The Institute for Management Development’s (IMD) world talent ranking issued last month showed Taiwan surpassing Japan, South Korea and China. The quality of Taiwanese skilled workers is comparatively strong, but the report warns that Taiwan’s brain drain and its inability to attract foreign skilled professionals will become an underlying problem for economic growth.
In 2005, the Ministry of Education launched the Program for Promoting Teaching Excellence of Universities. The second phase of the program — the five-year, NT$50 billion (US$1.67 million) Aim for the Top University Project — commenced in 2011. Total funding for the project is estimated to reach NT$100 billion over 10 years.
The project’s goal is laughable — to get a Taiwanese institution into a top-100 global university ranking within the next 10 years.
The UK’s Times Higher Education 2018 World University Rankings placed National Taiwan University at 198. If the project’s sole aim is to break into the top 100, then NT$100 billion will be needlessly squandered.
Starting next year, the ministry is to implement its five-year Higher Education Deep Cultivation Plan,which is to receive NT$11.8 billion annually. The second phase of the plan will cost a further NT$100 billion. Together with the Program for Promoting Teaching Excellence of Universities, more than NT$200 billion will be spent by successive governments on higher education within two decades, but what have they achieved?
The most important commodity in higher education is talent. If the quality of Taiwan’s students is evaluated in line with the IMD’s assessment, within the Asian region, Taiwanese high-school students are surpassed only by their Singaporean counterparts. The quality of Taiwan’s teachers is, generally speaking, also rather good.
The hidden problem in higher education is low salaries for teachers. The IMD warns that Taiwan’s skilled workers’ market is facing a serious brain drain. This was reinforced by a recent report in the Chinese-language Economic Daily News, which showed that the average salary in Beijing is NT$46,000, compared with NT$43,600 in Taipei. In Shanghai the figure is NT$43,000.
Because salaries in China’s tier-one cities have already caught up with Taiwan and given the dwindling number of positions available in Taiwan that offers career development potential, nearly 100,000 skilled individuals leave Taiwan to work in China every year.
Even more worrying than the increasing number of Taiwanese university graduates moving to China to advance their careers, the number of university teachers poached by Chinese institutions is on the increase, too.
According to the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper), Fujian Province in China has announced that it plans to attract 1,000 Taiwanese teachers to fill teaching positions in the province. Not only are top-tier Chinese universities headhunting highly qualified academics, now second and even third-tier universities are actively poaching local professors.
Previously, poaching Taiwanese academics was no easy task. This was because, in addition to the main incentive of working in your hometown, teachers used to receive a pension worth approximately 80 percent of their final salaries, which guaranteed a steady income in retirement.
Although tempted by higher Chinese salaries, they would have had to forfeit their generous pension, so many opted to stay in Taiwan.
However, now that teachers’ pensions have been halved, the security blanket of a well-funded pension pot has been taken away from them. This has forced many Taiwanese teachers to consider embarking on an alternative path.
I recently heard of several cases where Taiwanese professors were being wooed by Chinese universities with a package that included a salary three times their current remuneration, generous social security benefits and research funding. There are even cases of an entire team of Taiwanese researchers being scouted by a Chinese university.
Such a serious brain drain will end up hollowing out Taiwanese education. Unfortunately, the ministry’s Higher Education Deep Cultivation Plan will in all likelihood fail to stem the flow. It seems Taiwanese higher education is heading toward an inexorable decline.
Allen Houng is a professor at National Yang-Ming University’s Institute of Philosophy of Mind and Cognition.
Translated by Edward Jones
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