The Incheon Catholic University (ICU) is upset after it was given a B rating by the government, saying the government did not take into account the school’s unique role of training priests and artists.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced on September 5 that it will not subsidise 43 private universities and colleges next year, after a month-long evaluation of 346 private tertiary schools nationwide as part of measures to weed out poorly-managed higher education institutions.

The government excluded seminaries from the evaluation, acknowledging they are “religious schools” that train pastors.

But Andrew Choi Kyoung-kyun, director of academic affairs at ICU, said unlike the religious schools that only have a seminary, the ICU also has a college of art, so ICU was included in the rating. It has a seminary with 99 seminarians and an art college with 516 students studying the plastic arts.

The ministry made its assessment on the basis of two standards, namely “the (graduate) employment rate and student recruitment rate of the schools,” he noted.

But it was difficult for the seminary to meet the required quota of 90 percent recruitment rate, he explained, because of the seminary’s “strict standard to select appropriate applicants for the priesthood.”

Regarding the employment rate, Choi also said, “since most of the art college graduates work as self-employed artists, they do not have workplace health insurance,” noting in the result they are counted as “jobless.”

He called the seminary’s poor recruitment rate plus the art college’s low employment rate made for an “unfair rating.”

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University fumes over its B-grade rating