Pohang University of Science And Technology

POSTECH was established in 1986 in Pohang, Korea by POSCO, one of the world's leading steel companies, for the purpose of providing advanced education for budding engineers and laying the groundwork for future technological development.

The founder of POSCO and the founding chairman of POSTECH, Park Tae-joon realized the need for Korea to educate their youth in science and technology to ensure Korea's position in the high technology arena. Park wanted to use the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a model for POSTECH and visited the university on a business trip to Los Angeles in 1985. He noted characteristics of Caltech and requested to the POSTECH founding team to establish a contemporary research university that had: a low student-faculty ratio, a greater proportion of graduate students to undergraduates, a low net education cost, student on-campus housing, and a high-quality campus environment. These features represented a drastic departure from the Korean universities of the 1980s.