The Ministry of Education (MOE) said yesterday it would ban graduate schools from increasing their number of new recruits to ensure education quality.
“The ministry is concerned about the huge number of graduate students and has decided to strictly prohibit graduate schools from seeking to raise the number [of their vacancies] starting from the 2009 academic year,” Yang Yu-hui (楊玉惠), deputy director of the ministry’s Department of Higher Education, said when asked for comment.
The measure is aimed at strictly managing the quality and number of graduate students in the country, she said, adding that universities must obtain the ministry’s approval before they can establish new graduate schools.
Statistics from the ministry showed that the number of students pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees reached 170,000 and 30,000 respectively last school year, up dramatically from 38,000 and 10,000 in 1999.
“Pushing reforms to promote the nation’s higher education and controlling the number of graduate schools and their population, enforcing an exit mechanism for universities and managing the quality of college students to live up to public expectations should be the government’s responsibility,” a ministry press release said.
In related news, statistics released by the ministry’s Bureau of International Cultural and Educational Relations yesterday showed the majority of Taiwanese students in the US were concentrated in California, New York, Texas, Massachusetts, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Washington states.
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:
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