Guide
The English-taught Korean studies master's with no TOPIK and no tuition
You want to study Korea, seriously, at a Korean institution. You do not yet have the Korean to sit through graduate seminars in it. Almost every door in the country is shut to you. One is not, and this guide is about that one, including the part of it people leave out.
The Graduate School of Korean Studies, at the government-funded Academy of Korean Studies, teaches most of its majors in Korean and asks for TOPIK level 4 before it will even read your file. One major is different. Korean Cultural Studies, in the Global Korean Studies division, is provided in English. Its applicants submit an English test rather than a Korean one, may write their personal statement and research plan in English, and need no TOPIK certificate at all to apply.
And, like every other international student the school admits, they pay no tuition.
That combination is genuinely rare: a research master's about Korea, at a Korean institution, taught in English, open to you without Korean, and free. This guide explains who it actually suits, what it costs you in the end, and the requirement that catches people out.
- Taught in English, and no TOPIK to apply. Korean Cultural Studies applicants submit TOEFL, IELTS or TEPS instead. You can write your personal statement and research plan in English too, which no other major here allows.
- Full tuition is waived for every admitted international student, for the two years of a master's. Automatic on admission, not a competition.
- The catch: you still need TOPIK level 4 to graduate. The English route gets you in without Korean. It does not get you out without Korean.
- Master's only. There is no doctoral program in Korean Cultural Studies, so a PhD here means switching into a Korean-taught major, and TOPIK 4 to apply.
- It is a research degree, not a taught survey course. The five-page research plan is the first thing the committee reads, and you defend it at interview.
- Living costs are on you unless a committee awards you one of the two stipends after you are admitted. Budget as though it will not happen.
What the program actually is
Korean Cultural Studies sits in the Global Korean Studies division of the Graduate School of Korean Studies. The school is small (about 200 students, roughly 110 of them international, from 38 countries) and research-oriented, with a student-to-faculty ratio of 5 to 1. It was established in 1980 by the Korean government specifically to produce scholars of Korea.
So this is not a language course, and it is not a cultural immersion year. It is a two-year research master's, with a thesis, at an institution whose entire reason to exist is Korean studies scholarship. The other majors around you (Korean history, philosophy, religious studies, musicology, art history, anthropology and folklore, political science, sociology) are what your seminars and your supervisors are drawn from.
What you submit instead of TOPIK
| Test | Minimum score | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| TOEFL iBT | 80 for tests taken before 21 January 2026; 4.5 for tests taken on or after that date | MyBest scores and the Home Edition are accepted. TOEFL ITP is not accepted. The AKS destination code is 2067. |
| IELTS Academic | 6.5 | The Academic module, or IELTS Online Academic. The school accepts the electronic score report. |
| TEPS | 301 |
The score must be from a test taken within two years of the application deadline.
You can skip the test entirely in two cases: if you are a national of a country where English is an official language and can prove that nationality, or if you hold a degree from a university or graduate school where English was the medium of instruction, with an official letter from the school proving it.
No TOPIK certificate is required. If you happen to hold one, the school says it may be given preference, so send it.
The catch nobody puts in the brochure
Here is the thing to understand before you build a plan around this program.
This is not a reason to walk away. It is a reason to plan honestly. Two years is a realistic runway to TOPIK 4 if you are living in Korea, studying seriously, and using the school's free Korean language education for academic purposes, which is part of what it offers students. But it does mean the program is not a way of avoiding Korean. It is a way of starting before you have it, with your tuition paid, and finishing with it.
For most people that is a much better deal than the alternative, which is spending a year and a lot of money at a language institute first and applying afterwards. But you should walk in with your eyes open, and you should not treat the language as optional coursework you will get to later.
What it costs
| Item | What you pay |
|---|---|
| Tuition | Nothing. Full tuition is waived every semester for 2 years, for every admitted international student. It stops only if you go on academic probation or face disciplinary action. |
| Living costs | Yours, unless you are awarded a stipend after admission. Boarding fees and living expenses are explicitly the student's own expense. |
| National Health Insurance | About 75,000 KRW a month on a D-2 student visa, compulsory from the day you register as a foreign resident. |
| Application fee | 50,000 KRW (or 50 USD), non-refundable once paid. |
| Bank balance to prove for the visa | 14,880,000 KRW, or 5,280,000 KRW if you receive the school's Government Grant. |
Two stipends exist, and neither is automatic. The Government Grant pays 800,000 KRW a month to up to 15 students a semester, with no nationality restriction, renewable annually. The POSCO Global Scholarship pays 1,000,000 KRW a month plus a settlement grant and a health insurance subsidy, to about 3 students admitted in the spring, and only to nationals of a set list of designated countries (the full admissions guide lists them). Neither has a separate application: the school's committee selects from among the students it has already admitted, on their admission scores.
Getting in
The admission process is the same as for every other major at the school, with the language documents swapped. It runs through the Korean government's Study in Korea portal, not the school's own website, and it has two stages: a document screen, then an interview that everyone who passes the screen must attend.
The differences that matter to you as a Korean Cultural Studies applicant:
- You submit an English score, not a TOPIK certificate.
- You may write your personal statement and research plan in English. Every other applicant to this school must write both in Korean. This is a significant advantage, and it means the quality of your thinking, not the quality of your Korean prose, is what is being judged.
- Master's only. There is no doctoral program in this major, so if you intend to continue to a PhD here you will be applying into a Korean-taught major, with TOPIK 4 required to apply.
Everything else (the eligibility rules, the 16 documents, the recommendation letter that must come from a professor's own email address, the apostille, the bank balance, the interview, the deadlines) is common to the whole school, and we have written all of it out in detail.
The research plan is the application
It is worth saying separately, because applicants from English-speaking backgrounds often underrate it.
This is a research institution. The document screening explicitly weighs your research plan first, ahead of academic ability, language and background. The plan runs about five pages and asks for a research topic, why you chose it, a review of the previous research, your research details (method, and what is distinctive about it), and a bibliography. Then you sit in front of the people whose field it is and talk about it.
A vague plan about "Korean culture and the global spread of K-pop" will not survive that room. A specific question, honestly situated in what has already been written, with a method you can defend, will. Read what the faculty in your division actually publish, and write toward it.
The school also asks that you not use AI to write the plan or the personal statement: grammar and typo correction is fine, drafting essays or translating whole sentences is called inappropriate and can lead to disqualification. Given that you will defend this document out loud for an interview, that is practical advice as much as it is a rule.
How this compares with your other options
If your goal is a degree taught in English in Korea, this is one option among a fair number, and most of the others are in different fields entirely. Our guide to English-taught degree programs in Korea maps the wider landscape, and study in Korea in English covers what is realistic without the language.
What makes this program unusual is not that it is in English. It is the combination: an English-taught research degree, in Korean studies, at a Korean government institution, with tuition waived for everyone admitted. If Korea is your subject, there is not much else like it. If Korea is merely where you want to live while studying something else, look at the wider English-taught list instead, and at the GKS Graduate Scholarship, which funds master's degrees across many more fields.