For sixteen years, the National Taiwan Institute of Technology (NTAIT) was the only technological college in Taiwan, training engineers in accordance with its motto of “precision in work, sincerity in attitude.” At the beginning, life was much simpler than it is today. In the sixties, Taiwan’s shift away from reliance on agriculture led to a demand for a large labor force in manufacturing industries—not too skilled, nothing too high-tech. “Most people had only had a junior-high education, so if you were lucky enough to attend a technical or vocational school the skills you picked up there would see you through your lifetime,” says NTAIT president Liou Ching-tien (劉清田).
Then industry came to play an increasingly important role in Taiwan’s economic development, and the government began to encourage capital-intensive enterprises. “It wasn’t like the old days any more, when you could live on a single skill that you’d learned from vocational senior high,” Liou says. “It takes high-level engineers and technicians to develop high-tech industries. And that meant upgrading Taiwan’s technical education.”
The first step in that direction was the establishment of a university-level technological school. The proposal was first raised at the Fifth National Education Convention in 1970, and a preparatory office was set up in 1973. The following year saw the foundation of NTAIT as Taiwan’s first technological college.
In the early days, NTAIT had just 185 students spread across two departments: industrial management and electronic engineering—a far cry from today’s 5,700 students in ten departments and eight graduate schools that focus on engineering and management issues in various industries. There is also a department of humanities, which is responsible for the planning and teaching of the humanities and social sciences across the board.
For projects involving more than one field, NTAIT has an Automation Control Center and a Materials Science and Technology Center to collate and coordinate input from the various departments concerned. Beside the regular school programs, NTAIT also works with government agencies to provide occasional courses that are open to the public. All students must attend between one and two hundred hours of classes before they can receive their certificates.
NTAIT undergraduate departments offer three programs. They are a two-year program for graduates from two-year and five-year junior technical colleges; a four-year program for vocational high-school graduates; and a three-year night-school program for junior technical college graduates who are already employed. “Our curriculum is designed to be a continuation of a junior technical college education,” says Chen Shi-shuenn (陳希舜), dean of academic affairs. “We supplement students’ existing knowledge and prepare them to be engineers.”
It is not easy to get into NTAIT. The two-year program has a less than 20 percent acceptance rate, and the corresponding figure for the four-year program is under 2 percent. Institute president Liou believes that this tough competition stems from the commanding position that NTAIT graduates enjoy in the job market. “Compared to a university education, we place much more emphasis on practical skills,” he says. “Employers don’t have to worry about pre-job training, because we’ve brought our graduates to the point where they’re ready to start working as soon as they enter the market.”
Employers certainly recognize that strength. As with National Taipei Institute of Technology (see page 14), many companies regularly engage in recruiting activities on campus. In a 1995 survey by Common Wealth magazine, NTAIT graduates came third in terms of popularity with manufacturing and high-tech industries in search of engineers and technician-level staff. NTAIT is satisfied with that—for the moment—because the institute recognizes that it is much younger than the higher-ranked schools, National Cheng Kung University, and National Taipei Institute of Technology. (It also believes that alumni of the older schools hold numerous decision-making positions in industry, and have a natural inclination to favor graduates from their own schools.)
Why is NTAIT so popular? In common with all schools of technology it places the emphasis squarely on practical skills. It recruits teachers who are either academically well-qualified or experienced in the real world of industry. The curricula are designed to offer as many opportunities for hands-on experience as possible. Beside intensive lab training—usually a third to one-half of the total course hours, depending on the department—and summer placements in private companies, students are required to participate in projects commissioned by government agencies or the private sector. “These projects provide technological assistance to industry, and provide opportunities for students to experience the real thing,” says Liao Ching-jong (廖慶榮), dean of technology cooperation. “They also have a significant effect on our budget. This year they earned us approximately US$3.6 million.” He adds that his institute is required to raise 20 percent of its annual budget from outside sources, but that last school year NTAIT actually managed to raise 27 percent, thanks to its close ties with industry and with government agencies.
These factors, however, are becoming commonplace in the technical education environment. What makes NTAIT unique? Perhaps the real answer is a combination of its emphasis on engineering, and its foresighted views on industrial development. “Technological education can’t afford to train students merely in the light of industry’s current needs,” Liou Ching-tien says. “We have to take into consideration the way things are going. Otherwise, by the time they graduate, finish their compulsory military service, and enter the job market, their skills won’t be of any use.”
Liou uses microprocessors to illustrate his point. Microprocessors became common in Taiwan in a very short period of time around the mid-seventies. If the school hadn’t prepared its students for the development, its graduates would have entered the job market at a distinct disadvantage to graduates of more prescient schools. But Academic Affairs Dean Chen Shi-shuenn enters one very important caveat: academic foresight depends almost entirely on the country’s having a clear industrial development policy. “National industrial policies and technical education are constantly influencing each other,” he says. “Technical schools educate engineers to aid industrial development, but if the country doesn’t have a long-term development plan, then inadequate technological education is going to retard industrial development.”
NTAIT staff are not afraid to face up to their shortcomings. “We offer vertical and focused training, whereas the technological departments of the universities offer horizontal training on a broader basis,” institute president Liou explains. “The result is that we stand taller in various professional fields, but we have a narrower foundation. Non-technical fields—foreign languages, human relations—those are our weak points.”
NTAIT requires its two-year students to get at least twelve credits in humanities and social science courses, and students of the four-year program must obtain at least thirty. There are additional elective courses in the humanities and social sciences. But it seems that students drawn from vocational high schools and junior technical colleges, who have a weaker foundation in these subjects, prefer to devote their time and effort to their professional courses. The problem assumes a practical aspect with textbooks. “Like universities, we use foreign-language textbooks in the hope that students will be able to improve their language abilities as a by-product of studying in their chosen fields,” Chen Shi-shuenn says. “But unfortunately, if there’s a translation available, they’re going to turn to it.”
Chen recognizes that this gives rise to problems later. After a university graduate has worked in the same job for a period of time, he will have picked up most of the practical skills that a tech school graduate would have brought to the same job in the first place. But with superior language ability and a grounding in social sciences, the university grad will have a better chance of promotion, compared to an NTAIT alumnus. Liou Ching-tien knows full well that NTAIT students have to spend most of their time studying their professional fields, and he frankly says that for the most part it is up to the students themselves to remedy any deficiencies after they graduate. “School is only a small part of a person’s education,” he says. “People spend decades working, so it’s hardly likely that your achievements will depend entirely on what you learned at school. You have to be learning all the time, whether you’re at school or work.”
In keeping with its faith in ongoing self-improvement, NTAIT now has plans to upgrade itself to university status—not to compete against the newer colleges but because of what Chen Shi-shuenn styles people’s “insincere attitude.” “Entering technological college is often not the first choice for many junior-college or vocational-senior-high graduates who are interested in higher education,” he says. “People in Taiwan think that university education creates the intelligentsia, while technological colleges create technicians. So students who have received several years of technical training want to transfer over to the other educational system. This is an improper use of resources and has caused difficulties in the planning of technological education.”
Liao Ching-jong notes that the Chinese traditionally view intellectuals as the highest class in society, a concept that is bound to influence students when choosing between technological colleges and universities. “In the United States, you don’t find MIT graduates respected any less than university graduates,” he says. “Why isn’t that the case with us? It seems to be a uniquely Chinese phenomenon.”
Rather than wait for the Chinese mindset to change, NTAIT is busy upgrading itself to a science and technology university. The proposal is expected to be approved by the Ministry of Education next fall. “We will establish new departments in the humanities and social sciences, in order to comply with the regulations governing universities,” Liao says. “But we don’t intend to water down our emphasis on practical skills. And with the word university in our name, we won’t have to worry so much about being anybody’s second choice.”