The Blue House staff are red-faced after the new floor leader of the ruling Grand National Party suddenly came up with a half-tuition offer for college students, one of President Lee Myung-bak’s major campaign pledges which an unfavorable economy had forced him to shelve for the past three years. Rep. Hwang Woo-yea picked it up aiming at the votes of two million college students and their struggling parents.

Also embarrassed are GNP lawmakers loyal to President Lee who ask where the money will come to subsidize colleges and universities or provide scholarships which will amount to at least 2 trillion won. The opposition Democratic Party welcomed the GNP move, but demanded that the ruling party join it in requesting a supplementary budget for free school lunches and relief measures for farmers and low income earners.

Progressive civic groups argue that halving tuition is not enough and that the government should dramatically change its education policy to exempt school fees for all levels of students. Most encouraged are student bodies that had campaigned against tuition fee hikes since the beginning of the semester. Emboldened demonstrators came to Gwanghwamun to denounce “crazy tuition.”

Watching the partisan race to woo younger voters with the approach of elections next year, conscientious citizens are questioning the fiscal feasibility of these “pyo-pulist’ programs. “Pyo” in Korean means vote. It does not require profound economic knowledge to predict what will happen if welfare expenditures grow by trillions in the parties’ march to the left while the productive population continues to decline in this rapidly ageing society.

Not many students would be satisfied but we recommend that our politicians stop at promising a freeze in college tuition so as not to cause serious disappointment to youths after the elections. Apart from counting votes, they should give deep thought to the correlation between the level of tuition, the quality of higher education and overall university population in this country where 90 percent of high school graduates go to college.