Plans by National Kaohsiung University of Hospitality and Tourism and French culinary institute Le Cordon Bleu to cooperate would misuse public land and resources to fund an elitist “cram school,” union activists said yesterday.
“This is a crucial case because the Ministry of Education has always hoped to bring foreign schools into Taiwan and they have now sacrificed tuition restrictions,” Taiwan Higher Education Union organization department director Lin Po-yi (林柏儀) said, adding that the move would encourage other schools to sign similar deals, undercutting the public nature of education as schools take advantage of the situation to raise tuition fees.
As many schools are struggling financially amid falling student numbers, private sector cooperation plans that would bring in additional revenue have become a source of contention, with the union contending that many of the schemes would encourage private “rent-seeking” to take unfair advantage of schools’ public resources and funding.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan Higher Education Union
The contract is for the university and Le Cordon Bleu to establish a for-profit institute in a refurbished university building, stipulating tuition fees of more than NT$1 million (US$30,670) for a 15-month program.
Yearly tuition for universities in Taiwan range from about NT$60,000 to NT$100,000.
Lin said the university should stop admitting people to the joint venture until a full review of the Ministry of Education’s approval is conducted, citing the illegality of the school’s plans to hire foreign teachers when approval occurred.
For-profit schools were only allowed to hire foreigners to teach foreign languages prior to a special regulation exception passed by Ministry of Labor earlier this week, which allows foreigners to teach culinary arts.
The “tailored” amendment was unnecessary, given the existing ability of public and private non-profit universities to hire foreign instructors directly, Lin said.
“This amendment was designed to get Le Cordon Bleu out of a pinch — not to protect the labor rights of foreigners,” he said. “Even though they will charge extremely high tuition fees, they actually only intend to bring in two foreign instructors.”
The new institute intends to admit 64 students starting next month.
The university has also been criticized for sacrificing one of its buildings for the institute.
“The building was constructed with government funding, but our students will not be able to use it,” Chen Chien-hao (陳千浩), an assistant professor at the university said, adding that the institute pushed out the original student cafeteria, which was forced to move to a basement.
“It would not be such a big deal if we were dealing with Harvard — but this a diploma mill,” he said, citing legal controversy forcing the closure of Le Cordon Bleu schools in the US.
Wang Ying-shun (王映舜) — a former deputy student council president at the Kaohsiung university — said that promises to allow regular students to intern at the institute were “flimsy” as there would likely be just one or two openings available given its small class size.
Interns would also likely be responsible for helping out with “odds and ends” rather than being allowed meaningful participation, Wang 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