Partnerships between Local Governments and Community Colleges in South Korea: Perspectives on Local Decline and International Students

Purpose: This study investigates how cooperative governance between local governments and vocationally oriented community colleges can counteract rural depopulation by attracting foreign students and migrant workers, reorganizing industry-linked majors, and integrating life-cycle social overhead capital (SOC) investments. It seeks to clarify the mechanisms through which such collaboration promotes population inflow, regional innovation, and local economic sustainability. Method: Eleven experts in low-birth-rate policy, social welfare, higher-education admission, and local-industry promotion—each with at least seven years of field experience—were interviewed between 1 August and 30 October 2024. Their written, open-ended responses were coded inductively following Mertens’ qualitative category-building procedure, producing five validated thematic clusters: inter-institutional relationships, university roles, foreign-resident policy, living-infrastructure strategy, and childbirth-response cooperation. Results: Stakeholder collaboration enabled specialized-major restructuring, lifelong-learning platforms, and strengthened industry–university ties, thereby creating high-quality jobs and slowing youth out-migration. Integrated “foreign-resident packages” (housing, visa, language, and employment support) and a life-cycle SOC model (jobs → housing → childcare/health → culture) significantly raised settlement intention, labor-force stability, and even marriage and fertility expectations among young adults. These outcomes confi rm the complementary effects predicted by Triple Helix, human-capital, social-capital, and push-pull migration theories. Conclusion: Local government–community-colleg e partnerships emerge as an essential strategy for mitigating rural decline, simultaneously fostering human-capital accumulation and multicultural revitalization. Institutionalizing a performance-sharing RISE framework, expanding resident-friendly SOC, and extending quantitative longitudinal analyses are recommended to sustain and scale these benefits nationwide.