Young Taiwanese people’s obsession with National Taiwan University (NTU) is increasing, with many top students this year choosing to do an unpopular major at NTU over a popular one at National Chengchi University (NCCU).
The results of this year’s College Entrance Exam, released on Monday, show the entrance level to NTU’s drama department has, for the first time, surpassed that of the journalism department at NCCU, an indication that high-scoring students would rather attend a not-so-prestigious department of NTU than a well-known department at NCCU.
Observers said that many top students tried their best to “get admitted to NTU” regardless of their personal interests or talents, presuming that they will enter the top university first and then be able to transfer to another department later.
As a result, the entry thresholds of such NTU departments as the department of geography and the department of forestry have risen above the levels of previous years.
A clear indicator is the entry-level score of NTU’s department of drama, which surged higher than the entry-level scores of the departments of journalism and advertising at NCCU.
Seven of the top 10 engineering choices for this year’s freshmen were NTU departments, including the top six choices for all engineering freshmen.
On the other hand, National Chiao Tung University’s (NCTU) department of computer science and information engineering, which was ranked fifth in Taiwan last year, fell to seventh place this year. The same department at National Tsing Hua University fell out of the top 10.
NTU remained the top choice for high-scoring high-school graduates this year as all spots in the various departments in the university’s different colleges and schools were filled as soon as the entrance exam results were out.
A good example of the ever-growing “NTU complex” among Taiwanese students is that the minimum score for entering NTU’s department of drama — 472.7 — surged ahead of the score for attending the department of journalism of NCCU, which was 471.8.
The entry level for NTU’s department of meteorology also rose above nine other departments in other famous universities, including the nanotechnology department of NCTU and the electric and electronics department of National Cheng Kung University.
Students are placing NTU above all else, indicating that their “NTU complex” has grown stronger, said Liu Chun-hao, a student counselor.
NCCU president Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) said that choosing NTU’s drama department over his school’s journalism department was an indication of students planning to focus on their majors only when they follow a master’s program.
He said he blamed the phenomenon in part on the Ministry of Education’s unfair allocation of NT$3 billion (US$103.6 million) per year to NTU in its “five-year NT$50 billion program.”
Only NT$200 million is given to NCCU annually, he said.
This distribution of educational funding leads people to think that NTU has abundant resources, he said, adding that the government should not adopt a policy which “singles out” and “prioritizes” a particular university.
Why do students love NTU?
Hung Tai-hsiung (洪泰雄), director of the NTU student registration division, said the university has a full range of academic studies and has a 50 percent success rate when students who did not know their interests in high school want to transfer to a more appropriate field of study.
Chang Kuo-pao (張國保), director of Ming Chuan University’s Institute of Education, said choosing universities over departments creates a disadvantage for students when they graduate and have to make career decisions.
Chou Chu-ying (周祝瑛), a professor of education at NCCU, said that by giving preferential treatment to NTU — where nearly 80 percent of the students are from middle and upper-class families — the government was only taking care of “members of the elite families.”
“This is not good for the country,” she said.
She said the current situation is like “NTU driving a Mercedes-Benz while all other universities are riding on bicycles.”
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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