The Ministry of Education yesterday said it hoped the number of international students and overseas Taiwanese studying in Taiwan would reach 10 percent of the nation’s student population by 2020.
In a press release, the ministry’s Bureau of International Cultural and Educational Relations promised to encourage Taiwanese universities to improve the quality of their education in a bid to attract more foreign students to visit for long-term or short-term study.
The bureau said the number of international students pursuing an academic degree, visiting Taiwan as exchange students or for short-term study in the current academic year had reached 22,366 — an increase of 2,870 compared with last year.
The number studying for an academic degree rose by 1,506 to 7,764, with the majority of them — 5,644 students — coming from other Asian countries, the bureau said.
The number of students visiting from the Americas came second, at 17 percent of the total number of overseas students enrolled in academic programs, the bureau said. The number studying at National Taiwan University outnumbered the number studying at other universities, the bureau said.
The bureau said the number of foreign students studying at Mandarin centers at universities this year also increased by 961 to 11,612. The majority, 6,209 students, came from other Asian countries, while 3,071 were from the Americas, the bureau said.
In related developments, the number of Taiwanese college students and graduate students who postponed their graduation year hit a new high this academic year.
A total of 50,219 students who were supposed to have graduated in June last year are still attending university, up from 47,127 students in the previous academic year.
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