The Ministry of Education’s formula for calculating the student-teacher ratio of the nation’s universities is “watered down” with fudged figures, union representatives said yesterday, calling ministry moves to increase the ratio of teachers to students “inadequate.”
“While trying to make improvements is a step in the right direction, the indices the ministry is using are watered down,” Taiwan Higher Education Union organization department director Lin Po-yi (林柏儀) said. “The student-teacher ratio is a critical indicator of the quality of a university’s education, but the ministry’s estimates do not include many students, and count as ‘teachers’ many people who do not teach.”
Starting yesterday, the required student-teacher ratio at universities fell from 32:1, to 27:1, Lin said, adding that the calculation fails to count any foreign students — including Chinese students.
“For teachers, foreign students are still students, but strangely they are not included in the ministry’s calculations,” Lin said, adding that the ministry’s formula only counts foreign students if they comprise at least 10 percent of a university’s student body — a precondition which none of the nation’s universities meet.
He also criticized the ministry for counting a student who works during the day and takes evening or weekend classes as only half a regular student, and valuing military instructors, teaching assistants and administrative personnel, such as school presidents, as teachers.
“While military instructors do teach, they are not full-time instructors, and their courses are not academic,” he said, adding that military instructors were primarily responsible for providing students with “life guidance,” as well as directing occasional military training classes.
He said that more than 3,000 people without teaching positions are counted as teachers under the ministry’s formula, relative to the nation’s 48,000 full-time instructors.
He said that universities’ average student-teacher ratio of 26.1:1 is still comparatively high, up from 18:1 in 1990 after huge increases in the number university students as part of efforts to increase access to university education.
As student numbers started to fall following years of low-birth rates, bringing the ratio back to former levels would improve the quality of university education and also prevent massive lay-offs among private-university professors, he said.
Elementary, middle and high schools, which have already been hit with falling student numbers, have mostly responded by reducing class sizes, partially because their instructors have guaranteed government positions, Lin said.
In contrast, instructors employed by private universities do not have their positions guaranteed by the government, making them vulnerable to being “sacrificed,” even if preserving their jobs would improve the quality of education an institution offers, he said.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
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