Chapter 5. Push-Pull Factors for Taiwanese Graduate School Applicants to China
5.3. Discussion
5.4.3. Desire for International Perspectives and Contacts
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for college graduates when taking inflation into account between 2004 and 2014.27 Lin and Wang’s 2005 study of overeducation in Taiwan’s workforce found that by 1999, 35 percent of workers were overeducated, meaning that these workers had jobs requiring fewer skills than they gained in schooling.28 On wage differences, they found a positive rate of return for adequately educated workers and a negative rate of return for
undereducated workers; for overeducated workers, the rate of return was positive but small.29 This shows that the sustained expansion of higher education has not been met with labor market conditions that can accept the growing supply of graduates expecting high-paying, knowledge-sector jobs. This forces young graduates to spend longer looking for a suitable job, lower their expectations of employment, or perhaps move elsewhere for better work opportunities.
Across the Taiwan Strait, China is positioned to become an attractive option for work and study for Taiwanese students. In addition to the favorable policies toward Taiwanese students that some questionnaire respondents indicated as reasons to migrate to China, respondents mentioned the thriving economic conditions and growing market as factors that made China more attractive than Taiwan or other countries for graduate study.
Concerns that Taiwanese professionals, in choosing to work in mainland China, are contributing to “brain drain” on the island have Taiwanese nationalists worried about the relative economic strength of China compared to Taiwan and what that might mean for political relations.30 These labor market conditions could be a possible push factor Taiwanese students’ choice to look to mainland China for their higher education in the future. While academic investigation have yet to uncover the effects of talent migration from Taiwan to mainland China, the fact that all but one of survey respondents indicated that they plan to work in China in the future indicates that students’ perception of this phenomenon is worthy of academic attention and further research.
5.4.3. Desire for International Perspectives and Contacts
Several questionnaire respondents listed the need for international perspectives (國際視野) as an important reason to look outside Taiwan for an advanced degree. This
27 Yung-Fung Lin, “Effects of Decreasing External Incentives on Higher Education – Reflections from the Case of Taiwan,” Journal of Education and Work, vol. 29, no. 1, 2016, pp. 40-42.
28 Chun-Hung A. Lin and Chun-Hsuan Wang, “The Incidence and Wage Effects of Overeducation: the case of Taiwan,” Journal of Economic Development, vol. 30, no. 1, 2005, pp. 33, 38.
29 Chun-Hung A. Lin and Chun-Hsuan Wang, op. cit., p. 46.
30 Simon Denyer, op. cit.
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is linked to the worldwide phenomenon of internationalization in higher education as students and institutions seek to embed themselves in global systems of competition. On this front, some respondents explicitly mentioned that Taiwan’s higher education system is lacking in international outlooks and needs to be strengthened.
Compared to the questionnaire responses, the scholarly evidence of
internationalization in Taiwan’s higher education system paints a slightly different picture. Internationalization efforts at Taiwanese universities and in the Ministry of Education have been underway since the early 2000s with large-scale projects to enhance the quality and competitiveness of higher education.31 The recruitment of international students is seen as a method of boosting university enrollment rates as population decline shrinks the pool of Taiwanese students each year, along with other measures the Ministry of Education has undertaken to assist institutions in downsizing, merging, and retooling their purposes for the smaller population of students, as discussed in Chapter 4.
Internationalization efforts at Taiwan’s higher education institutions involve much more than simply the recruitment of international students and promotion of study abroad programs. For Taiwan, internationalization also involves reforming academic offerings to cover international topics, encouraging faculty to participate in international exchanges and research, building internationalized campus life experiences for students, and strategically building institutional and financial infrastructure to initiate, maintain, and evaluate internationalization processes.32
On one hand, the perception of Taiwan’s higher education system and institutions as less prestigious and less internationalized emerged as a factor that some questionnaire respondents reported as a reason to apply to graduate schools outside the island. On the other hand, Taiwan’s higher education system and its individual institutions are still highly ranked internationally and has successfully recruited increasing number of international students in recent years. Scholarship initiatives such as the Taiwan Scholarship Program and the Ministry of Education Mandarin Enrichment Scholarship program have successfully attracted non-local students to Taiwan, with the foreign degree-seeking student population increasing from 3,935 in 2006 to 10,059 in 2011.33 A
31 Joseph Meng-Chun Chin and Gregory S. Ching, “Trends and Indicators of Taiwan’s Higher Education Internationalization,” The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, vol 18, no 2, 2009, p. 186.
32 Joseph Meng-Chun Chin and Gregory S. Ching, op. cit., 198.
33 Dorothy I-ru Chen and William Yat Wai Lo, “Internationalization or Commodification? A case study of internationalization practices in Taiwan’s higher education,” Asia Pacific Education Review, vol. 14, no.
33, 2013, p. 35.
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May 2019 report from Taiwan News indicated that the number of mainland Chinese students applying to and enrolling in Taiwan’s graduate and doctoral programs reached an all-time high for the 2019-2020 school year at 1,440 students.34 Taiwanese universities have also expressed enthusiasm in recruiting students from Southeast Asia, even before the start of the current DPP administration’s New Southbound Policy.35
Internationally, Taiwan’s higher education system and institutions continue to rank very highly. The ROC government-sponsored organization Study in Taiwan highlights several international rankings on its international-facing website for student recruitment, including Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) data that ranked Taiwan 19th out of 75 countries for higher education system strength in 2018. QS ranked Taipei as 20th and Hsinchu as 73rd “Best Student Cities” out of 101 cities in that same year.36 Across QS, Times Higher Education, and U.S. News and World Report data, National Taiwan University consistently ranked within the global top 200 universities for 2018.37
While these data on student recruitment and international rankings highlight the strength of Taiwan’s higher education system in the global education market, its rankings compared to mainland China show the mainland’s current strength in higher education.
China’s higher education system ranked 8th in the world in the same QS report that ranked Taiwan as 19th in 2018.38 China’s top two universities (Tsinghua University and Peking University) consistently score higher than Taiwan’s top schools in global rankings from QS, U.S. News and World Report, and Times Higher Education.39 This shows that while Taiwan continues to perform well in the international market for higher education, efforts to internationalize and enhance the quality of higher education in mainland China have
34 George Liao, “Chinese students applying for Taiwan’s postgraduate programs reach new height,” Taiwan News, May 27, 2019, accessed May 29, 2019,
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3711697?fbclid=IwAR1HdmgriLMy8JTfbycMnGmAGvJ95xz oDHWD7M9z_xryYgujPfTcV15tzRY.
35 Dorothy I-ru Chen and William Yat Wai Lo, op. cit., p. 36.
36 “Education at a Glance,” Study in Taiwan, accessed May 29, 2019, https://www.studyintaiwan.org/discover/education.
37 Ibid.
38 “QS Higher Education System Strength rankings 2018,” Quacquarelli Symonds, accessed May 29, 2019, https://www.topuniversities.com/system-strength-rankings/2018.
39 See: “Best Global Universities in China,” U.S. News and World Report, accessed May 29, 2019,
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/search?region=&country=china&subject=&name=; “Best Global Universities in Taiwan,”
U.S. News and World Report, accessed May 29, 2019, https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/search?country=taiwan&name=; “World University Rankings 2019,” Times Higher Education, accessed May 29, 2019, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats.
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surpassed Taiwan. This links to the perception among questionnaire respondents that Taiwan’s university system lacks strength and internationalization compared to mainland China’s.
Moreover, institutional-level weaknesses in Taiwan show that more work is needed to achieve internationalization goals. Chen and Lo point to the understaffing and underfunding of international student offices at universities, an administrator and
efficiency-led approach to internationalization rather than an academic or instructor-led approach, and deficiencies in English-language course offerings. They concluded that internationalization in Taiwan’s universities is successful in recruiting international students to their campuses, student experiences must still be improved. For local students in Taiwanese universities, this translates to segregated academic and campus life
experiences from their international peers at the same campuses.40 Perhaps questionnaire respondents in this study refer to this reality of internationalization when mentioning Taiwan’s insufficient internationalization in its higher education system.
On the other hand, globalization and internationalization of higher education all over the world has driven students to seek international experiences. In this vein, the desire to encounter and work with mainland Chinese classmates, faculty, and institutions for the sake of making friends and experiencing different perspectives became a recurring theme among questionnaire respondents. These social and cultural reasons to study in mainland China connect back to the concept of linkage communities across the Taiwan Strait. Even if not politically powerful as a homogenous community, these people who form connections across the strait in education express an active desire to build
connections with people on the other side for the sake of making friends, expanding one’s horizons, and building goodwill across borders. These are factors not typically discussed in the academic literature on cross-strait economic ties among the Taishang
businesspeople operating in mainland China. Even though current evidence points to a gap between socioeconomic integration and political spillover in the cross-strait
relationship, the inclusion of cross-strait students in the conversation highlights the social reasons for cross-strait mobility that are perhaps downplayed in the purely economic conversations of business ties across the Taiwan Strait.
Overall, this chapter has introduced primary data to the discussion of cross-strait student mobility among Taiwanese graduate students. While small, the sample revealed
40 Dorothy I-ru Chen and William Yat Wai Lo, op cit., pp. 37-39.
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several strong themes of push and pull factors affecting these students’ decisions to pursue a graduate degree in mainland China. Each of these themes may be explained in depth through existing academic literature on cross-strait economic relations, Taiwan and China’s efforts to internationalize higher education, trends in graduate employment, and the imperative to accumulate cross-border and international experiences. While economic competitiveness is a motivating factor for these Taiwanese graduate students, this chapter also found that personal motivations to meet and collaborate with people of different backgrounds and international points of view factored into student decisions with high frequency. These altruistic factors are significant because they are unique to the
population of students, whose goals and rationales for staying in mainland China differ substantially from the population of Taiwanese businesspeople or tourists traveling to China.
In revisiting the two hypotheses posed in Chapter 1, we may find that the preceding chapters support the presumption that economic and academic drawbacks in Taiwan (including perceptions of comparatively weaker job markets and
internationalization efforts) were on these students’ minds in their decisions to pursue a graduate degree in China. These push factors in Taiwan were accompanied by economic and social advantages in mainland China that pulled these students toward an education in the PRC. Questionnaire responses corroborated existing academic evidence of economic difficulties in Taiwan and economic growth in China, especially for new graduates.
However, in reality the picture of student mobility from Taiwan to China is much more complex, as the mobility of students back and forth across the Taiwan Strait illustrates the intersectionality of the cross-strait business community with the community of Taiwanese graduate students studying in mainland Chinese universities. Overall, the economic advantages to a career in mainland China versus Taiwan emerged as a pair of push-pull factors influencing students’ decisions in the questionnaire.
Hypothesis 2 is also supported in that the questionnaire responses and interview results found few instances of political factors motivating student migration to China.
Rather, existing economic connections in mainland China and the prospect of prosperous careers there drove student decision-making. However, questionnaire responses revealed that several students wanted opportunities to collaborate with peers and professors, gain new perspectives, and join social and academic networks in mainland China. In other words, many students in this study sought out an advanced degree in mainland China with an expressed purpose to participate in the creation of linkage communities across the
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Taiwan Strait. These rationales are perhaps unique to the experience and expectations of students in higher education, who not only pursue an advanced degree for professional and economic opportunity but also for the opportunity to experience a variety of
viewpoints and build connections with new peers and networks, actively contributing to the formation of linkage communities that understand and have a stake in the political and economic futures of both China and Taiwan.