The report, compiled jointly by Statistics Korea and the Korea Immigration Service, analyzed the quality of life for 1.56 million foreign residents this year. They included temporary workers, highly skilled professionals, students, ethnic Koreans and spouses of Korean citizens.

Of the respondents, 90.4 percent expressed a desire to remain in Korea after their current stay ends, up from 89.6 percent in 2023. Permanent residents and naturalized Koreans were not included in the survey.

A total of 61.6 percent of the aforementioned respondents this year said they were thinking about extending their visas. The other 16.9 percent seek to secure permanent residency and another 10.3 percent want to acquire Korean citizenship.

The findings come as Korea is on the cusp of becoming a multicultural society, which, according to the OECD, is defined by foreign nationals exceeding 5 percent of the total population. The foreign population reached 4.89 percent in 2023.

In 2023, Korea experienced the second-fastest growth rate of immigrants globally, at 50.9 percent, trailing only the United Kingdom, which saw a 52.9 percent increase, according to the OECD.

Under the circumstances, 84.3 percent of the surveyed foreign nationals said they were satisfied with life in Korea this year. The rate went up from 80.4 percent in 2022.

Over the 2022-24 period, the ratio of those satisfied with their job advanced from 68.6 percent to 72.6 percent.

The ratio of those satisfied with their income also moved up from 53.3 percent to 58.2 percent.

Concerning housing conditions, the ratio of those who are satisfied increased from 79.2 percent to 84 percent.

The 2024 report showed that foreign workers totaled 1.01 million, representing an increase of 87,000 individuals, or 0.2 percentage points, from a year earlier.

It was the first time that the number surpassed the 1 million mark, as Korea is grappling with a declining population and is increasingly relying on immigrant workers to do a range of jobs.

Of the 1.01 million, 956,000 were wage workers, the majority of whom were employed by small and medium-sized enterprises.

A total of 51.2 percent of these wage workers earned a monthly income of between 2 million won ($1,389.94) and 3 million won. The ratio went up from 50.6 percent in 2023.

In the 2022-23 period, those earning 3 million won or more per month also rose from 35.8 percent to 37.1 percent.

When asked about the difficulties of living in Korea, 34.7 percent of foreign nationals surveyed this year responded with “None.” However, 29.8 percent identified language as a barrier, while 13 percent cited loneliness.

With regard to discrimination, 17.4 percent of respondents said that they have experienced it.

About 54.5 percent of those who felt they were discriminated against said it was due to their country of origin, while 31.2 percent attributed it to the language barrier.

The victims of discrimination responded passively, with only 15.3 percent publicly addressing the issue.

Among foreign nationals with children, under 18, 35.7 percent reported facing challenges in their children’s education, with more than half of which citing difficulty helping with homework. Nearly half of the foreign residents expressed that their children’s education costs are burdensome.

When asked to identify the obstacles to becoming a member of Korean society, 44.7 percent cited language as a barrier, while 11.8 percent considered religion a problem.

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The temporary relocation of the around 140 students from Suzu city and Noto town came after a similar move by students from Wajima in the prefecture last week in the wake of the magnitude-7.6 quake that struck the Noto Peninsula in the prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast on New Year’s Day.

Although all junior high schools in Suzu and Noto are set to be reopened by Monday along with elementary schools, the parents of some of the students requested the transfer to ensure they can study in an adequately equipped environment.

In Suzu, where nine public elementary and junior high schools have already reopened, 102 of 199 students from four junior high schools will relocate to the facility in Kanazawa. The city’s two remaining schools are set to resume classes on Monday.

At a public library where some of the students gathered for departure, some appeared happy to see their friends again, while parents anxiously watched their children board a large bus.

As the bus departed, the parents waved farewell amid cries of “Good luck” and “Take care.”

In Noto, 40 of 247 students attending four junior high schools departed their hometown for the Kanazawa facility at their parents’ requests, although all of the town’s nine public elementary and junior high are scheduled to reopen on Monday.

On Wednesday, some 250 of the roughly 400 students from all three Wajima city-run junior high schools evacuated to two facilities in Hakusan in the prefecture’s south.

In Wajima, classes will resume on Monday at the earliest using vacant classrooms at local junior high schools, according to the prefecture’s education board.

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The remarks in question were made on Thursday, when Education Minister Lee Ju-ho said during a media briefing that he was instructed by the president to exclude what is not taught at schools from the annual exam, as part of educational reforms.

One of the top three reforms being pursued by the Yoon administration, along with labor and pensions, is overhauling Korea’s education system.

Students and parents say the president has aggravated their worries by making controversial remarks, which could exert an influence on the difficulty level of the CSAT, which is regarded as one of the most important academic events in a Korean person’s life.

As the remarks led to criticism that there could be confusion among students who have already established their study plans ahead of the exam, the presidential office distributed some changes to Yoon’s remarks to the media.

It was very unprecedented to attempt to change the administration’s official comments, hours after they were already reported and had made the headlines in local media.

The changed version focused more on the need to reduce students’ reliance on private crammers.

“If the exam requires students to have excessive background information and deals with material not covered by public education, such as nonliterary questions at the college level, isn’t that asking them to completely rely on private crammers?” Yoon was quoted as saying by his office.

Nevertheless, the remarks were still construed as the president pointing out the high difficulty level of the CSAT as one of the factors that cause parents to spend more on private crammers, raising speculation that this year’s exam would be easier as instructed by the president.

What fueled such speculation was the education ministry replacing a high-ranking official in charge of university admissions, Friday, just a day after Yoon made the critical remarks about the exam.

That official took her post in January this year. It is unusual for the ministry to replace a director-level official who oversees CSAT-related affairs, one of the most important policies of the ministry, within six months.

Regarding this, Vice Education Minister Jang Sang-yoon told reporters that the replacement was to censure the official, as a mock CSAT exam that was carried out on June 1 included some questions beyond what is mentioned in public school textbooks.

“The government set its policy goal in March to produce a fairer CSAT exam and the June 1 test was our first trial,” Jang said. “That official was reprimanded as she failed to reflect this policy in the mock exam.”

Amid intensifying confusion, the presidential office once again attempted to clarify Yoon’s remarks.

Senior presidential secretary for press affairs Kim Eun-hye said in a written briefing that Yoon did not talk about an “easy exam or a “hard exam” when he said the test should exclude what is not taught at schools.

“The education ministry should exclude areas not covered by the public education curriculum from the exam, while maintaining the assessment ability,” the president was quoted as saying by Kim. “Setting questions not covered by public education amounts to education authorities forcing students to use the services offered by the private tutoring industry. This is very unfair.”

But those comments did little to appease students and parents.

One mother wrote on an online forum, “The president should know that his remarks could exert an enormous influence on the difficulty level and direction of the exam. I think he should be careful about even a word regarding the exam so as not to stir our children who are at an important time of their lives.”

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Elite, indeed. In 1960, Harvard College received around 5,000 applications and accepted roughly 30%. For this year’s freshman class, 57,435 applications poured in and the school accepted only 3.43%. The narrower the funnel, the finer that kids grind themselves down to squeeze through it. The ones who succeed feel like they’ve earned their place at the top of the ladder—and need to do all they can to keep it.

So it’s no surprise that most of the kids sitting around me were feeling a heavy burden of imposter syndrome. After all, most of what made us “gifted” was mere that we were the children of doctors, lawyers, bankers and academics who had guided us toward elite schools since our earliest days of childhood.

But I didn’t feel like an imposter. I thought the ego-stroking was a piece of theater. My friends at home in London who were going to Cambridge University told me about their first week. It consisted of no such welcome: They’d been granted five days of drunken debauchery, followed by an essay prompt, a 12-book reading list and a set of deadlines.

Rejection and Acceptance

Cambridge had rejected me, but then Harvard had accepted me. As I saw it, I’d gotten unlucky and then I’d gotten lucky. The acceptance letter hadn’t suddenly transformed me into a world leader, and I didn’t think that Harvard was going to magically turn me into one. The school had given me an opportunity because I had decent grades, was good at writing applications, and happened to fit a profile—a brown British humanities student who likes acting, dancing and drawing—that the admissions office needed to fill.

These kinds of pompous promises of grandeur are widespread at elite American universities, and I, like many people, react badly to them. Why do I react this way? I think it’s because I believe that Harvard’s promise to turn its freshmen into inspiring elites is largely unfulfilled and that it’s an awful mistake to make that promise in the first place.

Almost everyone—even Harvard professors—is in some level of agreement with my first point: Harvard vaguely gestures toward greatness but doesn’t truly encourage it. The college admits a bunch of kids with magnificent dreams and spends four years nudging them toward accumulating gold stars. It doesn’t transform its students into inventors or artists or leaders, helping them turn their dreams into reality. It turns out people who are very good at high-paying roles in the corporate economy—consultant, banker, software engineer. To the extent that Harvard transforms its students, it transforms them into sheep-like, credential-obsessed robots.

This may be strongly stated, but research backs this up. Studies show that graduating from an elite college usually doesn’t lead to higher career earnings or enhanced well-being, that the person you are before entering college “is a better predictor of your future success than the school you graduate from at 22.”

Don’t Spoil the Students

What’s far less common is for anyone inside the university to suggest that Harvard students shouldn’t be taught that they’re special. Even most critics of elite universities assume that these institutions, like any heavy-handed government, should intervene. They argue that top schools shouldn’t leave their young charges vulnerable to the recruiting tactics of Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the rest of the Fortune 500. Instead, they should set out a cohesive vision of greatness for students to aim toward and provide the proper guidance for them to get there.

This is an assumption worth questioning, largely because it’s difficult to even imagine how we could create that kind of environment. As much as the narrative about grooming world leaders and change-makers dominates the websites of elite universities, it is hardly the only, or most important, the purpose of such a school. For an incoming freshman, an Ivy League education is supposed to be many things: a signal of your intelligence, a path to social mobility, an opportunity for a cultural inheritance, a place to find yourself and a place to find your friends. It is, in other words, a bundled product with a jumbled set of functions, and each of those functions will matter more to some kids than others.

This difference in preferences is seen in all aspects of student life. In a typical class at Harvard, or any college, some students are there to satisfy a requirement, some are there because of a genuine interest in the subject, some plan to do further work in the field, some are just looking to get an A. Since students are there for different reasons, it’s impossible for them to get an individually tailored experience. The professors must teach everyone the same way.

Lively Debate? Not Here

The one thing within the professors’ power—indeed, what I would hope they would do—is to ensure that a classroom is a place of lively debate and free inquiry. They can lay down the law on the first day of class: “By all means, bring your politics or identity into the classroom, but you are not allowed to use it to shut someone else up. Every idea is on the table. Political passions or career aspirations can’t get in the way of that.”

This is the kind of classroom experience we should want for students, but fewer and fewer professors provide it. That’s a problem not only at Harvard but at most universities. And the same point applies more broadly: Rather than asking what kind of elite we want to engineer, we should ask, what are the experiences that we want every student at an elite university to have?

Harvard’s focus on the virtues of its students is not only a distraction but also could be damaging. The only experience that is unique to Harvard freshmen is that they attend college with other Harvard freshmen, and that experience is immediately distorted when we teach them to relate to each other as fellow elites.

More importantly, this sadly leads to missed opportunities. One of the craziest things about working on my own projects since the COVID restrictions began has been seeing how easy it is to be paid for something if you have the Harvard badge, the courage of your convictions and the humility to ask. It is a luxurious position to be in, but so many students have not taken the time to figure out how to properly use it. We spend most of our time trying to justify our place at an elite university, rather than taking advantage of it.

Feeling the Pressure

As I see it, the self-image that was imprinted on my Harvard class when we arrived has helped overwhelm many of my peers with anxiety. This is not only anxiety about their grades, but anxiety about their schedules. They feel a constant need to pack their calendars and resumés—the compulsion to classify themselves as an artist, activist, writer, politician—and then to make every second of their time socially, academically and professionally productive.

So, you learn to try out an activity or an idea only if you already believe you’re the best at it, and that’s an extremely high bar for experimenting. You tend to spend your freshman fall signing up for everything, sophomore year desperately trying to keep up, and junior year realizing there wasn’t much benefit in trying. By the time recruitment season rolls around and blue-chip companies start touting their starting salaries and fancy perks, you haven’t found anything else that you’re convinced you could make enough money doing.

It’s unlikely that the best way for Harvard students to accomplish great things is to start by congratulating themselves for being so smart and then spending four years overloading their schedules. Students need time to reflect on why they are learning what they’re learning and doing what they’re doing, and they need a level of confidence—a confidence that can come only from recognizing one’s limitations—that allows each of them to explore outside the classroom.

Hovering over the Kids

But Harvard is basically a massive helicopter parent—and, worse, it’s the annoying helicopter parent who can’t stop talking about how great the children are. In the end, critics argue, too many Harvard students turn into the wrong kind of elites—excellent managers, not inspiring leaders. That may be true, but the real problem is that the students are taking on the self-image of elite status in the first place. We think that by puffing up students we’re making them confident, but we’re actually just making them all feel like frauds.

Harvard needn’t instruct its students to do visionary, purposeful work or indulge them in the idea that they are better or more talented than anyone else. It should be maniacal in its insistence upon open inquiry, decide on a few specific experiences to make compulsory—an experience of vertigo, perhaps—and, mostly, just let the students get on with their lives.

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Saad added, during a telephone interview with the Al Hayah Al Youm program, on Saturday evening, that the vaccination will be free of charge for all public and private university students, school students above 18 years old and teaching staff.

The Cabinet spokesman urged parents to encourage their students to receive the vaccine in order to avoid the panic that happens among them each new wave of the Coronavirus.

He noted that Egypt is still committed to the 18-year-old rule as a minimum limit for vaccination.

Saad stated that a decision will be issued by the Prime Minister to regulate the conditions of those who refuse to receive the vaccine.

He pointed out that compulsory vaccination has previously been applied to the tourism sector, with a positive impact on encouraging the return of foreign tourism.

Egypt is planning to provide coronavirus vaccine to workers, employees, teaching staff and every one belonging to the educational sector ahead of the new school year.

So far, Egypt has reported more than 286,000 coronavirus vases and more than 16,654 deaths.

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The Ministry of Education called for local authorities to offer convenience to exam takers, particularly those with disabilities, and make preparations for potential emergencies, including extreme weather and natural disasters.

Students were reminded to abide by the exam rules and follow COVID-19 containment regulations while sitting the test.

The exam, also known as the Gaokao, is deemed the most important event for Chinese students and hailed as a fair system to select talent. Enditem

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Most of the students jumped over the school fence into the bush and other locations nearby to hide as the gunmen attacked, said Gambo Isah, the state police spokesperson, in an interview with Xinhua via telephone.

Isah said some “bandits” attacked on Friday night the Government Boys Science Secondary School which is located on the outskirts of Kankara town of the state.

Earlier reports indicated that some students might have been abducted during the attack which lasted about an hour.

Isah said the police and school authorities were working together to find out the exact number of students that have not returned.

“So, this morning the Divisional Police Officer found over 200 of the students and returned them back to the school,” he said.

“We are still counting the figures in order to ascertain whether or not actually the bandits were able to kidnap any of the students,” said Isah.

According to the police spokesperson, no student was killed during the Friday night attack, noting that the gunmen in their numbers attacked the school with dangerous weapons.

He added that the gunmen shot at one of the security guards at the gate who is presently under treatment.

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“As of Friday 2 October, we can confirm that we are aware of 770 Northumbria University students who have tested positive for Covid-19 of whom 78 are symptomatic,” a spokesperson from the university said.

“These students are all now self-isolating. Their flatmates and any close contacts are also self-isolating for 14 days in line with government guidance.”

The university said that they were providing students with food during their self-isolation.

Cllr Irim Ali, Newcastle City Council cabinet member for Neighbourhoods and Public Health, said the universities had gone to great lengths to protect students from viruses but said that “a small number of students are undermining these efforts”.

Cases have been increasing significantly in the United Kingdom over the past few weeks, with nearly 7,000 cases in 24 hours on Friday.

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Nearly 1 million students took the exams between February and March, and nearly 350,000 failed, causing widespread protests from parents, student groups and political parties.

One student named Sirisha was failing biology and set herself on fire at her home in the Narayanpet district on Saturday after her parents went out to the fields, according to Khaleejtimes.

On Thursday, Chief Minister K. Chandrashekhar Rao ordered the recounting and re-verification for all the students who failed their exams, while urging the students to not commit suicide, adding that failing the tests didn’t mean the end of their lives.

According to the parents, what caused students to commit suicide was an error on the part of the software solutions firm, Globarena Technologies Private Limited, which had been hired by Telagana BIE to develop software for processing admissions, pre-examination and post-examination results.

A three-member panel consisting of G.T. Venkateswar Rao, Managing Director, Telangana State Technological Service, A. Vassan of BITS Hyderabad and Nishanth Dongari of IIT Hyderabad, submitted its report on Thursday to B. Janardhan Reddy, Secretary, Higher Education, Government of Telangana, which looked into Globarena Technologies. They also made recommendations to avoid examination lapses in the future, according to Khaleejtimes

12 BIE centers are currently in the process of evaluating the answer sheets of the failed students, says Khaleetimes, with each one handling between 70,000 to 120,000.

Reddy told Khaleejtimes they are still receiving applications and more than 50,000 students who passed also applied for re-verification because they weren’t satisfied with their results.

The BIE says they have manpower to handle all the new tests, and they would release a daily bulletin on the status of those needing re-verification.

Answers were still wanted by the students and parents, who protested about the lack of information on the re-verification process. They wanted free re-verification for all of the students. According to Khaleejtimes they were denied entry to BIE offices by the local police.

“Why should we pay fee for the blunders committed by them?” a student told Khaleejtimes.

The student groups also asked for 25 lakh ($36,000) as compensation for the families of each student who committed suicide.

In 2017, both the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana regions of India saw more than 50 suicides by students between September and October.

On Friday, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) issued a notice to the Telangana government, seeking a detailed report by the Board.

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