Academia Sinica President James Liao (廖俊智) has said that employees of research institutes and universities in Taiwan are paid less than in other places in the world.
The Association of National Universities of Taiwan released a statement detailing the importance of increasing academics’ salaries to avoid a brain drain.
Meanwhile, Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) said that he is supportive of raising salaries of military personnel, civil servants and public schoolteachers.
In addition to low wages, for those who teach in universities, the current way of calculating the income replacement ratio (IRR) is tellingly unfair.
After the pension reforms, the IRR is to be calculated in accordance with years of service.
The ratio for those who have worked for 40 years is 62.5 percent, those having worked for 35 years 60 percent and those with 30 years service 52.5 percent.
For 25 and 20 years of service the IRR would be 45 percent and 37.5 percent respectively.
In short, the fewer one’s years of service, the lower the IRR. Normally, before a person can work as a university teacher, they need to train for a long time.
They must spend years in a doctoral program and then work as a postdoctoral researcher before being hired as an assistant professor. The starting point of their teaching career is much later than that of other teachers.
Those who hold a doctorate in engineering could become an assistant professor in their early 30s, but people with doctorates in the humanities or life sciences would very likely be in their 40s before they start their careers.
As a result, for university lecturers and academic researchers, the total years of service are between 20 and 30, which means that on average their IRR is only about 45 percent.
Due to much longer training, professors only work for a shorter period, but they have to accept the consequences of a lower IRR, which is by no means the result of their own choices.
To fix such an unfair situation, not only should professors’ salaries be raised, the ways in which the IRR is calculated should also be modified.
It would be much fairer to consider when one starts their career, and measure the years of service according to a normalized scale.
Chen Sinn-wen is a chair professor at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) and chairperson of the NTHU Teachers’ Union.
Translated by Emma Liu
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