Chapter 4. Higher Education Across the Taiwan Strait
4.1. Development of Taiwan’s Higher Education System
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Chapter 4. Higher Education Across the Taiwan Strait
This chapter focuses on the development of Taiwan and China’s higher education systems and the ways in which they interact today in terms of student exchanges and migration. Sections 4.1 and 4.2 give a brief historical overview of Taiwan and China’s higher education systems from the 1960s through present day, focusing on how each government’s political imperatives and economic goals have affected the development of their higher education systems. Taiwan and China both face unique challenges as a result of the expansion of higher education access. Section 4.3 provides an overview of the legal and political basis for exchanges in students between China and Taiwan. Section 4.4 investigates the current state of student flows and reviews relevant research on cross-strait student exchanges.
4.1. Development of Taiwan’s Higher Education System
The expansion of the higher education system in Taiwan has largely followed global trends in privatization, marketization, and massification over the past several decades as discussed in Chapter 2. After a period of strict control over higher education institutions from the 1950s through the early 1980s, the ROC now features a highly expanded and marketized higher education system, having quickly achieved universal access. These developments occurred in tandem with the transition from an agricultural economy to manufacturing, and subsequently to a service-based economy over the course of the late twentieth century. These liberalization efforts in the education sector also reflect Taiwan’s transition from military to democratic government. Taiwan’s near-universal higher education system today, while mirroring existing trends of massification throughout the world, also experiences its own set of unique challenges in terms of inequality in status among institutions and competition for student recruitment.
4.1.1. Historical Overview
Taiwan’s higher education system today has expanded rapidly to the point that 95 percent of high school graduates enroll in tertiary education.1 Higher education
institutions in Taiwan increased from only seven in 1950 to 158 by 2015.2 For Taiwan,
1 Chia-Ming Hsueh, “Higher Education Crisis in Taiwan,” Inside Higher Ed, August 5, 2018, accessed January 16, 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/world-view/higher-education-crisis-taiwan.
2 Robin J. Chen, “Public and Private Universities in Taiwan: To Compete or Not to Compete?” RIHE International Seminar Reports, no. 23, 2015, p. 102.
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the growth in size and number of higher education institutions took off with their
deregulation starting in the late 1980s. Before then, the KMT tightly controlled the higher education system in accordance to larger political and economic goals. As Taiwan’s economy shifted from import-substitution to export-led growth in the 1960s, the government encouraged the expansion and addition of vocational junior colleges and restricted growth in academic institutions to generate skilled workers for the
manufacturing sector and meet the island’s industrialization needs. The vocational sector of higher education continued to expand through the 1970s with the upgrading of
Taiwan’s industries. Throughout Taiwan’s period of martial law, the KMT government maintained tight control over the higher education sector to bring together the industrial needs of the economy with the human capital of students. This control over the higher education system would loosen with the political and economic liberalization of the 1980s.
The pattern of global economic liberalization has correspondingly impacted Taiwan’s higher education system and changed the role of government in education.
Government control of higher education shifted toward supervision and regulation in the late 1980s with Taiwan’s moves toward democratization and economic neoliberalism.
higher education was deregulated in 1985 in response to pressure from civil society, along with the shift from a manufacturing industry-based economy to a service-based one.3 In 1994 and again in 2005 the ROC Executive Yuan Educational Reform Committee revised the University Act to loosen government control over higher education institutions, creating a more autonomous higher education system in terms of academic and administrative responsibility.4 These change turned higher education institutions into entities that resemble businesses. The most recent version of the University Act largely leaves organizational, administrative, monetary, and curricular matters to the universities themselves to govern, with the Ministry of Education taking on a more supervisory role.
The Act classifies universities into three categories: national, public, and private. Here, public universities refer to those established at the municipal or county level. The establishment of national and public universities occurs through national and local
3 Shu-ling Tsai and Yossi Shavit, “Taiwan: Higher Education—Expansion and Equality of Educational Opportunity,” in Yossi Shavit, Richard Arum, and Adam Gamoran, eds., Stratification on Higher Education: A Comparative Study, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007): pp. 143-146.
4 Chuing Prudence Chou, “Taiwan Higher Education at the Crossroads: Its Implication for China,” Journal of Asian Public Policy, vol.1, no. 2, 2008, p. 149.
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government approval channels, while the establishment of private universities is governed through the Private Institute Act.5
Since deregulation, the massification of Taiwan’s higher education sector can be characterized by the growth in number of higher education institutions, especially in the private education sector. This growth has been characterized by not only the
establishment of new private higher education institutions but also the upgrading of existing schools to “college” or “university” status. In the 1990s many private two- and three-year vocational colleges experienced upgrades in status, thereby joining the higher education system under new classifications.6 Robin J. Chen notes that this growth in private institutions was accompanied by a decrease in the number of polytechnic institutes in favor of colleges and universities, mirroring Taiwan’s economic transition from
manufacturing to services.7 Today, these private institutions outnumber public
institutions. Expanded capacity is also a defining feature of massification in Taiwan’s higher education system. Although the public universities have likewise expanded their capacities, a larger proportion of today’s students are enrolled in private colleges and universities.8
Overall, the role and function of the university in Taiwan has changed in step with global economic imperatives of neoliberalism and trends of academic capitalism. From their role as engines of Taiwan’s industrialization to institutions of the service and knowledge economy, Taiwan’s colleges and universities have reformed and grown concurrently with contemporary trends of massification, privatization, and marketization in other countries around the world. The transformation of higher education in Taiwan, while extraordinary in terms of achieving universal access, has also revealed some issues.
While Taiwan’s education system reflects the larger trends of globalization, these institutions of higher education face several unique challenges considering Taiwan’s current social and economic outlook.
4.1.2. Challenges in Taiwan’s Higher Education System
5 Ministry of Education, University Act, Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan), 2015, accessed May 6, 2019, https://law.moj.gov.tw/ENG/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?pcode=H0030001.
6 Chuing Prudence Chou, op. cit., pp. 149-150.
7 Robin J. Chen, op. cit., p. 104.
8 Sheng-Ju Chan and Liang-Wen Lin, “Massification of Higher Education in Taiwan: Shifting Pressure from Admission to Employment,” Higher Education Policy, vol. 28, 2015, p. 25.
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The privatization of the higher education system on one hand provided access to more students by easing government fiscal responsibility and oversight of higher
education institutions. On the other hand, rapid expansion and privatization has contributed to several social problems in Taiwanese society today. Taiwan now has a stratified university system in which the national and public universities enjoy the best reputations, accept the highest-achieving students, and offer subsidized tuition. This has become a problem for economic inequality in Taiwanese society as access to higher education still favors richer families who can invest more in their students’ educational achievement early in life. These students from more affluent households are then
rewarded with not only a spot at a top-ranking university, but also enjoy cheaper tuition.
This worsens social class segregation as lower-income students who cannot perform as well academically are funneled into private universities with higher fees and less
favorable reputations among the population and employers.9 Chih-Chun Wu’s 2009 study of undergraduate students found that students with lower-socioeconomic status were less likely to attend elite universities and were more likely to work part-time during their studies to relieve economic pressure. This indicates that while inequality in access to tertiary education has been eliminated in Taiwan, inequalities remain in the perceived quality of education students can attain depending on where they are able to enroll.10
Challenges facing universities and colleges in Taiwan naturally involve funding and revenue generation. While the role of the ROC government has changed from a controlling one to a merely regulatory one in supervising the activities and governance of universities and colleges, the government still plays a critical role in funding for higher education institutions: both public and private institutions rely heavily on winning government grants to meet their research, teaching, and other funding needs.11 Public universities tend to enjoy better support and access to these government funds than private universities, contributing to the stratification in perceived quality and reputation between public and private institutions. However, constricted national budgets make government grants alone insufficient for universities’ operation costs. While the public universities may have an advantage over public ones in terms of access to government grants and funding, both public and private institutions have turned to similar strategies of
9 Sheng-Ju Chan and Liang-Wen Lin, op. cit., p. 26.
10 Chi-Chun Wu, “Higher Education Expansion and Low-Income Students in Taiwan,” International Journal of Educational Development 29, (2009): 404.
11 Robin J. Chen, op cit., pp. 106-107.
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revenue generation. These strategies include raising tuition fees and building up endowments with donations from alumni networks.12 The ability for universities to change their funding structure has limits, as families oppose large tuition hikes and government grants continue to favor the more prestigious institutions.
Taiwan’s demographic outlook also contributes to growing concerns of competition between universities. Like other high-income economies in East Asia (including Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong), Taiwan is starting to
experience the effects of population aging. Taiwan’s birth rate has been falling for several decades as a result of many economic, social, and cultural factors. This low birth rate within Taiwan will shrink university enrollment rates as higher education institutions compete for fewer college-age students in coming years. Indeed, higher education institutions are already experiencing the effects and challenges of low enrollment: Yu-Ying Kuo observes that “for the 2013 academic year, the enrollment quota was 324 thousand [students], but the actual enrollment was 259 thousand leaving a vacancy of 65 thousand.” This trend of under-enrollment poses difficulties for universities and colleges that depend on student tuition in order to survive financially.13 The institutions that originally developed to meet growing demand for higher education in the 1980s and 1990s are now reckoning with the prospect of downsizing, merging, or otherwise reforming themselves to ramain operational as enrolling class sizes continue to shrink each year.
Some strides have been made toward addressing the challenges Taiwan’s higher education system faces today. The 2015 Innovative Transformation Policy put forth by the Ministry of Education aims to address these challenges through the merging, closure, and “re-shaping” of universities throughout Taiwan. More specifically, the policy
involves assisting university faculty in transitioning from the education and teaching sector to industry, strengthening the relationship between universities and industry, and overseeing the closure, merging, and cooperation between universities to balance the supply of higher education with reduced demand.14 The Ministry of Education has continued to list these goals in their “Objectives for 2018,” which also include goals to
“encourage universities to develop distinguishing features…maintain a balance in
12 Ibid.
13 Yu-Ying Kuo, “Taiwan Universities: Where to Go?” Humanities, vol. 5, no. 12, 2016, p. 4-5.
14 Yu-Ying Kuo, op. cit., p. 9.
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regional development…and vigorously implement technological and vocational education policies and programs.”15 These efforts aim to develop market diversity among
universities and maintain the regional distribution of institutions while improving educational quality for students and the Taiwanese economy. While it is still early to evaluate the effectiveness of the Innovative Transformation Policy, we may conclude that Taiwan’s higher education institutions and education officials remain highly concerned about the island’s future competitiveness in the global higher education marketplace. The following section focuses on the expansion and reformation of mainland China’s higher education system.