What money can and cannot buy
Almost every site that tells students which Korean university to consider is paid by those universities, and almost none of them say so where you would see it. This page sets out what a commercial relationship with KoreaAdmit buys, what it cannot buy at any price, and how you can check that we are keeping to it.
Why this is published now
We wrote this before selling anything. When this version was published there were no paying institutional partners on the site and no affiliate links live anywhere on it. A policy written after the money arrives is a description of what the money already bought, so the useful time to commit to rules is while they still cost nothing.
It is versioned and dated for the same reason. If a rule below is ever weakened, that change will be visible as a change rather than as a page that quietly always said the new thing.
We are never paid for where you end up
KoreaAdmit does not take a commission for placing a student, and never will. Not a success fee, not a marketing fee that depends on you enrolling, not a rebate that grows with volume, and not a retainer contingent on how many students we send. No amount of money we receive is tied to which institution you choose or to whether you enrol at all.
This is worth being specific about, because it is the arrangement the rest of this industry runs on. An agent paid a share of your first year's tuition is choosing between institutions that pay differently for the same student, and no amount of good intent changes what that does to the advice over time. It is also why a good institution that declines to pay commission can be missing from an agent's list entirely.
Universities can still pay us, and some will. What they can buy is set out below: labelled placement, and data about their own recruitment. What they cannot buy, at any price, is a student.
1. Eligibility
Only institutions holding current IEQAS certification (교육국제화역량 인증대학) may buy placement. An institution under enhanced or restricted visa screening is not eligible while that designation stands, and becoming ineligible ends a placement rather than pausing it.
This rule exists because of an uncomfortable pattern: the institutions most willing to pay for visibility tend to be the ones that cannot recruit on their own record. Deciding that in advance is easier than deciding it in front of a specific offer.
2. Paid placement never touches organic results
Sponsored units appear in fixed, visually distinct positions and are labelled as paid where they appear, in English and Korean. They do not enter the directory's ordering, filtering, ranking, or inclusion. Not as a weight, not as a tiebreak, and not as a quality score that happens to correlate with spending.
This is a structural rule rather than an intention. Partner data is held separately from the directory data and is deliberately kept out of the ranking inputs, so a paid relationship has no path into the code that decides what you see organically.
3. Paying buys no control over what we publish
A commercial relationship confers no right to edit, suppress, delay, soften, or add context to any data we publish about that institution. That includes certification status, visa screening designation, dropout figures, and cost data.
An institution may submit a correction of fact, and we will adjudicate it against the primary source exactly as we would from anyone else. Those requests, and what we decided, are logged on the corrections page whether the institution pays us or not. A correction succeeds because it is right, and the log is what lets you check that claim rather than take it.
4. Ending a relationship changes nothing
If an institution stops working with us, the sponsored unit stops and nothing else moves. Its profile, its data, and its position in organic results stay exactly as they were.
This clause is here to make the previous one checkable. A platform that quietly downgrades a former advertiser was, in effect, selling protection all along, and the only way to demonstrate otherwise is to state the rule in advance and let it be observed.
How commercial relationships are labelled
Every paid surface carries its label at the point you see it, not in a footer or a terms page. Institutional partner modules are marked as a paid partnership in English and Korean. Affiliate links, if we ever use them, are marked as sponsored and disclose that we may earn a commission at no additional cost to you.
Disclosure in a place you have to go looking for is not disclosure. If you find a commercial relationship on this site that is not labelled where it appears, that is a bug and the feedback page reaches us.
What we sell to institutions
Universities can pay us for audience access and for data about their own recruitment: how students find them, how they compare on the measures students actually see, and which source markets are underserved for their programme mix. The for universities page describes what is currently offered.
Student contact details are a separate matter and are not part of any package. Nothing about a student reaches an institution unless that student asked us to send it to that named institution, and consent to one institution is not consent to another. The privacy policy sets out how that works.
What we do not do
We do not accept per-enrolment commission from an institution, in any wrapper. We do not accept payment to change organic ranking, ordering, filtering, or inclusion, in any form. We do not accept exclusivity arrangements that would remove a competing institution from your view. We do not take money from lenders or earn on financing for a decision we advised you on. We do not handle your tuition payments. And we do not guarantee admission, scholarship, or visa outcomes, from anyone, at any price.
Related
Methodology covers where our data comes from and how it is checked. Editorial standards covers how our guides are written.
Version 2026-08-07.1 · August 7, 2026