying down:
However, hagwons complained that there is no certain way they can confirm every instructor’s resume. “If we ask universities for confirmation of graduation, they reject it,” Chung Sun-ki of the online tutoring company Vitaedu said. Therefore, the best things he can do is to make instructors ask the universities to send verification documentation to the company, he added. [Korea Times]
As far as the employment of international workers is concerned, since immigration is coming up with ever-stricter evidence of graduation requirements, which now include the degree and transcripts, only the hakwons knowingly employing workers without proper papers should be affected.
