In an attempt to attract more foreign students to Taiwan, the Cabinet yesterday approved a 10-year plan called the Taiwan Scholarship to provide students with annual scholarship payments of between NT$280,000 and NT$540,000.
Statistics made available by the education ministry show that there are about 7,800 foreign students studying in the nation. While about 6,200 are in short-term or long-term language-study programs, the remaining 1,500 are taking credit courses at colleges or universities.
The Cabinet hopes to see the number of students pursuing graduate or undergraduate degrees increase to about 10,000 by 2013 with the implementation of the 10-year project.
The Taiwan Scholarship is one of nine major initiatives included in the measure approved by the Cabinet yesterday.
The program, which would offer a monthly allowance of between NT$25,000 and NT$30,000 starting this fall semester, is projected to benefit over 850 students from foreign countries.
According to Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng (杜正勝), who delivered a special report on the recruitment project during yesterday's weekly closed-door Cabinet meeting, the nation faces several challenges in recruiting students.
"In addition to English-speaking countries and non-English speaking countries with international influence, China poses the biggest threat because it boasts cheaper tuition and cost of living," Tu said.
While China attracted only 44,700 foreign students in 1999, the number jumped to over 77,700 last year.
In addition to the establishment of the Taiwan Scholarship, the ministry plans to bring in high-caliber foreign teachers from abroad, encourage schools to offer courses suiting the needs of foreign students and use English as the instruction medium.
The program's undergraduate scholarship provides a foreign student pursuing a bachelor's degree with a NT$25,000 monthly stipend for up to four years.
Recipients of the graduate scholarship will receive monthly subsidies of NT$30,000 for the pursuit of a master's or doctoral degree. While the grant for a graduate student is up to two years, that for a doctorate candidate is up to three years.
The annual quota for the three scholarships is 300.
Students who are residents of diplomatic allies or of developing countries and who are granted the diplomatic scholarship will receive a monthly allowance of NT$30,000 per person on top of an economy class round-trip plane ticket to study either Chinese at universities' language centers or at undergraduate schools or graduate schools.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching