A poster of Spring 2021’s Mason Korea Community Meeting
Photo Credit: GMU Korea
There have been many issues regarding tuition and scholarships among Mason Korea students. The tuition for a full-time student at Mason Korea is $20,000 a year. For many students, it can be difficult to receive additional scholarships after entering the school. However, as many students wished, during the Community Meeting held on 7 April 2021 and followed by an interview with Yorgun Marcel, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs, the topic of tuition and scholarship were discussed. During these discussions, it was revealed that Mason Korea is trying to consider students’ situations and provide more scholarship opportunities to students to support them every year.
In the Community Meeting, Dean Marcel said Mason Korea’s tuition has not changed since the opening of the school in 2014 and maintained $ 10,000 for a full-time load even though other universities on the IGC campus and George Mason University have increased their tuition. Considering that Mason Korea students are receiving a George Mason University degree, not George Mason University Korea degrees, students could receive the same degree as their Fairfax peers for about $16,000 less each year.
Still, Korean students might feel paying $ 20,000 for a year is expensive for them when comparing the cost of tuition with universities in Korea. However, Dean Marcel emphasized that it is incorrect to compare the price of tuition of Mason Korea to universities in Korea. Instead we should compare the cost of tuition with other American university tuition rates. According to bigfuture.collegeboard.org, the average published yearly tuition and fees in private four-year colleges is about $32,410. Compared to this, paying $20,000 for a year to receive a GMU degree seems more reasonable than originally discussed.
However, considering students’ requests and circumstances, Mason Korea is trying to provide more scholarships every year. “We have increased the amounts of scholarships and the amount of dollars students can receive,” said Dean Marcel in the interview and also in the Community Meeting. In fact, since the school opened, many new scholarships have been introduced to assist students. More recently, the university began providing Fairfax Progression Scholarships for students transitioning to Fairfax to offset the cost of US tuition prices which Mason Korea had worked for 2 years and introduced in 2018 – which made the total cost of scholarship Mason Korea grant became similar to Fairfax’s – as well as the MK-IBK scholarship introduced in 2020 – the first private endowment in the university’s history. Additionally, in Spring of 2020, the university began allowing students to “stack” scholarships on Merit Scholarships and Leadership Scholarships, meaning they could receive more than one form of financial assistance.
Dean Marcel also explained that 50% of Mason Korea students are currently receiving scholarships and compared to the 41% receiving in 2017, it is a substantial increase about 126 more Mason Korea students are receiving scholarships considering the growth of the student body. Moreover, on the contrary to the past that Resident Advisors, Patriot Activities Council and Chingu Programs were just the volunteers in the past, they can receive Community Service Scholarships from 2019, as well as students entering Mason Korea receiving Entrance Scholarships percentage were increased from 26% in 2019 to 38.5% in Spring 2021.
In the future, Mason Korea students will be able to get 50 pages free printing quota per semester as Mason Korea is working with the IT department. In the interview, Dean Marcel also implied that there would be new scholarships in three areas announced after this Spring Break. With regard to Korean National Scholarships and National Student Loans, Dean Marcel explained that Mason Korea is currently communicating with Korean government regularly to help Mason Korea students receive those benefits, but it is hard to make it because it requires changing Korean national laws. Furthermore, he said that Mason Korea will keep working on it, but also students need to be vocal about it to the Korean government to make it happen.
Dean Marcel expressed that it is hard to decide what to do, and how to distribute the scholarships to the students in the interview. However, he emphasizes that Mason Korea will keep trying to figure it out as he says “We will always try to find ways to grow whether it is the amount of money that students can receive or to grow the number of students that are eligible to receive scholarships”. Also, Dean Marcel referred that Mason Korea created the Care and Conduct Coordinator and hired the employee to track the data and let students know about the scholarship information in a concise presentation. And he says Mason Korea will be getting better at this.
The Community Meeting following the Town Hall Meeting was the event that the office of Student Affairs could provide overall information about tuition and scholarships to Mason Korea students such as why the tuition is agreeable, what kind of scholarships the university is working on. This Community Meeting highlighted that students and the university can go along and solve the problems together. And to make it more happen, Dean Marcel said to the students “Let’s go on the same page”. As it was a good start in the Community Meeting held in April 2021, the next Community Meeting which will be held on 12 May 2021 is also expected to be the place where Mason Korea and students can communicate and have the same page.
Sunbin Kim, Staff Writer
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