World noticed Korea's chip schools before Korea did
· UPISEOUL, Aug. 4 (UPI) -- Korea's newspapers and broadcasters have flooded the airwaves lately with the country's semiconductor Meister high schools, apparently alert at last to their worth as the chip industry's base.
The honest account is less flattering: The domestic press stirred only after The New York Times, one of the world's leading papers, reported on Chungbuk Semiconductor High School in a small Korean town, and then the others scrambled to catch up. It is not a proud moment for Korean journalism.
The school, in Eumseong County, North Chungcheong Province, enrolls nearly 300 students and is the oldest of the country's four semiconductor Meister high schools. In a rural town far from Seoul, it long went unnoticed -- until, almost overnight, it filled broadcasts and front pages after appearing in The Times on June 26.
Nor did the interest stop there. While the Korean media looked elsewhere, visitors from abroad -- reportedly a Chinese state broadcaster among them -- came to study the school in detail. Such visits are said to continue, bent on tracing the boom's sources and learning its model.
The draw is plain: six simulated fabrication centers, partnerships with chip firms, a placement rate near 96%, an all-resident student body. Its principal speaks of a graduate barely a year into work who earned a bonus larger than his own salary -- leaving him proud and a little rueful.
It is, admittedly, an unlikely subject for a great international paper -- a high school, not a university or research institute. Yet, schools like this have long supplied Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and other top chipmakers with skilled young talent, cultivating early the workforce every industry rests on.
The two giants are not alone. Foreign chip and equipment makers court these graduates. too. Proof lies in the school's 118 placement agreements across chip manufacturing, testing and maintenance, Samsung, SK Hynix and U.S. chipmaker onsemi among them -- far more than its nearly 100 graduates a year can fill.
Graduates, then, do not worry about work. Jobs await them anywhere, the pay is substantial and the industry's bonuses -- often dwarfing base salaries -- have become the talk of the country. Small wonder the admissions briefings overflow, with parents' and students' cars packing the cramped yard. Competition climbs yearly, entrance scores keep rising, and the school has quietly become a new elite institution.
Founded in 1969 as Mugeuk Comprehensive High School, it became a specialized school for semiconductor equipment in 2006, was renamed Chungbuk Semiconductor High School in 2008 and made a Meister school in 2010 -- a category created to train tailored talent for specific industries.
Its departments in semiconductor manufacturing, equipment and chemicals let students work on donated industry equipment in facilities built to mirror a real chip plant. Their futures secured from enrollment, they study hard -- beginning marathon 12-hour job sessions some three months before graduation, and each October presenting year-long team projects under a supervising teacher.
This year, it added "project classes," in which students tackle real problems set by chip companies. Structured like a quiz, the program builds early ties to industry: a firm sets a theme in March, students work six months and then present to the whole school in October. Given a prompt, like designing a bottle cap that ketchup will not cling to, they do the research, design and prototyping themselves. Teachers say it readies them for the problems awaiting on the factory floor.
Tuition and dormitory fees are waived for all, and special hiring tracks exist. For the Samsung Meister scholarship, 15 second-year students were chosen this year based on their grades. Recipients join internships, receive up to 5 million won over two years and are assured a job on graduation. Some 30 second- and third-year students are now enrolled.
SK Hynix, too, holds annual special-recruitment rounds, weighing grades through the second year alongside its "Young Meister" certification in technical qualifications, service and language.
A scene now familiar here: a graduate who earned a bonus in the hundreds of thousands of dollars returning to pick up the tab for younger students' meals. Unlike at ordinary schools, loyalty running from school to company and back binds alumni and students.
Chungbuk is not alone. In March, the former Daegu Electronics Technical High School became Daegu Semiconductor Meister High School -- the first of its kind in the Daegu and North Gyeongsang region. It enrolls some 498 students under 66 teachers, about one for every eight, a ratio that says much about the teaching.
First-year students take common semiconductor coursework and then choose a track in chip manufacturing or equipment, drilling into process control, production and quality management, equipment fabrication and maintenance. Here, too, teenagers train -- from their high school years -- in exactly the fields their work will demand.
None of this denies the doubts. Chipmaking is capital-intensive, not labor-intensive, and as its processes automate, skeptics warn, jobs may shrink rather than grow; even now the boom's heat scarcely reaches the subcontractors at the industry's edge.
The caution is fair, but it misreads what these schools are for. Even if the head count narrows, the work that remains falls to the most skilled hands, and those are the hands that these schools train. Automation raises the bar; it does not remove the ladder.
For all the focus on semiconductors, Korea has some 60 Meister high schools training talent this way across advanced fields -- IT, software, biotechnology, energy -- cultivating the foundational workforce early through partnerships with industry.
The country's high-tech ascent rests precisely on this specialized education, layered from the lowest rung to the highest. The gaze from abroad fell only on chips; unnoticed at home, saplings like these are growing sturdily nationwide. That, in the end, may be Korea's true strength.
Nohsok Choi is the former chief editor of the Kyunghyang Shinmun and former Paris correspondent. He serves as president of the Kyunghyang Shinmun Alumni Association, president of the Korean Media & Culture Forum and CEO of the YouTube channel One World TV. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.