U News (大學問), an online platform providing information about college entrance procedures, yesterday said that its Web site’s overseas traffic had grown nearly 150 percent annually so far this year, signaling foreign interest in higher education in Taiwan.
The Web site has been in operation for many years and contains information in traditional Chinese about local universities and colleges, and how to be admitted, U News chief executive officer Wei Chia-hui (魏佳卉) said.
While the Web site initially targeted Taiwanese students, it found in the past two years that most of the growth in its traffic was originating from overseas Internet addresses, she said.
From Jan. 1 to Tuesday last week, the rise in overseas traffic was 146.58 percent from the same period a year earlier, higher than the domestic traffic growth rate of 21.03 percent, she said.
The trend might be due to the stabilization of domestic traffic or increasing interest in Taiwanese higher education from overseas students or parents, she said.
The highest increase in overseas traffic over the period was from China at 2,116.17 percent, followed by Hong Kong at 160.8 percent and Macau at 57.28 percent, U News data showed.
Wei said that although China has banned Chinese students from traveling to Taiwan, and it was initially thought that the Web site was being attacked by Chinese hackers, further analysis of the Chinese IP addresses found that they were spread across major cities, indicating that the visits were likely from interested parties.
Although overseas site visits still primarily came from Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, the US and the UK, this year the site has seen a jump in visits by Indian users, U News data showed.
The US ranked first in overseas visits from 2017 to 2019, but was this year replaced by Hong Kong, the data showed.
Vietnam has been the largest source of Mandarin students in the nation for two consecutive years, with as many as 5,000 to 7,000 Vietnamese traveling to Taiwan to learn the language each year, U News data showed.
Taiwan should seize the opportunity and, as capacity permits, continue to relax overseas restrictions, speed up the visa process for various countries and assist universities with admissions, so that it can build a higher education brand, she said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater