Six hagwon franchises, including Wall Street Institute Korea, were slapped with fines yesterday for misrepresenting fees or issuing false ads.
The Korean Fair Trade Commission ordered them to pay a total of 167 million won in fines, a month after President Lee Myung-bak called for measures to curb excessive hagwon fees.
Five hagwon chains specializing in preparing students for admission to elite high schools were found to have coerced its offline students to take online courses as well.
A Ferma Edu branch in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, for instance, charges 88,000 won for an offline math course for eighth graders. But it required students signing up for its offline lessons to pay for its 182,000-won online courses as well.
Wall Street Institute Korea advertised a three-month course that did not exist for 1.55 million won to delude students to think it was giving a 46 percent discount for its nine-month program at 2.49 million won, the FTC said.
Four other hagwon issued false ads saying they had the largest number of elite high school students.
Some 66,421 people were found to be paying for lessons at 168 branches of the six chains - Ferma Edu, Topia Education, JLS, Yes Youngdo and Koreapolyschool - which teach elementary through high school students, and WSI which teaches adults English.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Six English hagwon franchises fined.
From the Korea Herald, "The Nation's No. 1 English Newspaper" that you can't link to and from which you have to pay to read poorly-formatted articles over two weeks old:
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6 comments:
Unrelated to your post, but I couldn't think of anywhere better to put this -- the government of Kazakhstan will introduce a TOEFL-type test for Kazakh. By itself that's nothing big, but apparently taking the test will be "required at employment starting in 2010".
Didn't you post an article a few months ago that involved some folks lamenting how the younger generation don't speak Korean as well as they should? (I believe the proposed remedy was to place more emphasis on hanja in school.) I imagine some Koreans (say, linguistic purists) would enjoy having Korean-language test (TOPIK?) scores required for jobs, although this would most likely kill (or seriously dent) the EFL industry in the country.
I'm a national manager with WSI Korea. I can tell you for a fact that the "fine" that the FTC issued WSI Korea is in fact, completely false and BS. We were not fined, in fact in our hearing the 8 judges of the FTC dismissed all of the prosecutors charges against us. The only "fine" we received was a 10 million KRW "saving face" fine. This was announced by the FTC the day before they made this media release saying we had "broken" these rules.
The way our academic program (which is based on both linguistic theory and the psychology of learning, designed by people with PhDs in linguistics) works is that it is designed to be a long-term process. The majority of our students sign 1 to 2 year contracts because they will see few results from just 3 months. The 3 month contract is only recommended for students who want an extremely intensive program. So, students can sign a 3 month contract, but they receive discounts if they sign for longer. However, if they sign for longer and decide to quit after just 3 months, they cannot get a full refund. This is because they would have received a discount for signing a long-term contract and only studied for 3 months at a cheaper price if they had just signed up for a 3 month course. From a business perspective this is bad for us as we lose money.
Our pricing system and refund policy is standard at all of our centers worldwide (400 centers in 30 countries around the world). We are seriously considering filing charges against the FTC and have consulted our attorneys as to what our next course of action will be.
WSI Korea prides itself as being the most professionally run private language institute in Korea. In under 5 years we have grown to become the largest private English language company in Korea catering to adults based on our sales figures. We are one of the most successful brances of WSI throughout the world and both WSI International and the Carlyle Group (who own WSI International) could not be more pleased with our results.
Neil, thanks for the visit and the comment.
Paul, thanks for that, I might post about it tomorrow. Does that extend to foreigners, too?
I posted a little about the declining Korean-language proficiency in July: http://briandeutsch.blogspot.com/2008/07/korean-language-proficiency-drops.html
It'd be really unrealistic to force foreigners here to speak Korean in order to get jobs, but to have it as a requirement for citizenship would be perfectly fine. I'd love to see Korean-language proficiency rewarded more in my line of work, because it definitely comes in handy. But, for Korean-language proficiency to be graded and rewarded there also needs to be opportunities to learn it. The demand must not be there, though, because there are just about no opportunities around oustide of self-study.
hah. I used to work for a POLY school.
I'm not sure if the upcoming Kazakh law applies to foreigners or not. During the Soviet Era I know that a lot of Russians moved to the other SSRs and the central government promoted Russian at the expense of local languages; my guess is that this law is aimed at Russian transplants who never bothered to learn Kazakh. (i.e., "We won't kick you out, but we won't let you get a job here, either.")
I know when Latvia declared independence from the USSR in 1991 they immediately stripped citizenship from anyone who couldn't pass a Latvian fluency test -- if I remember correctly, something like 35-40% of the population lost their citizenship.
I agree with it being fine to have Korean proficiency tied to citizenship. Given the limited resources available when it comes to studying Korean though, it would be pretty much impossible to require English teachers to be proficient in Korean before arrival. I suppose it's a bit easier for folks living in the main districts of Seoul (Jongno, Gangnam, and Hongdae), but only if you know where to look or have someone willing to help you find a school. Having rewards for Korean-language proficiency sounds great in theory, but I can only imagine what a headache implementation would be ...
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