Funding Without Philosophy: The Limits of Busan’s RISE Program

Busan, South Korea — As South Korea’s second-largest city faces a shrinking youth population and the slow erosion of its industrial base, Busan has turned to its universities as engines of regional revitalization. The recently launched Busan-style RISE (Regional Innovation System for Education) initiative promises to synchronize higher education with industrial needs, entrepreneurial energy, and local employment. With 134.1 billion KRW earmarked for the first year alone, and 20 universities selected to participate, the project is one of the city’s most ambitious educational investments in decades.

Why RISE Might Miss the Mark

Yet beneath the surface of policy optimism lies a troubling question: What exactly is Busan investing in? In a region where many universities suffer from declining enrollment, overlapping missions, and diminished teaching quality, RISE risks becoming a lifeline without direction—a generous financial intervention untethered from any real vision for academic renewal.

Many of the participating institutions, particularly those focused on "lifestyle," "tourism," or vague industry clusters, appear to be repurposing themselves as policy delivery vehicles rather than educational institutions. Their proposals are heavy on keywords and light on substance. At the same time, Busan’s core issue—its lack of high-quality, future-oriented jobs—remains unsolved. Training more graduates in fields with no real labor market is not innovation; it is repetition.

Moreover, the management of RISE by a newly created public unit, the Busan RISE Innovation Institute, raises concerns about governance capacity. Does the local government possess the philosophical, academic, and strategic expertise to shape the future of higher education? So far, the evidence is thin. The “regional innovation” language of official documents often reads as a checklist of buzzwords, rather than a grounded, mission-driven plan.

At a time when Busan needs fewer universities but better ones, RISE appears to be doing the opposite: funding a fragmented and overloaded system in the hope that quantity will somehow yield quality. It is a high-stakes gamble — one that could either set a new standard for localized education reform, or entrench the very inefficiencies it claims to solve.

What Problem Is RISE Trying to Solve?

On paper, the RISE initiative is designed to tackle several urgent challenges: youth outmigration, university irrelevance, and local economic stagnation. The underlying idea is sound — integrate local universities into the economic and social fabric of the city, transforming them from ivory towers into hubs of innovation, employment, and community development.

But here’s the dilemma: Busan’s actual bottleneck is not a shortage of university programs — it is a shortage of high-quality, future-ready jobs. No matter how many new majors are created in “bio-wellness,” “digital lifestyle,” or “tourism tech,” the fact remains that most graduates are funneled into either low-growth service sectors or migrate to Seoul and the capital region in search of better opportunities.

Adding to this is the crisis of higher education redundancy. Busan already has more than 20 universities, many offering overlapping programs with little differentiation. Student numbers are in decline, and teaching quality in many mid-to-low tier institutions is under scrutiny. Yet, instead of confronting the difficult conversation about mergers, closures, or structural reform, the RISE program chooses to inject money into every corner of this overextended ecosystem.

Rather than creating fewer but stronger institutions, RISE may be entrenching a landscape of mediocrity, where funding is diluted across too many actors, and innovation is sacrificed for administrative balance.

The program's success metrics — including localized employment rates, university-led startups, and collaboration with local firms — are quantifiable but not transformative. They measure activity, not impact. Without addressing deeper systemic issues, these indicators risk becoming self-justifying loops, where the appearance of motion is mistaken for progress.

Who Holds the Steering Wheel? Governance Without Pedagogy

A critical blind spot in the RISE initiative lies in its governance structure. While the rhetoric of “local autonomy” and “university-region synergy” is appealing, the hard question remains: 

Is the Busan city government equipped to shape the future of higher education?

To date, there is little evidence to suggest that local governments — including Busan — have either the philosophical depth or policy expertise required to oversee complex university reform. Most city administrations have focused on industrial development, infrastructure, and urban management. Education, especially tertiary education, has traditionally fallen under national jurisdiction and philosophical stewardship — not just budgetary logistics.

The newly created Busan RISE Innovation Institute, a municipal sub-agency tasked with overseeing the program, further underscores this concern. Staffed primarily by policy managers and strategic planners, the Institute appears to function more as a program coordination office than a genuine think tank for higher education renewal. Its mandate spans evaluation rubrics, local cluster networking, and administrative support, but lacks the intellectual architecturenecessary for reshaping curriculum, pedagogy, or academic vision.

This disconnect poses a long-term risk: when education policy becomes a grant management exercise, universities may chase funding rather than purpose. Already, many RISE proposals from participating universities seem to function as ritualistic applications for budget support, rather than meaningful blueprints for educational reinvention.

Without independent oversight, deep academic consultation, or ties to pedagogical research, RISE may replicate the very institutional fatigue it hopes to overcome.

Degrees Without Demand: The Labor Market Mismatch

At the heart of the RISE program’s optimism lies a fragile assumption: that funneling students through “industry-aligned” university tracks will naturally lead to meaningful employment. But in Busan — a city facing both aging demographicsand a chronic shortage of high-quality, future-facing jobs — this logic collapses under scrutiny.

Busan’s economy, historically reliant on manufacturing, port logistics, and tourism, has struggled to transition toward high-value digital or advanced industrial sectors. Despite attempts to rebrand the city as a "global hub," many of the city’s top talents continue to migrate to Seoul or abroad, seeking better career pathways. Even as local universities churn out graduates with degrees in “biohealth,” “digital content,” and “marine mobility,” the number of stable, growth-oriented positions in these fields remains severely limited.

This mismatch is compounded by duplicative specialization. Among the 20 RISE-funded universities, dozens are proposing overlapping programs in generic sectors — AI, tourism, wellness, cultural content — without sufficient differentiation or proven local demand. In effect, the city is producing supply without strategy, leaving students with degrees that struggle to find resonance in the real economy.

Moreover, with declining school-age populations, the structural oversupply of university seats in Busan is already unsustainable. Rather than consolidating resources, RISE appears to preserve the illusion of institutional vitality, propping up under-enrolled universities through short-term funding instead of long-term reform.

If left unchecked, this dynamic will not only burden the city with poorly allocated public funds — it will also risk reinforcing the very cycle of disillusionment and brain drain that has long plagued Busan’s educational landscape.

Toward a Smarter Model

For Busan to move beyond the surface-level ambition of the RISE program, what it truly needs is not another funding-driven campaign but a long-term vision rooted in educational coherence, urban strategy, and institutional sustainability. The current model, which disperses resources across a broad set of loosely defined projects and overstretched institutions, risks reinforcing fragmentation rather than cultivating resilience.

A first and foundational step is the rethinking of institutional structure itself. The fact that 20 universities — many of them struggling with low enrollment and unclear academic identity — are part of the same initiative points to a fundamental redundancy in the system. Consolidation, not in the form of administrative merger alone but through functional specialization and coordinated ecosystem design, would allow for more efficient allocation of resources and a sharper focus on quality education. Rather than attempting to sustain every institution, the city could support a select few to grow into regional anchors with internationally competitive programs.

Equally important is a shift in how success is defined. Currently, universities are incentivized to draft grant applications that check bureaucratic boxes but rarely reflect long-term commitment to educational excellence. Funding should be tied not to enrollment figures or MOU counts, but to clear, tangible outcomes — the employability of graduates in local industries, the depth and originality of research contributions, and the ability to foster critical thinking and civic capacity in students.

The question of relevance is also paramount. Many RISE projects invoke fashionable terms like "AI" or "wellness" with little grounding in the city’s actual needs. Instead, higher education should be tightly woven into the fabric of Busan’s existing strengths — its ports, its marine economy, its design and tourism heritage, and its aging population. Curricula and research agendas must be shaped in close collaboration with local employers, not through one-sided academic planning or symbolic partnerships.

Concerns also arise from the program’s governance. Entrusting the implementation of such a critical, citywide educational strategy to a semi-public administrative body with little public scrutiny or academic legitimacy risks turning the entire project into a procedural exercise. True reform requires that governance be participatory and informed by domain expertise. Planning for Busan’s higher education future should involve not just municipal officers and institutional administrators, but also students, teachers, researchers, labor representatives, and urban development experts.

Above all, what is lacking is philosophical clarity. The RISE program, while well-intentioned, has yet to articulate a coherent theory of change. What kind of society does Busan envision for itself in the post-industrial, post-growth era? What role should universities play in nurturing that vision? And how can education become not just a pipeline to jobs, but a foundation for collective agency, innovation, and dignity?

Without honest answers to these questions, the city risks building structures with no soul, and funding projects with no compass. It is not enough to raise investment; we must also raise the level of discourse.