President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday pledged to increase the international competitiveness of the country’s universities and said he expected more colleges to offer courses taught in English.
“Higher education in Taiwan should not keep its doors closed any more. We need to promote the idea of studying in Taiwan and attract great students to Taiwan,” Ma said yesterday in his weekly online speech.
“If we refuse to make changes, great teachers and students will be gone and it will be more difficult for us to raise competitiveness,” he said.
Ma said the government would redouble efforts to attract foreign students. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for example, has offered scholarships to more than 2,000 foreign students over the years.
The ministry will add NT$100 million (US$3.1 million) to its budget next year and provide even more scholarships for foreign students, he said.
Thirty-nine of the 70 public and private universities in Taiwan offer a total of 9,350 English-speaking courses, while foreign students make up 1.3 percent of all college students.
The government expects to double the percentage of foreign students to 2.6 percent in the near future, Ma said.
The president said attracting foreign students, including those from China, would create more opportunities for educational exchanges and expand the vision of Taiwanese students.
“College students in mainland China work very hard because of the intense competition, and students in Taiwan have lost their competitiveness because it is too easy to get into college,” he said.
The education industry brings tens of thousands of foreign students to US schools every year, bringing annual revenue of about NT$15 billion to the country.
In related news, a Hong Kong university is offering attractive scholarships to lure elite Taiwanese senior high school students.
At a presentation held on Friday at Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, one of Taiwan’s most prestigious boys’ high schools, Hong Kong Polytechnic University offered a scholarship package worth HK$480,000 (US$62,112) in financial support to each student.
The scholarship will include HK$80,000 for tuition and HK$40,000 for living expenses per year per student.
Laura Lo, the university’s Chinese mainland affairs department chief, said at the presentation that hopefuls can apply based on their academic proficiency exam scores. As long as the applicants are outstanding, the school will offer them scholarships.
“There will be no quota restrictions, “ she said, adding that if there are many talented Taiwanese students, the school will increase the scholarship quota for Taiwanese students at the expense of those from other areas.
A similar presentation was made at Taipei First Girls’ Senior High School, said Lo, who added that the response from students at both schools had been enthusiastic.
Earlier this year, the University of Hong Kong also made presentations in Taipei offering scholarships worth HK$150,000 per year for up to four years.
Meanwhile, National Taiwan University Chief Secretary Liao Hsien-hao (廖咸浩) said his school has been actively recruiting foreign students to create a multicultural campus environment.
“We have been working hard to retain outstanding students in Taiwan. In addition to luring foreign students by offering scholarships, we have also been actively forging cooperative ties with famous foreign schools for student exchanges. Our goal is for one-third of our students to be able to study on foreign campuses as exchange students,” Liao said.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY CNA
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