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“Gold-Plating” Plan Conversely Pushes Taiwan’s Education Backwards

icon2018/05/04
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  “Gold-Plating” Plan Conversely Pushes Taiwan’s Education Backwards

 United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

April 24, 2018

 Translation of an Excerpt

 

Amid the “blocking Kuan” storm, media reported that several top universities went abroad in search of talent, but with disastrous results. Among them, National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Department of Economics issued three offers of appointment for full-time faculty members, but all three finally gave up teaching in Taiwan. In addition, the Departments of Finance and Fiscal Administration of both National Taiwan University and Tsinghua University also met the same fate, issuing offers of appointment with no takers. This phenomenon of talent search running into a wall, of course, is related to the low pay of the professors in Taiwan; however, more importantly, Taiwan’s holistic development is moving towards more and more contraction, while the black hand of politics endlessly reaches into campuses, resulting in a situation where talents are difficult to find their future in this kind of environment.

 

The phenomenon of Taiwan’s low pay-- college professors’ pay scale in contrast with that of other countries-- has become a bitter joke. However, nowadays, the average salary of professors in South Korea is roughly twice that of Taiwan, Hong Kong is three times that of Taiwan, and Singapore is four times that of Taiwan, while we lag far behind.

 

The government, however, has a special set of smoke and mirrors for education, which is endlessly introducing attractive sounding "gold-plating” plans to embellish the system. The then Chen Shui-bian government introduced a 5-year-NT$50 billion “top universities plan,” which was designed to spend large sums of money in order to create “first-class institutions of higher learning.” However, continuously injecting NT$100 billion over ten years, Taiwan’s universities not only failed to move forward, but backpedaled; the plan was ridiculed as a "capsizing" plan.

 

According to the "Times Higher Education World University Rankings" of London, National Taiwan University (NTU) ranked 110 in 2005, but after injecting funds under the top universities plan for two consecutive stages, last year NTU’s ranking dropped to 198. It not only failed to squeeze into the world's top 100, but nearly fell out of the top 200. The more money we spend, the more serious the fall in ranking; thus it could be seen that many resources were not spent in the proper places

 

For education, the powers that be have not paid due attention or made far-reaching plans, but they have frequently used high-handedness to forcibly intervene in education policies and university personnel matters. Students oftentimes are led by the faculty members to the streets for protests or rallies, while their upbringing and employment careers have been neglected. How could we have international competitiveness with this kind of environment for higher education? With harsh political atmospherics and economic environment endlessly forcing a brain drain, how could we still indulge in bragging about attracting talents far and near?

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