South Korea’s Ministry of Education used its September 8 policy announcement to shift the national international student strategy from growth to quality control, and agents are one of the areas of the targets. Having hit 307,464 international students in 2026, a year ahead of its “Study Korea 300K” goal, the ministry is now less focused on volume and more focused on who is bringing those students in, and how.
The headline measure for agents is a standard contract template that the ministry will distribute to universities in October 2026, governing the university–agency relationship directly. Under the template, agencies and universities must give accurate information about programs, degrees, and the conditions for working while studying, and misleading advertising is explicitly prohibited. Agencies will be required to submit information to universities on request, with universities taking on responsibility for monitoring their own agents’ conduct. Students must also be told in advance about tuition refund procedures, methods, and amounts, a direct response to the refund disputes that have dogged the sector.
This isn’t just guidance. The ministry plans to amend the Higher Education Act to make these provisions mandatory and to create legal grounds for corrective orders when they’re breached, backing the standard contract with enforcement teeth rather than leaving it as a voluntary code.
The other agent related piece is credential verification. The ministry will issue guidelines for verifying overseas academic credentials through the Korea Academic Recognition Information Center, and expand consulting support for universities. Ths is a response to cases of students enrolling on falsified degree certificates, which links to weak points in the agent application pipeline.
These agent-specific rules sit inside a much larger tightening. Universities will face an overhauled IEQAS certification regime between 2029 and 2032, with mandatory quality indicators; required language proficiency thresholds rise from 40% to 60% by 2030; and financially distressed or underperforming institutions will lose visa issuance rights, building on the visa curbs already imposed on 20 universities earlier this year over poor oversight of international students.
While the detail of the changes is not yet known it seems clear that in terms of education agent regulation Korea is following the example of other international student destination countries in making educational institutions, not just the agent, accountable for agent conduct.
Sources: Chosun Biz, Korea Herald, Seoul Economic Daily
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