Students and education groups yesterday protested in front of the Ministry of Education in Taipei, demanding the ministry reject proposals from 14 universities to raise tuition fees.
Shouting slogans, the protesters said that universities should not be run as cram schools and students and parents should not be treated as ATMs.
The ministry should push for fairer distribution of education resources among prestigious universities and private institutes instead of allowing universities to pass costs on to students, they said.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
The Anti-Commercializing of Education Union said that many institutes submitted plans to raise tuition fees to the ministry even though they are profitable.
The group said that three regulations promulgated by the ministry are hampering efforts to bring about a fair tuition system and should be nullified.
The first regulation states that the ministry should notify every university of the range of tuition hikes at other institutes every year, which encourages institutions to raise tuition, members said.
The second rule has created incongruity between systems by which undergraduate and postgraduate students are charged, they said, citing the example of Fu Jen Catholic University in New Taipei City, which they said had revoked a plan to charge undergraduates more, but could still push through a hike for graduate students.
The third regulation allows institutions to charge foreign students at a higher rate than Taiwanese, which has seen some foreign students pay up to twice as much as local students for tuition, protesters said.
A Tamkang University student surnamed Yeh (葉) accused the university of having imposed a rule that subjects students who have just enrolled to higher tuition fees.
This amounts to exploitation, Yeh said.
He accused the university of acting with subterfuge when announcing that tuition would increase and saying that nearly 4,000 students had been notified when in reality it only made one announcement over a loudspeaker.
A student at Chang Gung University surnamed Lin (林) said that the institution — which is funded by Formosa Plastics Group — in 2013 invested in stocks, but ran up a NT$400 million (US$12.26 million) deficit.
It plans to offset the deficit by raising tuition, Lin said.
Chang Gung plans to raise tuition, despite having more than NT$43.7 billion in assets and having booked more than NT$300 million from liquidated assets over the past three years, Lin said.
Quoting Minister of Education Pan Wen Chung (潘文忠), who on Monday said now is not the right time to raise tuition fees, the protesters pressed Department of Higher Education division head Tsai Hui-min (蔡惠敏) to commit to rejecting proposals to increase fees.
Tsai said the ministry would review the proposals and put together a committee comprising students, non-government organizations and government officials.
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