A growing number of Korean students are heading overseas to study medicine as competition intensifies in their home country, and Hungary has emerged as the most popular destination.
According to the Korea Health Personnel Licensing Examination Institute, 409 people took the Korean medical license exam from 2001 to 2023 after studying abroad. Of the 247 or 60.4 percent who passed, 119 of them had studied in Hungary, followed by 106 in the Philippines, 38 in Uzbekistan, 23 in the U.K. and 22 in Germany.
As recently as the early 2000s, the preferred overseas destination for aspiring Korean doctors was the Philippines, where English is a lingua franca, but the preference shifted to Hungary from 2015.
Candidates for the Korean license need to have graduated from a university recognized by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. They must pass a separate preliminary exam in order to be given a chance to take the state licensing exam.
Hungarian medical schools select students based on an absolute scale, which makes it easier than in Korea, where admission is based on a relative scale and those who want to study medicine need to get a nearly perfect score.
Hungarian is a notoriously difficult language to learn, but the medical schools favored by Koreans teach in English.
At Semmelweis University, a research-led medical school in Budapest, almost 20 percent of the students are from Korea. The license pass rate for Korean graduates of Hungarian medical schools is 82.4 percent, significantly higher than among graduates of other foreign schools.
