Prospective students and parents attend a 2027 admissions information session at Chungbuk Semiconductor High School in Eumseong County, North Chungcheong Province, South Korea, in July. Photo by Yonhap
SEOUL, Aug. 4 (UPI) -- Korea's newspapers and broadcasters have flooded the airwaves lately with the country's semiconductor Meister high schools, apparently alert at last to their worth as the chip industry's base.
The honest account is less flattering: The domestic press stirred only after The New York Times, one of the world's leading papers, reported on Chungbuk Semiconductor High School in a small Korean town, and then the others scrambled to catch up. It is not a proud moment for Korean journalism.
The school, in Eumseong County, North Chungcheong Province, enrolls nearly 300 students and is the oldest of the country's four semiconductor Meister high schools. In a rural town far from Seoul, it long went unnoticed -- until, almost overnight, it filled broadcasts and front pages after appearing in The Times on June 26.
Nor did the interest stop there. While the Korean media looked elsewhere, visitors from abroad -- reportedly a Chinese state broadcaster among them -- came to study the school in detail. Such visits are said to continue, bent on tracing the boom's sources and learning its model.
