Lee came to fame as a star private English tutor, claiming that after moving to the U.K. as a middle school senior, she graduated from the University of Brighton and completed a master’s course in linguistics there. She lectured in the Foreign Language Institute of Yonsei University.

But Lee on Wednesday told the Chosun Ilbo that her academic background was invented. After graduating from elementary, middle and high schools in her hometown of Gwangyang, South Jeolla Province, she enrolled at Suncheon University, where she rarely attended classes, and studied to enter other universities in Seoul. But she failed to win admission to a Seoul university for three years running and actually never got a college degree. She did go to Britain in 1990 for a one-year language program in Hove, a small town near Brighton, before attending a polytechnic in Brighton for a year.

However, she used a falsified academic background to promote her status as an English instructor, claiming in a book and interviews to have a master’s degree from the University of Brighton. KBS treated Lee as a star, giving her an award in 2004 in recognition of her contribution with the program “Lee Ji-young’s Easy English.”

“When I was offered work as the host of ‘Good Morning Pops’, KBS asked me to submit a diploma. But my predecessor suddenly quit and I had to hurriedly take over the job,” Lee said. The producer of the show says he had no reason to doubt Lee’s academic qualifications, since she performed the job without problems for seven years.

(englishnews@chosun.com )