The Cabinet approved a plan last week to provide tuition fee subsidies to public and private high school, vocational high school and junior college students from families with an annual household income of less than NT$900,000 — up from the NT$600,000 originally proposed by the Ministry of Education.
Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and Minister of Education Wu Ching-chi (吳清基) both apologized to parents and members of the public who were upset over the higher threshold.
The uproar over the proposal, which is intended to equalize the costs of attending public and private schools, has subsided for the time being. However, the controversy has raised the question of how such a major educational policy could be proposed and then changed at the whim of the education minister alone?
On the surface, the incident appears to be a case of wishful thinking in which the minister mistakenly thought he could adjust tuition fees as he saw fit. However, it is symptomatic of the ministry’s habitual mode of decision-making.
A consultative report on education reform published in 1994 suggested Taiwan should set up a national education research institute. This body would do ongoing research on proposed education policies before they are implemented. Unfortunately, after education reform got under way, powerful members of the “education reform faction” put this proposition on the back burner. Proceeding according to romantic notions about “advanced Western” education, they treated students as laboratory mice, subjecting them to one reform after another.
Aside from throwing students and parents into a state of confusion, these reforms have wasted a lot of Taiwan’s education resources. As a result, the quality of Taiwan’s education looks a lot better than it really is.
Following the return to power of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), one would think the government would conduct a thorough review of these education reforms and their effects.
Regrettably, the proposed national education research institute remains to this day a provisional office. Taking a “positivist” scientific approach, those responsible for planning the institute think “education research” means using all kinds of tests to collect assessment data on elementary and high-school students. In respect to today’s most important education issues, they either ignore them or avoid talking about them, so as not to incur unwanted trouble.
When it encounters pressing education policy issues, the ministry sticks to its habit of handing the matter over to some friendly professors who then outsource it to someone else to collect “empirical data.” Data collected in this way lacks cohesion and does not always meet the ministry’s needs. Often it is of no use for resolving real problems.
Policy decisions made by ministry officials based on this way of doing things often seem arbitrary. Frequently they have to be changed over and over again. No wonder education mandarins are often criticized as “romantic.”
The only sound basis for government officials, whatever their department, to decide what policies to promote is rationality, not romanticism. Although the latest fracas over the plan to equalize high-school tuition fees has subsided for the time being, now that Wu Ching-chi is out of the line of fire, he should learn from this experience and give careful thought to how to make the education ministry’s policy decisions more rational.
Hwang Kwang-kuo is a professor of psychology at National Taiwan University.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
RSS