Lawmakers and education administrators have voiced concerns about the state of the nation's educational facilities after recent studies showed that Taiwan's higher education quality has fallen behind other Asian countries.
In a legislative session called to discuss measures to stop the rot in higher education, Minister of Education Huang Jong-tsun (
According to the report, the inconsistency between the university-level students' quality and the growing number of higher education institutes has manifested itself in a number of factors, including the ratio of students to teachers, the number of professors making up the teachers' body, the students' academic performance and the ratio of educational resources distributed to each student.
The evaluation has shown that Taiwan university students' overall competitiveness is far behind neighboring countries such as Japan and South Korea and even China and India, according to the Ministry of Education's report.
In answer to an inquiry from PFP Legislator Sun Ta-chien (孫大千), Huang admitted that he personally thought that less than one fifth of the higher education schools in Taiwan are well above the standards.
Amid the growing problem of quality in higher education, Huang has vowed to "clean up the mess" in order to secure the nation's educational competitiveness.
The report indicated that teachers in Taiwan's higher education facilities mainly consist of lecturers, who make up 42.1 percent of the teaching body, with professors only counting for 17.5 percent -- far behind South Korea's 39.4 percent and Japan's 38.9 percent.
In terms of academic achievement, Taiwanese universities' frequency and performance on research papers published every year also lagged behind countries such as Japan, South Korea, Australia and, again, India and China.
The report also pointed out that Taiwanese university students' international participation has declined as more and more students turn their back on the opportunity to study abroad and that the level of university students' English proficiency, based on TOEFL score performance, was ranked fourth from the bottom in Asia.
Huang revealed that between 1996 and 2001, the number of overseas students had dropped from 61,000 to 46,000 persons.
Cheng Chen-lung (程振隆), a TSU lawmaker of the legislature's Educational Committee, cited a poll that claimed that 47 out of the 52 university presidents in Taiwan were unsatisfied with their student's English ability while 39 regarded the academic research ability of the nation's higher education as being second rate in global standards.
Another reason held responsible for the sliding quality in higher education is the relatively small amount of spending by the government on universities as compared with other Asian countries.
"In 2000, educational spending per capita for public and private university students in Taiwan was NT$203,000 and NT$121,000 respectively, while that for Japan's University of Tokyo, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and South Korea's Seoul National University was NT1.8 million, NT$900,000 and NT$360,000 respectively," Huang said, citing the report.
Huang blamed the decline in quality of higher education on "the over expansion of junior colleges, which were upgraded into institutes of technology too quickly over the past two years."
"What we can do now is try to clean up the mess as best we can," the education minister said, adding that supplementary measures for improvement can be taken by imposing stricter requirement on schools seeking expansion and consolidating the schools' international participation in research.
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