An overhaul of the education system is due to reduce the stubbornly high unemployment rate and keep the country competitive. An ideal education system should have diverse functions and one of them should be developing and nurturing homegrown talent to support the development of local industries. In Taiwan, there are about 160 colleges, which generate 230,000 graduates each year, but local companies still find it difficult to recruit enough qualified workers.
At the beginning of this year, Hon Hai Precision Industry, which assembles iPhones and iPads for Apple Inc, launched a recruitment program to hire 3,000 software engineers for its new cloud-computing data center in Greater Kaohsiung, but only 300 vacancies have been filled.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s unemployment rate has been at a relatively high level since the global financial meltdown caused by Lehman Brothers in 2008.
Five years later, the unemployment rate has improved to more than 4 percent on average from the peak of 5.85 percent on average in 2008. Yet the improvement stopped there, with the number of people out of a job remaining steady at about 480,000 in the first 10 months of this year.
The mismatch is again reflected in the latest survey released by international consultancy ManpowerGroup, which indicated that Taiwan’s employment outlook is the strongest in Asia. About 36 percent of the 1,080 companies surveyed plan to recruit new blood next quarter, up 3 percentage points from a quarter ago and up 5 percentage points from a year ago. Yet Taiwan’s jobless rate is expected to remain the highest among neighboring Asian countries.
“This shows that a talent shortage is the problem,” said Joan Yeh (葉朝蒂), operations director of temp business at ManpowerGroup Taiwan. “It means that jobseekers lack the skills and working experience that are required for the jobs.”
So the question this begs is: Do we need so many colleges? And, is the pool of college graduates equal to the pool of talent?
The answer is clear: Taiwan’s number of colleges is stunningly high compared with Singapore’s four and Hong Kong’s seven. Taiwan’s population is about five times Singapore’s 5 million people and three-and-a-half times Hong Kong’s 7 million. Yet the number of colleges in Taiwan is 40-fold and 23-fold that of Singapore and Hong Kong respectively.
Morris Chang (張忠謀), chairman of the world’s top contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, last week shared his opinions about the nation’s educational system and provided his suggestions to the government.
Chang said that Taiwan does not need so many colleges. Doctorate degrees do not guarantee that the people who possess them have the ability to innovate, he said. However, Taiwan needs more vocational schools to train skilled workers, Chang said.
The nation’s industrial boom over the past decades was based on the vocational school system, as well as college eduction. The balance was tilted after most vocational schools scrambled to upgrade to colleges, as the government had encouraged them to do. That has inflated the number of colleges, but those “new” colleges are unable to offer useful programs and to produce high-quality graduates.
Chang is deeply concerned about Taiwan’s scarce talent pool and the future competitiveness of local industries.
Chang has good reason to be worried, since fewer young people are interested in entering the manufacturing industry. They no longer believe that higher education can provide better salaries or better careers because the monthly salary of most college graduates is capped at NT$22,000 and the jobless rate for local graduates with doctorates is 95 percent.
The government should take a serious look at this issue and reform the education system.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this