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Built on 1,500 acres of land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea off Incheon, about 35 miles from South Korea's capital, New Songdo City is billed as the largest private real-estate development in history. It is Korea's answer to Shanghai and Dubai. Estimates put the cost of the Songdo project, which is barely five years old, at up to $60-billion. The city's centerpiece is Songdo Global University Campus, a collaborative attempt to blend Korean, American, and European academic strengths. The founders broke ground in May and at least two American partners, North Carolina State University and the State University New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook have each received $1-million in planning money to help develop undergraduate programs. Both colleges view Songdo as a local recruitment hub. SUNY at Stony Brook currently attracts 2,000 students from Asia. The model for the Global University Campus is similar to Qatar's Education City, in which American universities will offer undergraduate programs inside a single campus, while administering them separately. Campus developers predict it will enroll 12,000 students by 2012. SUNY at Stony Brook will initially offer four undergraduate engineering programs, along with a business and a technology-management program. Students will be given an opportunity to study at the U.S. campus as well. Several more partners, including the University of Delaware, the University of Southern California, and George Mason University have signed agreements to start faculty and student exchanges, and, eventually, collaborative research projects. Moscow State University, Glion Institute of Higher Education, in Switzerland; the University of Surrey, in England; and Monash University, in Australia, have also been linked by the Korean media to the project. Songdo's American partners say that despite the potential difficulties, they are in for the long haul.

For government officials in South Korea, it's a vision worth savoring: Within the next decade, South Korea becomes Southeast Asia's top higher-education destination, poaching thousands of Chinese, Indian, and Japanese students from American universities and overtaking rivals Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. The higher-education system's historical insularity fades away. A handful of South Korean universities climb into the premier global academic league. Local students elect to stay at home to attend a branch campus of an American college. Grandiose visions of the future often evaporate in the heat of an economic meltdown, and this one has its share of skeptics. Yet amid the wreckage of Asia's worst slump since World War II, the South Korean government is powering ahead with plans to transform the nation's higher-education system. South Korea has signed pledges of cooperation with American colleges and lured hundreds of foreign professors to what was once considered an educational backwater. The government believes it can propel its best universities into the world's top 50 and stem the flow of students out of the country. These plans, including a state-backed project to build a new "global" university from scratch in partnership with up to half a dozen American institutions, will not be affected by the recession, claim their architects. South Korea has pledged about $600-million over the next five years to its World Class University project, a ministry-of-education-led bid to raise the quality of research at 30 universities. Nine Nobel Prize winners, including the 2006 chemistry laureate Roger D. Kornberg, are among the 81 foreign researchers set to take positions in the country. BrainKorea21, a project aimed at creating "centers of excellence" in information technology, bioengineering, and other "knowledge-based" fields, has been promised $2.3-billion before 2012, in addition to the $1.4-billion invested from 1999-2005. Critics remain unconvinced, however, that these strategies will help South Korea overcome a crippling handicap in original research.

It is too early to predict enrollment numbers for international students in the United States this fall, but universities in Asia are already seeing big declines among South Koreans studying abroad. The value of South Korea's currency has dropped sharply in recent months, almost doubling the cost of living abroad for South Korean students and throwing their budgets into disarray. It has since started to bounce back but remains volatile. South Korea remains an important market for American universities, having sent nearly 70,000 college students to the United States in the fall of 2007, up 11% from the previous year. The country is an equally important source of students for many universities in Asia. The number of South Korean undergraduates studying in Beijing and Shanghai is down by as much as 50% on some campuses, according to Chinese state media. In Japan, undergraduate enrollments of South Korean students at some private universities has plunged to almost zero, forcing administrators to take emergency measures, including deferring tuition and seeking government assistance. Enrollments are also reportedly down at universities in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Australia, as thousands of South Korean students struggle to deal with their country's currency fluctuations. Anecdotal information from colleges around the United States suggests a mixed picture for the fall. San Jose State University reports that new South Korean applicants for its American-language program are down 56% compared with 2008. The State University of New York at Buffalo, however, says initial applications from South Korean freshmen are up by 37%.

In less than two generations, ambitious technocrats have transformed the southern half of the Korean peninsula from one of Asia's poorest nations into the 11th largest economy in the world. Now they want to turn South Korea into the East Asian capital of higher education. Several American colleges are in talks to set up academic and research ventures here, while Korea's top universities are retooling themselves to be more competitive with elite institutions in Singapore, Japan, China, and the United States. The changes are driven in part by the growing number of students who opt out of South Korea's higher-education system to study abroad. Despite spending 2.6 percent of its gross domestic product on higher education (second only to the United States and more than twice the average of most Western countries) South Korea lost 218,000 university students to foreign study last year, a figure that has almost doubled since the mid-1990s. The education ministry makes no secret that the student drain has become a crisis, and that persuading more to stay at home is a priority. The government is offering subsidies to colleges that teach in English and supporting efforts to lure more foreign professors. The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Kaist) is at the cutting edge of what reformists believe South Korea must do to transform its higher-education sector. Beginning this year, all undergraduate classes will be taught in English, and professors and students must now compete to retain tenure and scholarships. The university is also throwing its doors open to non-Koreans. Whether South Korea is fleet-footed enough to leapfrog over its regional competitors to become a world-class educational hub depends on who you ask. Supporters say that South Korea's central geographical position, along with its size, mature economy, and Western-educated elite, give it advantages few in the region can match. Detractors point to unsuccessful attempts of foreign universities to establish campuses in Singapore and Japan and caution that proponents of internationalization underestimate the difficulties. Whether the answer to South Korea's problems lies with building up its own universities or building campuses for foreign ones, the writer concludes that the competition for students and faculty members will be intense.

The article focuses on the plan of South Korea to develop New Songdo City as a free economic zone with 80,000 apartments, 50 million square feet of office space, and 10 million square feet of retail. It notes that 40% of the city is officially designated as green, including the centerpiece 100-acre park, with the main car depot buried in a sunken courtyard to keep heat and emissions down and a network of electric water taxis to run in the city's salt-water canals. New York-based real estate company Gale International and Korean steelmaking and construction giant Posco are working on this project. Mayor Ahn Sang-soo and the Gale International countered criticisms like one on the ability of the country to secure loans from banks for the project.