PROTEST. A classroom at a medical school in the southern city of Daegu remains quiet on April 15, 2024. About 13,000 medical students will file a motion for injunction against the government's plan to increase medical school quota, a lawyer said Wednesday (April 17, 2024). (Yonhap)
SEOUL – About 13,000 medical students plan to collectively seek court injunctions to halt their schools' expansion of admission quotas, a lawyer said Wednesday, as the walkout by protesting trainee doctors continued for nearly two months.
The motion for an injunction will be filed next Monday by students from 32 medical schools outside Seoul against the presidents of their universities.
Lee Byeong-cheol, the counsel for the students, said they would seek the court’s nod to halt the schools' revision of admission plans to reflect increased medical school seats.
As part of the much-resisted medical reform, the government allocated an additional 2,000 medical school admission seats last month to universities across the nation, 82 percent of them to universities outside the broader capital region.
Currently, universities are in the process of updating their admission plans for the 2025 academic year to reflect increased medical student quotas and are expected to announce them in late May.
Lee claimed that the quota increase could seriously erode the quality of education provided by the schools to the extent that it may infringe upon constitutionally guaranteed rights for learning.
So far, the medical community has filed six legal suits, including injunction requests, against the quota increase plan.
Four of them have been denied by courts, including injunction requests filed by an association of medical professors and the leader of the trainee doctors' association. (Yonhap)
