The Ministry of Education should reject requests for tuition fee hikes and force universities that fail to meet student-teacher ratio standards to cut their fees, student protesters said yesterday in a demonstration outside the ministry building in Taipei.
“Wage growth this year was actually negative, even as the cost of living rose, but the Ministry of Education has still left open the possibility of tuition increases, continuing its policy of commercializing education,” Alliance Against the Commercialization of Education member Hsieh Yi-hung (謝毅弘) said, blasting the ministry for allowing universities to apply for a 0.445 percent increase in tuition for the coming academic year.
Universities that did not hike fees last year can apply for an increase of up to 1.88 percent, with percentages based on a combination of changes to the consumer price index, disposable income and average wages.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
Two universities last year were allowed to increase their fees, while 12 other applications were denied, ministry statistics showed.
The average increase would be NT$445 (US$14.79) per student at private universities, Hsieh said.
The ministry failed to cut fees charged by several universities which last year violated maximum student-teacher ratio requirements, Hsieh said.
Eighteen universities have student-teacher ratios greater than the maximum of 23 to 1, the alliance said.
“If they continue to refuse to implement the official policy this year and punish universities that exceed the ratio, that would amount to giving more than NT$100 million to universities that have been doing a poor job,” Hsieh said, adding that higher ratios undercut educational quality by forcing class mergers.
Chinese Culture University Student Self-government Reform Alliance member Chen Pang-an (陳邦安) said that massive layoffs of part-time instructors in the past few years had dramatically reduced the number of courses available for lower-level students at the university, which activists said has a student-teacher ratio of 23 to seven.
“A new physical education class is being offered, ‘self-sufficient exercise,’ where students exercise by themselves in their spare time, which has led to physical-education teacher layoffs,” he said.
Students also called for adjustments to the way the ratio is calculated to include foreign students, which are included only if they comprise more than 10 percent of a university’s student body.
Department of Higher Education specialist Tan Yi-ching (譚以敬) questioned the figures provided by the protesters.
“Based on our review standards, no university had exceeded the maximum ratio,” Tan said, adding that numbers provided by the protesters did not match official statistics.
Hsieh said the discrepancy was based on the “fragmented” nature of official statistics, with figures for different types of students and teachers scattered across different information platforms.
“The ministry has purposefully made the data extremely complicated and messy to the point that those outside the system have no way to determine exact student-teacher ratios,” he said.
Yesterday was the deadline for universities to apply for fee increases.
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