Is South Korea doing enough to retain homegrown talent?

Despite the travel restrictions that affected researcher relocation during the COVID-19 pandemic, South Korea has remained attractive to international talent, although at a slightly lower rate than before. According to an analysis carried out for the Nature Index South Korea supplement by the League of Scholars, an academic data and recruitment company in Sydney, Australia, it is estimated that just over 3% of all the academics working in the country between 2021 and 2024 were from overseas. By contrast, in the same period fewer than half that proportion of all academics living in the US had moved there from overseas (1.3%). Movement into South Korea is slightly down from 2017 to 2020, where this metric was estimated to be from 4.3% to 4.9%, significantly higher than the global average for this period of 3.7%.

Although the past few years appear to have shown a slowdown in researcher mobility into South Korea, some academic institutions managed to grab a bigger slice of this inbound talent than before the pandemic. With the exception of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) in Daejeon, whose share of researchers from outside the country dropped from ~6.9% to ~4.5% between the two periods of 2017–20 and 2021–24, all of the top five institutions in South Korea for share of inbound talent have boosted their percentage.

Citations data analysed by the League of Scholars indicate that researchers relocating to South Korea from abroad tend to outperform peers who have only ever been affiliated with South Korean institutions. Academics who moved to South Korea between 2021 and 2024 had a median number of lifetime citations that was 22% higher than their counterparts who had always been based in the country. These scholars also had a median annualized h-index that was 14% higher than their domestic-based peers.

The government in South Korea appears to be making an effort to make the country more appealing to international scientists. In August, plans were announced to offer science postgraduate students and PhD holders from abroad a fast track to permanent residency and citizenship. The government also increased its budget for global research and development (R&D) collaboration from 1.6% (in 2023) to 6.8% of its overall R&D budget, to a total of 1.8 trillion won (US$1.3 billion). South Korea is also the first Asian country to join the world’s largest research-funding scheme, the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme, a move that could diversify South Korea’s internationally collaborative outputs in the Nature Index, which are currently dominated by connections with US institutions .

It comes at a time where South Korean universities are facing a steep decline in university enrolment, which is putting some universities at risk of closure. Analysis by a Seoul-based network of private tutoring colleges, Jongro Academy, showed that 51 out of 195 Korean universities had failed to fill their enrolment quotas for this year. The number of foreign students returning to their home country after graduation in South Korea has also consistently increased, from 40.9% in 2016 to 62.0% in 2021.

No return

At the same time as enrolments at South Korean universities come under pressure, a rising proportion of South Korea-based scholars appear to be leaving the country.

According to League of Scholars data, 9.2% of South Korea-based academics relocated overseas between 2021 and 2024, up by 2 percentage points from 2017 to 2020.

The researchers that relocated from South Korea between 2021 and 2024 moved to more than 80 different countries, the top choices being the United States, the United Kingdom and India. The proportion of South Korea-based researchers moving to the United States increased by 9 percentage points compared with the period from 2017 to 2020, while the UK’s share dropped from 15.3% to 5.2%.

The exact reasons why more South Korean researchers are relocating are unclear, but factors might include the pressures on higher education and the lure of funding offered by overseas institutions. Gender disparity in South Korea might also be influencing researcher movement. In 2024 it was found the average government grant won by a woman in South Korea is worth just 41% of that won by a man. Of the principal investigators on government-funded research projects only 18% are women. Compare this to the United States, where, between 2016 and 2020, the number of female-identifying principal investigators (PIs) funded by the National Institutes of Health was 26,603, just over 36% of the total number of individual PIs funded.

To incentivize local students to continue their careers in research, the South Korean Ministry of Education has announced new initiatives, including annual financial support for master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers as part of the overall R&D budget of 2024.

To address the flow of foreign students out the country, the government is hoping to retain international talent using initiatives such as the Brain Pool programme, through which doctoral researchers can access up to 300 million won annually for three years. For outstanding researchers in core technology fields, Brain Pool Plus offers up to 600 million won every year for up to ten years.

The future of the academic workforce in South Korea will be a core theme of an 'Index Live' conference being held at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology in Daejeon, South Korea, on 5 February, 2025. See here for details and registration.