North Korean Universities

[Monty]

Last night, I got to wondering about the quality (or lack thereof) of universities in North Korea. Anyway, here are my questions:

[ol][li]What constitutes an elite university there?[/li][li]How does an elite North Korean university rate academically?[/li][li]How does an elite North Korean university rate in other areas (housing, locale, etc.)?[/li][li]How much weight/validity does a Ph.D. from a North Korean university carry outside of North Korea?[/ol][/li]
Mind you, I’m certainly not planning on attending school (or even going) there. I’m just curious about the caliber of their top universities.

[Cunctator]

I wonder whether North Korean universities even have faculties/subjects in the normal sense. Perhaps all students graduate in one subject only: the *Juche * philosophy of the Dear Leader.

[MikeS]

From here (the first result obtained from Googling “higher education North Korea”:

Kim Il Sung University, founded in October 1946, is the country’s only comprehensive institution of higher education offering bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. It is an elite institution whose enrollment of 16,000 full- and part-time students in the early 1990s occupies, in the words of one observer, the “pinnacle of the North Korean educational and social system.” … Kim Il Sung University’s colleges and faculties include economics, history, philosophy, law, foreign languages and literature, geography, physics, mathematics, chemistry, atomic energy, biology, and computer science. There are about 3,000 faculty members, including teaching and research staff.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

I’m guessing the student body doesn’t lose too much classtime to political protests.