By Andrei Lankov

In May 1961, a military coup took place in Seoul. It brought to power a group of young military officers, tough and efficient believers in the power of order.

They began their rule with an attempt to right all the wrongs they perceived in Korean society, and one of the junta's first laws dealt with education. Among other things, the 1961 Law on Education introduced a strict set of quotas on student numbers.

It was stated that the number of students in the colleges and universities nationwide should go down.

This was part of an uphill battle South Korean governments had fought from at least 1955, when President Syngman Rhee issued his special decree on college-level education.

The 1955 decree aimed at restricting the growth of student numbers and enforcing higher educational standards. It was met with disgust and outrage, sabotaged by university bureaucracies, and finally failed. It was a sign of things to come.

But why were such measures necessary? The centuries of life in a Confucian society produced among Koreans a truly unique cult of education. The experiences of the modern era also demonstrated that a university degree was a sure pass to a middle-class lifestyle.

Indeed, until recently the wage differential between white collar and blue collar jobs in Korea was great, and a university graduation certificate virtually ensured that its holder would get a well-paying white collar job.

Thus, nearly all Korean families came to the conclusion that putting their children (initially sons, but from the 1970s daughters as well) at a university was the best way to guarantee their future.

This produced an explosive growth in education. In 1943, there were 9,500 college students in Korea (and most of them were Japanese). Merely 1,400 of them were university students, while the others attended ``professional schools," analogous to junior colleges.

In 1950, the number of college and university students reached 30,000. During the Korean War it remained stable for a while, but even then new schools were established. After 1953 growth resumed, so around 1960 there were 90,000 students nationwide.

This growth made the government uneasy, since it was clear that there was no guarantee of quality jobs for that number of prospective graduates in such a poor country (in those days South Korea's per capita GNP was below that of Nigeria and Papua New Guinea).

It also seems that the government worried about the political consequences of the situation. University graduates who would not be able to get jobs they considered themselves worthy of could easily become a major subversive force within society.

This danger appeared even greater because only a year had passed since the student-started April Revolution of 1960.

By the early 1960s, university students had already acquired a reputation as a militantly anti-government and pro-democracy force (the passionate love affair of the student movement with a more nationalist version of Juche Stalinism did not begin until the late 1980s).

At first, the military government undertook radical measures and for a while it appeared that the new reforms would not end in the same failure as those initiated by Syngman Rhee in 1955.

The new minister of education proclaimed that the number of students would be cut, the less successful colleges would be closed, and strict standards of the quality education would be applied nationwide.

Indeed, in September 1961, the reform dramatically reduced the size of the campuses. Before the reforms there were 71 universities and colleges with 91,540 students, but after only 44 schools with 55,410 students remained.

However, reaction to the plan produced was outrage, and it was opposed with determined resistance _ much like the fate that befell Syngman Rhee's program of 1955. Nobody wanted this reduction, the faculty and parents of future students in particular.

Thus, in 1962 the program was scaled down, and by 1964 the student numbers had risen to their previous level. The military government could send dissenters to prisons, build state-of-the-art factories in the middle of nowhere, play sophisticated diplomatic games with the U.S.

But it could not stand in the path of its people's desire for university education or at least a university diploma!

So, the growth continued. By 1975 the number of students had tripled, reaching 296,000. The growth did not stop, over the next 15 years the number of college students increased fourfold, reaching one million.

Even another half-hearted attempt to halt the growth, undertaken in the early 1980s, failed to change the situation.

Frankly, the worries of the governments proved to be unsubstantiated. The explosive growth of the university sector did not produce crowds of well-educated beggars and janitors.

Nobody expected in the early 1960s that the South Korean economy was on the verge of experiencing one of the longest boom eras in modern history. However, this is what happened, and the growing economy provided the graduates with a sufficient number of decent jobs.

Still, the quality issue remained serious. Korean universities suffer from numerous problems, which prevent them from becoming truly world-class institutions. There are exceptions, however, but I will tell of these success stories at a later date.

Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul.