Korea gained its freedom from Japanese colonial control in 1945 and became a sovereign nation in 1948. Because of restricted public access to formal schooling, almost 80% of South Korea's population was illiterate at the time (Kang, 1981). As part of the country's national rehabilitation following the Korean War, the government allocated nearly 10% of its entire budget to the education sector (Lee, 2002). The importance of education was widely acknowledged in Rebuilding Korea as a way to spur economic growth (Kim & Hong, 2010). Since its development began in the late 1980s, Korean HE has made incredible progress (D. H. Kim & Choi, 2015). As defined by Trow, it went from being an elite system to being mass and then universal in a relatively short amount of time through a process known as massification (1973, 2005). There has been a rise in the percentage of students enrolled in higher education (HE) from 12% in 1980 to 93.26% in 2015. (UNESCO, 2018). HE in particular, and Korean education in general, is characterised by a heavy dependence on the private sector for both provision and financing of educational opportunities (M. H. Lee, 2008; Shin, Postiglione, & Huang, 2015; Yeom, 2016b).