The pandemic has hit the bottom lines of struggling schools reliant on foreign students. Yet Taiwan’s ability to contain the coronavirus is also making it a more attractive place to study. Taiwan has long had a surplus of universities, the legacy of well-intentioned if myopic education reforms in the 1990s. The island nation is home…
Every year, tens of thousands of Taiwanese leave to pursue degree programs in the U.S. and elsewhere, but the pandemic is forcing them to make a tough choice this year: go ahead with their original plan, take courses online, or defer their studies altogether. Whether to stay in Taiwan where the COVID-19 pandemic has been…
Growing opportunities for foreign students in Taiwan and Taiwanese going abroad. Taiwan has a generally excellent educational system. The main challenge is to make the rest of the world aware of its quality and to enable education in Taiwan to be more easily accessible to foreigners. At the primary and secondary levels, Taiwan’s education system…
In the fall of 2007, Taiwan Business TOPICS invited 14 experts to offer their thoughts on “what Taiwan should aim to be like” in their areas of expertise by the year 2020, and how to achieve those goals. Their views were published in the November 2007 edition of TOPICS under the heading “Vision 2020.” With 2020 now upon us, TOPICS sought to re-engage with the…
A native of Kamloops in British Columbia, Canada, Brian Hockertz studied Chinese language in Nanjing and came to Taiwan in 1990 as an education advisor with the Canadian Trade Office. In 1995, he founded OH! Study to help Taiwanese students find educational opportunities overseas. From a two-person company, OH! Study has grown to more than…
When I arrived in Tainan in the summer of 1991, not even the city’s main roads had bilingual signs. As an English tutor, I had to visit households in different neighborhoods, and thus quickly had to learn how to read Chinese addresses. A few years later, romanization began to appear at major intersections. More recently,…
The promotion of English proficiency is designed to increase competitiveness in the international arena. To help ensure this country’s continued competitiveness in an era of globalization, the National Development Council (NDC) last December launched a plan to develop Taiwan into a “bilingual nation” by 2030. The goal is not to establish English as an official…
For decades before the establishment of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China in 1979, Americans with a scholarly or professional interest in Chinese affairs invariably spent at least a year in Taiwan – and often much longer – studying Mandarin or doing research. The result was that a whole generation…
For most people familiar with the Taipei-based Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, the non-profit organization has been virtually synonymous with the Fulbright Program. Over the more than 60 years in which the Foundation has been managing the Fulbright Program in Taiwan, it has provided grants enabling over 1600 American scholars to come to Taiwan to conduct…
In the first two-plus years of the New Southbound Policy, the number of students from the target countries enrolled in Taiwan’s colleges and universities increased by over one-third to reach 41,000. At the same time, more than 7,000 young Taiwanese per year head for the New Southbound countries either to take formal courses of study…
