Hsiao Hsiang-hung (蕭向宏), 18, is a freshman at the industrial engineering department of National Taipei Institute of Technology (NTIT). He took the joint entrance exam for technological colleges one year after graduating from Kaohsiung Industrial High School, where his major was information science. “I’ve discovered that what our country needs is more high-tech experts, not just skilled workers who graduated from vocational schools,” he says. “If I don’t have a college degree, it’ll be that much harder for me to move up the corporate ladder.”
After passing the highly competitive entrance exam—there is only a 35 percent success rate—Hsiao made NTIT his school of first choice. “I always wanted to enter this school,” he recalls. “The first thing I considered was my chance of getting a job. I read in newspapers and magazines about how popular its graduates were with manufacturing employers—they’re ranked higher than National Taiwan University graduates. My cousin studied here, and he was always praising the teachers and the facilities. I had my mind set on this school.”
Hsiao set about achieving his ambition in a highly methodical way. He visited NT IT before exam time, bringing a camera with him so that he could take pictures of the campus. Then he framed the photos and stood them on his desk. “I hoped that by envisioning myself on my dream campus as a fresh man I’d be able to hypnotize myself into studying harder,” he says with a smile. And it worked.
NTIT has always ranked high with students interested in pursuing a technological education, and that was true even when it was only a junior college. For the past two years, however, it has been a university-level technical college, and of the sixty-one schools that require candidates to take the four-year and two-year technical college entrance exams, it typically ranks number one or number two with applicants. An analysis of recent applications show that one quarter of its departments are placed as first choice, while the remainder are placed second. Among Taiwan’s nine technological colleges, the school as a whole stands as second choice, after the National Taiwan Institute of Technology, Taiwan’s first technological college, which has been going for more than two decades.
NTIT has a long and honorable history. It is the island’s oldest technical school, having been established in 1911. Taiwan was then a Japanese colony, and the school began its life as an affiliated industrial training school under the governor’s office. Following Taiwan’s return to Chinese rule in 1945, its name was changed to the Provincial Taipei Industrial School. In 1948, it was upgraded to a five-year junior college and became the Provincial Taipei Industrial Junior College, admitting junior high-school graduates. In 1953, it was integrated into the three-year college system, admitting both high school and vocational school graduates; and in 1961 it also became part of the two-year college system. In 1994 it was further upgraded to the university-level National Taipei Institute of Technology. The four-year program admits high-school and vocational school graduates, and the two-year program admits junior college graduates. Both streams offer bachelor’s degrees.
NTIT president Frank Tien-jin Chang (張天津), points out that Taiwan’s manpower needs have changed—it now requires more and more high-tech talent capable of doing research and development. According to him, the manpower structure in the past was a pyramid. At the top were the engineers, the second level consisted of technicians, and right at the bottom were concentrated skilled, semiskilled, and unskilled workers. “Now, the manpower structure has become more like a beer barrel,” he says. “The need for unskilled workers has decreased, while the need for technicians and engineers has increased. And when it comes to increasing the country’s competitive advantage, high-tech productivity is what counts.”
Chang notes that the school’s evolution has been keeping pace with Taiwan’s industrial development. During the labor intensive years, it provided skilled workers; during the automation years it supplied technicians; and now it is turning out high-tech engineers. “We’ve lived up to the mission of providing the manpower needed for national development at different stages,” he maintains.
Nowadays there are many alumni in both the public and the private sectors. Taiwan Power Company (Taipower), the Directorate-General of Telecommunications, Far East Machinery Ltd., and numerous other prominent organizations all number a high ratio of NTIT graduates among their employees. Over the past decade, Common Wealth, a leading local economic monthly, has conducted three surveys on industry’s attitudes to the various schools that supply its workforce. On each occasion questionnaires were sent to approximately 1,000 manufacturers plus some 300 companies in the service industry sector, and in each survey NTIT came second overall out of one hundred schools, right behind Cheng Kung University. Among non-university technological schools, however, it came top, and the manufacturing companies, considered separately from the service industry sector, awarded its graduates pride of place.
Chang is proud of NTlT’s performance and the popularity of its graduates. He attributes its success to being on the right track. “By right track, I mean taking an employment-oriented direction,” he explains. “There are basically two factors at work here: an emphasis on practical training, and fostering close ties with industry.”
NTIT requires its students to do much more than merely study theory. The 8,000 students must practice what they have learned in laboratories, work-placement factories, and other business establishments. Each of its ten departments offers practical courses, many of which involve lab work. These range from six to eight hours per week and comprise approximately 25 percent of the total curriculum. The school has 300 part-time instructors, mostly drawn from industrial circles, who provide guidance on practical and lab work.
Cheng Yung-fu (鄭永福), dean of academic affairs, is especially proud of the institute’s ability to back these practical and lab courses with proper facilities. “Students have plenty of opportunities to get their hands on the most advanced factory machinery, lab equipment, and other teaching aids,” he says. For example, the electrical engineering department boasts twenty-two laboratories, all fitted with state-of-the-art equipment, including large current short-circuit experiment facilities, robot arms, and an interference waveform analyzer, while the chemical engineering department has more than twenty labs and study rooms.
During their time at the institute, students also gain plenty of hands-on experience through frequent visits to factories and other forms of field study. Nearly all of them work in factories through the summer vacation. Before they can graduate, students have to complete an employment-related project. “Altogether, between 80 and 90 percent of our students will have first-hand contact with actual work,” Cheng estimates. “We require them to apply the knowledge they’ve learned and to develop problem-solving ability. And that greatly shortens the time they need to find jobs later.”
Ties with industry are fostered through a system known as chien chiao ho tsou, which can be translated as cooperation between industry and education. It has been a tradition since the institute first became a junior college in 1948. According to Meng Jeh-Iou (孟繼洛), dean of the research and development office, there are three types of cooperation: training, service, and research. NTIT specializes in providing training. “We’ve trained people for the Railway Administration, Taipower, the Tobacco and Wine Monopoly Bureau, and many private companies,” Meng says.
The services that the institute provides for industry largely consist of conducting tests for business enterprises—material tests for construction companies, chemical tests for textile companies, testing the quality and performance of machinery, and similar projects. Research is a recent addition, thanks to the increasing numbers of faculty members who hold doctorates.
In the course of this year the institute will continue to conduct a variety of long-term training programs. One of them, commissioned by the Employment and Vocational Training Administration under the Council of Labor Affairs, deals with automation and retraining with alternative employment skills. Another project was commissioned by the Ministry of Education on training teachers in the related areas of automation and photoelectricity. And the institute offers various classes on industrial design for participants in some of the programs run by the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Industrial Development Bureau. It has also been asked by the National Youth Commission to offer a half-year skills training program for high school graduates. Shihlin Electric & Engineering Corp. has just commissioned the school to conduct a three-year, on-the-job training program dealing with mechanical and electrical integration and automation for its junior college graduate staff. The institute receives approximately US$495,000 a year from its various training programs.
NTIT has also won the rights to conduct tests for a number of business enterprises, from which it will earn some US$364,000 this year. In addition, the teaching staff have raised $2.2 million for conducting research projects for various companies. Altogether, the money the institute earns through cooperation with industry has reached $3.1 million for this academic year alone. “One noticeable thing is that in the past our cooperation programs tended to come from the public sector,” Meng says. “But over the past decade, the private sector has gotten much more accustomed to working with academia, and the trend has now completely reversed. We’ve worked with dozens of public organizations over the years, but we’ve worked with thousands of private enterprises during the past few years alone.”
Meng also points out that the institute’s electrical engineering department focuses on something that other departments don’t touch: power generation. It thus has the closest possible relationship with Taipower. Similarly, the textile department has a very long history, and has established close ties with many leading textile companies. “Cooperating with industry is the best way to get ahead when it comes to learning applied science or technology,” Meng says. “And the faculties involved will be able to incorporate their experiences into their teaching materials and thus benefit the students.”
Making practical training a major part of the course-work and engaging in active cooperation with industry has paid off. NTIT graduates do not seem to worry about finding work, shruggjng off the rising unemployment rate among college graduates. York C.Y. Chiu (邱垂昱), chief of the institute’s practical training and placement section, says that NTIT is far from typical in this regard. “Most schools worry that their graduates won’t find jobs,” he says, “but we worry about just the opposite—that we won’t be able to meet the demands of companies that want to hire our graduates. The employers who come to us with work opportunities outnumber graduates in search of a job by about five to one.”
In Chiu’s experience, only 20 to 25 percent of its graduates need help from the placement section, because employers so frequently take the initiative by offering jobs. “Some companies plan their talent searches well ahead,” he says. “They’ll ask for the senior class list and call or write the students and offer them positions. I would say the majority of our graduates find jobs through employer-initiated contacts.”
Alumni often testify to how well they were trained at NTIT. Ming Tien-chih (明天其), a civil engineering major who now works for the planning and design center of the Chinese Institute of Civil Engineering Technology, praises its emphasis on practical training. From his second year onward, Ming spent his vacations gaining hands-on experience with a construction consulting company. That continued for four years. He graduated last year and since then he has been involved with the construction of Taipei’s Mass Rapid Transit System, a new railway, and numerous highway construction projects.
Ming describes his first-year academic performance as “awful,” but he suddenly made huge progress after starting practical training. “The experience really benefited me,” he says. “At work, I tried to apply what I’d learned at school; and at school, I tried to learn what I needed for my work. Work sort of gave me proof of the abstract theories I’d been studying at school, whereas my studies gave me the basic knowledge I needed to make work-related judgments. I think that’s the ideal learning situation.”
During semesters, Meng also worked alongside teachers who were involved in research projects, something that familiarized him with real-life projects as well as research methods and skills. “Of course, you need to have a firm understanding of fundamental theories, but I strongly recommend getting as much practical experience as you can while still at school,” he says.
Wang Mei-hua (王美華) is another satisfied student. The electrical engineering-major is the only female graduate in the class of 1993. Despite the sexual discrimination she encountered when looking for a job, her work experience was totally fulfilling. “I began my first project one month after I joined the company and I took six months to finish it,” she says. “That project was scheduled to be completed in ten months. What more can I say? I think I got a really good training at that school.” She notes that she used to spend four mornings a week on the factory floor, learning how to operate equipment, deal with motors and high-voltage electricity, and handle soldering, filing, and many other practical operations.
After she had put her skills to the test in the workplace for a while she decided to continue with advanced studies. “I realized that I was standing on pretty solid ground to upgrade my knowledge,” says Wang, who has only turned 23. “My boss offered me a raise if I stayed, but I figured that at my age I could really use some more theoretical study.”
Chuang Shih-wei (莊世偉) went abroad for further study right after he graduated three years ago. He says that it was only after he stepped into the outside world that he realized what a good education he had received. “I suppose the fact that I won admission to Cornell’s graduate program proves the good reputation of my alma mater,” he says. “Many American universities regard our junior college graduates as equivalent to bachelor degree holders. During my time at Cornell I met a lot of Taiwan students from NTU and other leading universities, and I discovered that I had more experience in architecture and structural design than they did, although they were really good at computers and theoretical stuff.”
Chuang recently returned to Taiwan and got a job without any problem, attributing his success to the numerous fellow alumni who are already working in industry. He has heard that 60 percent of management-level positions in the civil engineering industry are occupied by NTIT graduates. “It’s probably true, because when I went for interviews I was always bumping into alumni,” he says. “Their performance has given the school its good reputation, and they’ve become an important employment resource for later graduates. And this year, NTIT awarded its first bachelor degrees. So here’s to you, my alma mater.”