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At Trays of Donburi and Jjambbong Soup, Candid Talk on AI Education, Half-Price Tuition and Job Insecurity Erupts — Youth Voices Are the Compass of Gyeonggi Education

There was no podium and no microphone — just a single cafeteria tray.

On March 27, Gyeonggi Provincial Superintendent candidate Yoo Eun-hye quietly took a seat at a long table in the Vision Tower student cafeteria at Gachon University in Seongnam. Her black tray held teriyaki chicken over rice, vegetable jjambbong soup and fried seaweed-wrapped tempura. Students filled the benches on both sides, and conversation broke out naturally: questions about what professors should teach when AI can draft assignments, complaints that job hunting pushes real learning to the back burner, and gripes that tuition has risen while classroom heating and cooling remain neglected. These were remarks unlikely to surface at a polished campaign event.

Starting at 12:30 p.m., Yoo shared the same meal with students and led a wide-ranging discussion about campus life in the AI era, academic concerns, the importance of reading and writing, basic literacy, alternative schools and national curriculum debates. She narrowed the generational gap by recounting episodes from her own college years. Her visit seemed designed to compress, into a single campus meal, the mixture of hope and anxiety that students feel less than a month into the new semester.

The informal conversation moved into an official forum at 1:30 p.m. The student council meeting at the Student Union on Gachon University’s Global Campus drew current students and alumni, including student council president Park Jun-gi, vice president Ban Seon-jong, director of external affairs Jang Min-gyu, College of Business student council president Lee Ha-min and Jo Young-hak, chair of the Gyeonggi region of the National Student Council Association.

The agenda was sharp: how to support an entrance-exam-centered system while adapting to AI-era education; the surge in remote, noncontact relationships since COVID-19; proposals for half-price university tuition; operation of a 1,000 KRW (approximately 0.75 USD) campus store; expanding career and employment-linked instruction; and strengthening youth support policies. None of these weighty issues can be solved by a single superintendent acting alone — and that was the real gravity of the meeting.

Yoo said the college campus at the start of a new semester is the clearest place to observe students’ hopes and concerns, and she pledged to sharpen Gyeonggi education policy based on the voices she hears in the field. She emphasized that education does not end inside the classroom but connects to students’ whole lives, and promised to continue visiting campuses and other educational sites to maintain that dialogue.

The Gyeonggi provincial superintendent oversees kindergartens through high schools; universities technically lie outside that authority. Still, Yoo’s campus visit had a clear purpose: these students, fresh from high school and now in college, are the tangible outcomes of Gyeonggi education. Their words offer the most honest report card on what Gyeonggi education has done well and where it has fallen short.