The education ministry yesterday reminded students and parents to "stop, look, and listen" before making the decision to study abroad and to be careful when signing contracts if registering for study abroad programs through agencies.
Officials said that summer was the time that most students undertake short-term study abroad programs, but every year problems arose from disputes between students and agencies.
Approximately 32,000 students apply for study abroad visas per year with numbers for those who are only applying for short-term or travel-study programs totalling about 6,000 per year, according to education ministry figures.
Officials said that 10 to 15 agency-student disputes are reported to the ministry per year usually over money-back policies and procedures.
Chang Chin-sheng (張欽盛), director of the Bureau of International Cultural and Educational Relations under the Ministry of Education, said that the ministry has revised study abroad guidelines for contracts written by study abroad agencies.
Such agencies help students apply to foreign schools or language programs and charge a handling fee. A contract is signed between the agency and student.
Wu Ya-chun (
Depending on how much of a student's application has been processed by the agency, if the student decides to cancel plans to study abroad, he or she can ask for at most 75 percent of the handling fee back, Wu said.
Wu added that problems often stemmed from the fact that many agencies were not registered or that the contracts they provide students with are vague.
The International Education Consultants Association, an organization composed of over 100 members who have dealt with study abroad or travel-study programs for many years, was present at the conference and called for agencies to act responsibly.
Sharon Hung (洪世英), vice chairman of the association, said that students should first find out as much as possible about the overseas programs they are interested in and then budget accordingly.
Then they should make sure the agency they choose to help with applications is a legally registered one, Hung said.
If registering on their own and not through an agency, the students should make sure that they are in fact applying through the school's official Web site and not a third-party organization's, she added.
Chang said that details of travel-study program regulations such as insurance problems were still under discussion at the ministry.
However, the ministry hopes that the contract guidelines can help prevent further disputes between agencies and students, he said.
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