I simply could not believe my eyes when once again I saw in the news that university students were boycotting the college rankings issued by the local press. This is nothing new, and this time, I wanted to point out why they are making a big mistake.

Contrary to what we would like to believe, Korea’s business community has no patience for the so-called SKY (Seoul National University, Korea University, Yonsei University) graduates.

Perhaps it is because the students lack the incentives to improve themselves, and because the professors at those schools are far from top-notch, with many of them interested only in retaining their jobs. They are in love with the prestige connected to the school, and also the profitable academic projects that come their way.

As a result, the business community is shortchanged. SKY graduates enter the job market with unrealistically high expectations, often without the necessary qualifications for facing the “real world.” These graduates are then pitted against non-SKY graduates, who are more qualified but prone to victimizing themselves and perceiving themselves as underachievers.

So what needs to be done to create a better balance and help companies recruit the best kind of talent in the market?

The hope lies in the regular independent assessments that nationwide universities are subject to ― exactly what our students are protesting against. They need to understand that we actually need such evaluations to assess and improve the quality of Korea’s universities.

Both parents and the business community need to know where our kids and our new hires can get the best education and how the educational landscape is changing.

We want to push aside the names and the celebrity faculty members to focus more on exactly how the schools are improving their curriculums and just how many academic papers the professors are publishing each year.

The good news is that this is already happening.

Over the past decade, we have witnessed the rise of some non-SKY universities, such as KAIST and POSTECH. This is living proof that the best education in the country is not just being received by SKY students.

More universities and departments deserve this kind of recognition. It is only through fierce competition that we will see Korea’s universities move up the ladder, both at home and abroad. So, the bottom line is that we need more open competition, not less.

The bad news is, the nation’s top universities remain critical of such independent assessments. This is no surprise. Obviously, the myths they have built up over the years are destroyed by the reports. What makes it worse is that, ironically, many non-SKY universities have joined in.

They complain about the criteria. This much is understandable, as no evaluation system can be flawless and none is ever welcomed by those who are subject to it.

However, the question is, if the non-SKY universities and their students go as far as denouncing the very concepts and principles that underlie behind such independent assessments, they are helping to kill our only hope for improving the school system.

Unreliable reports will disappear with time, and more reliable assessment methods and institutions will emerge. What we need now is encouragement, not discouragement. We need not one or two, but several different entities that conduct university evaluations.

The bottom line is, it makes little sense for our students to discredit school rankings. By doing so, they are killing all hope of bettering the educational future of this country, and that means less qualified people for corporate Korea. Independent evaluation is one way we can bring about Korean universities that we can be truly proud of, and that produce the talent that businesses can confidently rely upon.

By Kim Byoung-joo, Head of strategic consulting firm KL&P