Four Billion Won Allocated for Educational Projectss, the Highest Amount Among Other ‘Superior’ Universities

  Kyungil University (President Chung Hyun-Tae) was selected as a ‘superior’ university at the annual evaluation done by LINC (Leaders in INdustry-university Cooperation), supervised by the Ministry of Education and National Research Foundation of Korea. 4 billion Won was allocated for 2016 educational projects to KIU and this amount is a yearly increase of more than 4 hundred million Won. The amount belongs amongst the highest  when compared to other ‘superior’ universities.

  The LINC project is one of the government’s most representative financial programs done by the Ministry of Education for cultivating creative talent. The LINC project performs achievements in meeting the demands of the industrial world by cultivating the activation of industry-university collaboration systems and operating educational programs friendly to business while including academic cooperation. This is the third consecutive year that KIU has been selected by LINC as a business-oriented university as it was first selected in 2014.

  KIU’s LINK team selected a smart car component industry and smart infra converged industry as its area of specialization and now performs a lot of industrial cooperative activities by looking upon the vision of ‘creative companion leading the convergence of educational-industries’. 26 departments amongst a total of 32 departments of the university are participating, thus it  can be said that the work is being run on a university-wide scale.

  Whole departments (colleges) designated Capstone Design as a required subject in their curricula and started to reinforce work experience and entrepreneurship education for friendly industrial cooperative education. 588 students participated in 2015 field education programs and the number was a 47% increase from the previous year, and 51% of junior and senior students completed the Capstone Design curricula (an increase of 10.5 % from the previous year). Specifically, KIU, as a specialized university for providing excellent entrepreneurship education so far, also received an award from the minister of the Ministry of Education in ‘KC-Startup, the Secret Note of Business Start-up (which was one of the events of the ‘2015 University-industry Cooperation Expo’). Futhermore, KIU has achieved the expected results after applying for 48 cases of intellectual property right for one year through the superior results from various start-up contests and many kinds of entrepreneurship education.

  In order to perform business and academic cooperation with local firms as another set of LINC business, KIU also expanded the size of its family company to as many as 992 and now performs 97 projects of joint technology development each year. By elevating the operation of the shared research instrument center, the annual revenue came to an amount of 6.5 hundred million, which was a 62% increase over the previous year. Furthermore, 2,887 workers from small and medium-sized  enterprises completed KIU’s curricula for the incumbent workers in the industry.

  Based on these outstanding results, KIU was also selected as a ‘superior’ university in the ‘Industry-academic Evaluation from Firm Perspective’ supervised by the Korea Sanhak Foundation in October, 2015. In addition, KIU has stood at an indisputable position worthy of the mecca of start-ups since being ranked at ‘NO. 1 of the Highest Rate of Graduates’ Start-up in the country’ in JoongAng Ilgo’s 2015 University Assessment field.

  Lee Gwang-gu, the head of KIU’s LINC team, said, “We have put emphasis on the 3 core strategies of the bottleneck technique package of family company (industry university research work- equipment use- education of incumbents), entrepreneurship education, and business development of efficient technology transfer since we executed 2015 LINC business. We have obtained excellent results from every section by showing 112% of average achievement rate in 21 of detailed indexes of evaluation.” He also made his new resolution, “As this year is the last year of the LINC project, we are going to raise the previous status of the university industry cooperation to a higher level, spread the university-industry cooperation outside the fields of science and engineering and develop programs of new global business and academic cooperation so that KIU can contribute to local economic development as a reforming university with capabilities of cultivating creative men of talent.”