The Ministry of Education has taken measures to prevent universities and colleges from forcing Southeast Asian students into manual labor, Deputy Minister of Education Lio Mon-chi (劉孟奇) said yesterday.
The ministry had previously given great liberty to schools offering internship programs as part of the government’s New Southbound Policy, but after discovering how the regulations have been abused, it has inspected nine schools and set down new requirements for all institutes participating in the program, Lio said.
He was referring to a series of scandals last year and this year in which Yu Da University of Science and Technology, the University of Kang Ning and Hsing Wu University were accused of collaborating with personnel agencies to trick Southeast Asian students into performing illegal work unrelated to the internship they signed up for.
Photo: Rachel Lin, Taipei Times
The internship program is designed to provide training to students who might be hired as middle-level managers by Taiwanese companies after graduation, Liu said.
It is part of an effort to boost the nation’s economy amid a declining birthrate, he said.
To prevent a repeat of the alleged abuses, the schools offering the program are now required to submit copies of the students’ internship contracts and salary transfer records to the ministry, so that it can see whether their work hours are legal and if their internship subsidies have been docked by personnel agencies, Liu said.
The schools are also banned from receiving tuition and other fees from personnel agencies or companies where the students work, he said.
Furthermore, any work opportunities that the school passes on to international students must be reported to the ministry, he added.
The schools are also required to submit their syllabuses to the ministry for review at least 15 days in advance, Liu said.
If the schools breach the regulations, for example by requiring students to work past legal work hour limits, they could be banned from recruiting international students or receiving government subsidies and given ad hoc consultation, he said.
The ministry would consider students’ Chinese-language skills and pass rates for professional certificates when evaluating the program’s performance, he said.
The schools would be required to provide a document detailing the program in the students’ native language before they arrive in Taiwan, he said, adding that the document would serve as a reference in the event of a dispute.
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