Flap Over College Entrance Jolts New S. Korean Cabinet

Influential South Koreans whose children were born in the United States and thus hold American citizenship long have taken advantage of an admissions system here that gives foreigners preference in getting their sons and daughters into universities without taking an arduous entrance examination.

But when it was discovered that President Kim Young Sam’s new justice minister used this loophole for his daughter, the first of two “mini-scandals” for the new Kim administration erupted.

The controversy came to a head Thursday as Kim instructed Justice Minister Park Hee Tae to have his daughter, Park Kye Ju, 22, quit Ewha Women’s University, give up the American nationality she obtained at birth and resume her South Korean citizenship, said Lee Kyung Jae, the president’s spokesman.

Park complied, the president later told Korean reporters. “This should be considered the solution of the problem,” Kim said.

Critics had called for Park to resign from the Cabinet appointed by Kim only six days ago. The revelations about the minister’s daughter came in the midst of an expanding scandal over illicit college admissions in which 58 people have been arrested so far.

Park Kye Ju was born in California in 1971 while her father, then a Seoul National University professor, was on a one-year study sabbatical at UC Berkeley. She renounced her South Korean citizenship in 1990 to enter Ewha in 1991 as an American. But when the media here disclosed her action, Park assured reporters that his daughter planned to give up her American citizenship after graduation from Ewha.

“It is shameful for my daughter to enter the university as a foreigner, but please understand that, as a father, it was very difficult for me to resist the pleas of a weeping daughter,” Park said.

Only 45% of applicants to all universities and two-year junior colleges are admitted in education-obsessed South Korea, where entrance tests normally are the sole basis for selection.

But a quota system, limited to 2% of freshman classes, allows colleges and universities to admit--without exams--foreigners or South Korean children who have lived abroad. Preferential admission is granted to young Koreans who have spent time abroad on the theory that their foreign education handicaps them when they take the highly competitive college entrance exams.

The justice minister’s daughter could not claim that exemption because she got all of her education in South Korea.

Education Ministry officials were quoted as saying that many of the specially admitted “foreigners” were, in fact, Koreans who had obtained dual nationality by virtue of birth in the United States.

In the other “mini-scandal,” Seoul Mayor Kim Sang Chul, 46, resigned Thursday in the wake of revelations that he had illegally converted greenbelt land reserved for farming into a garden and had expanded his home into the greenbelt. The president’s appointment last Friday of the former human rights lawyer had attracted particular attention.

At a lunch with Korean reporters, Kim Young Sam said he will tolerate no irregularities or corruption.