If You Don't Move the Universities, People Won't Move

If you don't move the universities, people won't move.

The real cause of the capital region's overcrowding isn't real estate — it's how opportunity is arranged.

Korea's concentration in the capital region is no longer merely a question of balanced regional development. It is a matter of national survival against threats, and beyond that a matter of human rights — ultimately, a question of survival for individuals and communities alike.

As of the April 2026 resident registration figures, the national population stands at 51,097,986. Of that, the population of Seoul, Incheon, and Gyeonggi — the capital region — is 26,106,997. That comes to 51.09 percent. In other words, more than half of all Koreans are crowded into one part of the country. Even allowing for the fact that these figures are based on resident registration and exclude foreigners, the direction of the structure is clear. Korea has already become a "capital-region nation."

The problem is not simply that there are a lot of people in Seoul. It is that the circuitry pulling people toward Seoul is too strong. Education, employment, culture, hospitals, investment, networks, marriage, and children's schooling are all bundled into a single track. And the end of that track, in most cases, is the capital region.

The statistics on youth migration show this structure most vividly. In its analysis of capital-region population movement over the past 20 years, the National Data Agency reported that net inflows into the capital region have continued since 2017, and that the 19-to-34 age group has seen sustained net inflows into the capital region throughout those two decades. The main reasons for moving from outside the capital region into it likewise turn out to be jobs, family, and education. In 2024, net youth inflow into the capital region was reported at roughly 61,000 people.

The key point here is simple. Young people do not move on emotion. They move toward where the opportunities are.

So if we want to prevent the disappearance of the regions, we cannot simply ask people to "please live in the provinces." We have to create reasons for young people to stay. And at the center of those reasons is the university.

A university is not a school. A university is the engine of a city.

When a single university is properly established, students come. Professors and researchers come. Hospitals and research institutes attach themselves to it. Companies move in for industry-academia collaboration. Cafés, bookstores, housing, culture, transit, and startup spaces spring up. Alumni networks stay rooted in the region, and those networks in turn create companies and jobs. Conversely, when a university collapses, the region does not merely lose its student count. It loses its future population, its consumer market, its research capacity, its startup potential — and its pride along with all of it.

The Basic Educational Statistics compiled by the Ministry of Education and the Korean Educational Development Institute tally the structure of educational institutions nationwide, including higher-education institutions, every year. These figures matter because the university question is no longer a matter for individual schools — it is directly tied to the nation's demographic structure.

The decline in the school-age population is already hitting provincial universities first. The university management and innovation support strategy that the Ministry of Education released in 2021 noted that universities nationwide had failed to fill more than 40,000 freshman slots, and that the shock was concentrated among provincial universities. A crisis in provincial universities can quickly translate into a weakening of the region's engine of growth.

If so, the answer is clear. Merely "rescuing" provincial universities is not enough. We have to grow the regional national universities into strategic institutions of the state.

The universities in Seoul are already strong. The private universities in the capital region are strong too. The problem is that strong universities are increasingly clustered in strong regions. The capital region's universities reinforce the capital region's jobs, and the capital region's jobs in turn reinforce the desirability of the capital region's universities. As long as this cycle continues, the provinces cannot hold on no matter how many roads we pave or government offices we relocate.

The 2024 employment statistics for graduates of higher-education institutions also lay bare the gap between the capital region and the rest. The overall employment rate for higher-education graduates was 69.5 percent, while the rate for four-year universities was 62.8 percent. Broken down by location, the employment rate for schools in the capital region was 71.3 percent, versus 67.7 percent for schools outside it. The gap is 3.6 percentage points. It may look like a mere difference in numbers, but for a young person a difference in the odds of getting a job translates into a difference in where they choose to live.

So the core policy of balanced regional development cannot stop at roads, government offices, and innovation cities. We have to redesign the location and the power of our universities.

First, we have to grow the regional flagship national universities with everything we've got.

A regional flagship national university must be more than a school that takes in local students; it must become a regional capital of knowledge that the state deliberately builds up. Core regional cities like Busan, Daegu, Gwangju, Daejeon, Jeonju, Cheongju, Chuncheon, and Jeju need world-class clusters of national universities. Strategic fields such as medicine, engineering, AI, semiconductors, bio, robotics, energy, climate, agri-food, and cultural content should be distributed region by region.

Second, some of the functions of Seoul's private universities have to be relocated to the provinces.

This cannot become a mere slogan of forced relocation. If it ignores the autonomy and property rights of private universities and the right of students to choose, the policy will run into legal and political resistance. Instead, there are finely tuned levers the state can use. Enrollment quota adjustments, financial support, research funding, approvals for new campuses, dormitory support, support for industry-academia cooperation foundations, tax benefits, the provision of sites for relocation to the provinces, and joint-research packages with local firms — all of these should be bundled together.

This is not about abolishing the main Seoul campus overnight. We need to move some of the core functions — medical schools, engineering colleges, AI graduate schools, entrepreneurship graduate schools, industry-academia campuses — to the provinces, and those functions have to actually move students, professors, and companies. A model where it's a "provincial campus" in name only while the substance stays in Seoul will not work.

Third, relocating universities has to go hand in hand with relocating companies.

Send only the universities to the provinces, and the students head back to Seoul after they graduate. Send only the companies, and people fail to put down roots because of family and schooling. That is why universities, companies, hospitals, research institutes, housing, cultural facilities, and international schools or excellent public-education systems all have to be designed together. Relocation to the provinces must be the relocation of an entire living environment, not the relocation of buildings.

The lesson of Sejong City and the relocation of public agencies lies right here. Moving the institutions is not enough on its own. There has to be a reason for families to live there together, an opportunity for spouses to work, an environment for children to be educated, and a culture to settle into after work. To become a city, a place needs not just workplaces but the entire circuitry of life.

Fourth, a regional national university must become not the cheap-tuition option but the best option available.

Provincial-university policy has often been treated as a welfare policy. But what we need now is not welfare; it is strategy. Enrolling at a regional flagship national university should come with powerful provisions: tuition, dormitories, research participation, overseas exchange, startup support, internships at local companies, and pipelines into public-sector hiring. It should get to the point where a top student seriously agonizes over the choice between "a Seoul private university or a regional national university."

Japan's case is also worth studying. Japan, too, is experiencing concentration in Tokyo and population decline in the provinces. The World Economic Forum analyzed how, in Japan, the movement of young people and women toward Tokyo has appeared strongly, and how Tokyo has recorded net inflows over a long period. At the same time, a number of Japan's regional cities are running experiments to revive their local economies by connecting startup ecosystems, universities, local governments, and companies. Cases like Nagoya's STATION Ai are attempts to create regional innovation hubs by tying together local universities, a manufacturing base, and startup support organizations.

Of course, Japan hasn't found a perfect answer either. Japan's provincial universities are likewise suffering from declining enrollment and financial pressure. If anything, that is precisely the point. Placing a university in the provinces does not automatically make it succeed. A university has to be grown alongside the region's industry, research, entrepreneurship, and settlement policy. When a university is detached from its region, the provincial school grows weaker. When a university is fused with the region's industrial strategy, the city can come back to life.

In the end, the question is just one.

Will Korea keep betting its entire future on Seoul alone? Or will it also build centers of the future in Busan, Daegu, Gwangju, Daejeon, Jeonju, Cheongju, Gangneung, and Jeju?

Concentration in the capital region is not a natural phenomenon. It is the result of policy. And if that's the case, dispersion can be made by policy too.

To save the provinces, we have to hold on to the young. To hold on to the young, there have to be good universities. For good universities to exist, the state has to pour money, authority, and institutional power into them. And it has to move some of Seoul's university functions to the provinces.

This is not an argument for shrinking Seoul. It is an argument for not shrinking Korea down into a single city-state.

Seoul is already strong. Now the state has to build strong universities outside of Seoul. We have to grow the regional flagship national universities into national strategic universities, relocate some of the core functions of Seoul's private universities to the provinces, and build regional ecosystems in which universities, companies, research institutes, housing, and culture all move together.

If you don't move the universities, people won't move.

And if people don't move, then neither do companies, nor industries, nor the future.

Korea's regional policy now has to be a strategy for redeploying universities, not a strategy of subsidies. That is the path to balanced regional development, the path of youth policy, and ultimately the path to national survival.