Taiwan's higher education system has recently been the focus of considerable debate, especially with regard to recent abolition of barrier examinations for colleges and high schools. A Ministry of Education white paper of 1998, which guided the changes, saw this step as a stage in the "deregulation of current admission paths and re-adjustment of curricula."
The changes have and continue to come rapidly out of a desire to modernize Taiwan's education system and keep step with the rest of the world. Earlier this week, American educator Morton Schapiro met with several Taiwanese lawmakers, academics, business people and personalities, but rather than encourage them to blindly pursue American standards in higher education, he presented cautious advice on which ideals were worth striving for, and which weren't.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
"The two greatest failures for the US system, which is a model the rest of the world seems eager to emulate, is first, differential access by income -- which has proven to be a very tough nut to crack; and second, most of our students go to public [colleges or universities]. When people blindly try to adopt the US model, they should know about some of the problems," he told the Taipei Times earlier this week.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
Schapiro is president of Williams College, one of the more low-profile members of the American elite in higher education. He is also an economist specializing in higher education, and has become something of a pundit through frequent appearances before the US Congress and quotations in the American press. At Williams, he last year transformed the admissions process into one that is completely "need blind" -- the college's admissions decision does not take into account a student's ability to pay -- for students from all over the world. Yale is the only other undergraduate institution in the US to have adopted such a standard.
In a meeting Wednesday, Schapiro shared his ideas on higher education with legislator Christina Y. Liu, Dr Yu Lun of Taiwan National University, Yi-Rong Young of National Taiwan Normal University and Dr Simon C. Dzeng, board member and executive vice president of the China United Trust and Investment Corporation.
In a separate appointment the same day, he also met with local mando-pop heart-throb Leehom Wang, a Williams College alumnus.
In regards to the major problems currently facing Taiwan's education system, Schapiro said, "In many ways, they're dealing with exactly the same kinds of things we are in the US. For example, one of the biggest problems is access, that is, access to higher education for people from all different levels of society. Here, I found people to be particularly concerned about access for the most talented students."
The problem of access to college degrees is both the result of and exacerbated by economic inequality within a society. In the US, only half the high school graduates in the lower third of the income bracket will go on to college, compared to 85 percent of students from the top third in income. When it comes to the top scorers in standardized tests, the numbers jump to 75 percent and 95 percent, with the more affluent students still ahead.
Taiwan has seen similar problems, even though its education system is at a different stage in development. In the last 15 years, enrollment at local colleges and universities has grown from 191,000 in 1986 to 647,000 last year, but wealthier students have always enjoyed an advantage.
"What's scary," said Schapiro, "is that these figures have proven highly resistant to change. With the numbers from the US, they're virtually the same as they were in 1980."
On these grounds, he continued, "American higher education, according to some definitions, is more of a force toward further stratification than toward equalization."
Schapiro was also critical of the US model of a heavily subsidized higher education system. His stance is that the market should be more involved in determining the cost of undergraduate and graduate degrees, because even if that makes them more expensive, it ensures quality. By the same token, he finds that an overdependence on state funding can cause grave problems for quality, noting how many of the "public ivies" in the US have been hamstrung by the recent economic downturn.
"People think of the US as a model for privatization, but they should look more to Taiwan and Japan," he said, describing how 73 percent of the 15 million college and university students in the US go to public institutions, and how the average public institution gets 55 percent of its budget from a state government. "And here's the rub. What happens is, the state budgets are really vulnerable to fluctuations in the business cycle." In current recession in the US, state budgets shrank by an average of 10 percent. And now, "schools are suffering to a point that we haven't seen in decades."
If Schapiro is critical of certain aspects of the US system, he recommends others, especially the liberal arts curriculum. In Taiwan, he said he found educators most interested in the liberal arts (or general learning, as opposed to professional learning), even though for many, it was a bit of a "tough sell."
His pitch goes like this: "Is it a good investment to major in philosophy as opposed to accounting? When you graduate, the starting salaries are substantially higher in accounting and engineering than they would be for a philosophy major or an arts major, but right around the age of 30 to 35 the lines cross, and the liberal arts graduate is able to increase his age earning profile at a more rapid rate."
He ascribes the success of the liberal arts model to the single skill of critical learning, which endows students with the tools to tackle problems they've never even learned about. As examples, he points to a few Williams alumni, like New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and former Securities Exchange Commission head Aurthur Levitt (both English majors. There's also chairman of AOL Time Warner Steve Case (who didn't major in computer science) and the Fortune magazine journalist who recently broke the Enron scandal, Bethany McLean (who didn't study journalism).
"If there's any best thing about American higher education, I thinks it's the intellectual involvement of the students in the learning process," he said.
By comparison, he sees the traditional systems of many Asian countries, especially those that are test driven and directed towards schools that are supposed to be universally superior (like National Taiwan University in Taiwan), as stinted and myopic. "The process to get into those types of schools destroys a lot of the intellectual vitality that you should be going to those schools to nurture," he said.
However, he also noted that such problems are not necessarily restricted to this side of the Pacific. "That kind of Asian obsession with prestige in higher education has been exported to the US. You see it in LA, you see it in Chicago, you see it in New York. It's becoming a kind of a world problem."
Foreign students in the US higher education system:
Total: 550,000
Top Countries:
1. China 54,000
2. Japan 47,000
3. India 42,000
4. Korea 41,000
5. Taiwan 29,000
Taiwanese students studying overseas in 2000-2001: 54,668
Overseas Chinese students studying in Taiwan in 2000-2001: 6,529
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