Gyeonggi Just Passed Its Own Law for International Students — What It Funds

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A large, diverse group of Soo House members posing together at a community celebration, with the Soo House brand banner visible behind them

If your campus is Ajou, Kyung Hee's Global Campus, Hanyang ERICA or Dankook's Jukjeon site, you already know the gap. Seoul has run the Seoul Global Center for years — orientation, Korean class, a counseling desk — and every "study in Korea" guide assumes you're near it. Gyeonggi, the province that actually surrounds Seoul, holds 38,501 international students of its own. Until the summer of 2025, it had no province-wide law requiring anything like the same support.

That changed on June 27, 2025, when the Gyeonggi Provincial Council passed the Gyeonggi International Student Support Ordinance (경기도 외국인유학생 지원 조례) at the fourth plenary session of its 384th regular session. Assemblymember Park Se-won, who sponsored the bill, put the gap plainly when he introduced it: Gyeonggi already has a large international student population, he said, but support policy hasn't matched that scale.

  • 38,501International students in Gyeonggi, Nov. 2024 — 4.6% of the province's foreign residents
  • 845,074Total foreign residents in Gyeonggi, more than any other province
  • 6thMetropolitan or provincial council in Korea to pass one of these ordinances
  • Jul 18, 2025The ordinance's own enactment date

What the ordinance actually funds

Read the bill text and it splits cleanly into two jobs: help the students who are already here, and bring in more of them.

The Gyeonggi International Student Support Ordinance funds six programs for students already in the province — Korean classes, move-in orientation, scholarships, legal and living counseling, job and startup training, and community events — plus two programs aimed at recruiting more students from abroad: new study-abroad products and overseas recruitment fairs For students already in Gyeonggi Korean classes Language support Move-in orientation Settling in early Scholarships Tuition & living costs Legal counseling Daily-life & legal Qs Job & startup help Career after graduation Community events Meetups & clubs For growing the pipeline Study-abroad products New program offerings Overseas student fairs Recruitment trips abroad
Eight programs, two goals: keep the students Gyeonggi already has, and go find more.

Seoul

The Seoul Global Center has run city-funded orientation, Korean class and counseling for international students for years — the model most study-in-Korea advice quietly assumes.

Gyeonggi, before July 2025

38,501 international students and no province-wide ordinance requiring the same kind of dedicated support — university international offices carried the whole load on their own.

Where the timeline actually stands

Timeline of the Gyeonggi International Student Support Ordinance: introduced in March 2025, passed by the provincial council on June 27, 2025, enacted July 18, 2025, and now in its first full year as of this guide Proposed Mar 2025 Passed Jun 27, 2025 Enacted Jul 18, 2025 Today Year one
An ordinance passed in June 2025 is barely past its first year — expect the actual programs to roll out gradually, not all at once.
What this ordinance is, and isn't It's a framework law: it tells the province it must run these programs and lets it hire universities, nonprofits and companies to deliver them, rather than creating one office that does everything itself. It is not a guarantee that a specific scholarship or class already exists at your specific school today — check what's actually live before you plan around it.

Gyeonggi is the sixth metropolitan or provincial council in Korea to pass one of these ordinances — the province's own council said so when it introduced the bill, alongside five others already running theirs. That framing matters more than it sounds: a province admitting it's behind five others is a province under some pressure to actually spend the budget line it just created, not let the ordinance sit unused.

Quick Hop: the ordinance explicitly allows Gyeonggi to hand these programs to outside partners — universities, nonprofits, companies — rather than running them all from one office. That's normal for this kind of law, and it means the actual class or counseling session you attend may carry a university's name or a partner organization's, not the province's.

At Soo House — the community platform we run for expats and foreign residents already living in Korea — we hear this exact gap from members outside Seoul more than anyone: a student at a Gyeonggi campus gets the same tuition bill and the same visa paperwork as one in Seoul, but none of the built-in orientation crowd Seoul Global Center gives its own. It's part of why we run our own Business Korean class and regular community meetups open to members regardless of which campus they're on — the kind of settling-in support this ordinance is now obligating the province to fund directly, rather than leaving it to whichever school happens to have the budget.

Soo, what? A framework ordinance doesn't hand you a scholarship by itself — it forces the province to keep funding something it can otherwise cut in a bad budget year. That's worth knowing if you're the kind of student who plans two years ahead.

Where to check what's actually live

  • Your university's international office — ask directly whether it participates in any Gyeonggi-funded student program yet; rollout won't hit every campus on day one.
  • The Gyeonggi Immigration Social Integration Support Center, 1661-0222 — the province's general multilingual hotline covers exactly the kind of legal and daily-life questions this ordinance funds. See our guide to the center for which of its three doors fits your question.
  • NIIED's own channels, for the separate, national Global Korea Scholarship — this ordinance is a Gyeonggi-only program layered on top of that, not a replacement for it.

Your Next Hop: if you're studying anywhere in Gyeonggi, don't wait for your school to mention this — call the international office this week and ask what's actually funded so far.

Checked September 27, 2026. The enactment date and the province's full list of nine immigration-related ordinances come from the Gyeonggi-do Family & Women's Foundation's Issue Analysis No. 326 (김영혜, published Jan. 30, 2026, gwff.kr), itself sourced to the National Law Information Center as of Sept. 1, 2025. The June 27, 2025 passage date, sponsor and program list are confirmed independently by Seoul Pn's coverage of the plenary vote and by Jeonmae News; the "sixth in the nation" claim is corroborated by SBS's earlier report on the bill. Gyeonggi's population figures are the Ministry of the Interior and Safety's foreign-resident statistics as of November 2024.

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