Taiwan Today

One thing distinguishes H.B. Liu (劉旭彬) from the rest of his colleagues: he has never attended a mainstream senior-high school or university. Liu, 29, now an engineer with a semiconductor manufac­turer in the Hsinchu Science-based Indus­trial Park, went to a vocational school and a technical institute instead. “When l was studying at vocational school, I thought that I was destined to become a blue-­collar worker,” he says. “But during my schooldays the job market changed, and the demand for higher technological edu­cation increased. So, I ended up getting a master’s degree and working at the cutting edge of Taiwan’s high-tech.”

From blue-collar worker to high-tech engineer—Liu’s story sums up Taiwan’s economic transformation, and backing up that transformation is the isIand’s carefully planned education system. “Technological education has always played a big supportive role in the nation’s economic development,” says Wu Ching-chi (吳清基), director-general of the Technological and Vocational Education Department of the Ministry of Education (MOE), the central government agency in charge of technical institutes. “Taiwan has changed from being an agricultural island with a trade deficit to the world’s fourteenth largest trading economy, and technological edu­cation has played a vital role there.”

Taiwan’s technical education has de­veloped in step with the island’s economic development. It took forty years for it to expand from junior-high status to univer­sity and eventually doctoral level. In the late fifties, the focus of Taiwan’s economy began to shift from agriculture to industry. Vocational schools at the junior and sen­ior-high level sprung up to provide the vast quantities of manual labor needed to work on assembly lines. Junior colleges fol­lowed in the sixties, as Taiwan’s industries gradually changed from labor-intensive to capital-intensive. The demand for high­-tech professionals gave rise to the first four-year technological institute, which awards bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. Following an MOE resolution, the National Taiwan Institute of Technology (NTAIT) was established in 1974.

The Industrial Education Department of National Taiwan Normal University has witnessed the entire evolutionary process. The department, which is respon­sible for training vocational school teachers, was established in 1953. The development of its forty-year-old curricu­lum pretty much mirrors Taiwan’s tech­nological development. The earliest courses included welding, mechanics, woodworking, sheet metal, electronics, and machine design. Refrigeration, printing, automobile repair, piping, and foundry-work were added during the seventies, and the most recent courses reflect the tremendous changes necessary to keep pace with rapid advances in tech­nology. They include computer science, communications, architecture, and envi­ronmental protection. The department is planning still more new courses, includ­ing business management and a program that will combine mechanical and electri­cal engineering.

For fifteen years, NTAIT dominated the scene. But the nineties saw a boom in tech­nical institutes. Over the past six years, eight new institutes have been established, including three private ones, and the MOE plans to set up eighteen more within the next three years. By the year 2000, the island will have no less than twenty-seven of them.

This growth reflects the fact that Tai­wan is gearing up for an industrial era that will require a work force of high-tech specialists. “These newly established technological institutes have a great re­sponsibility, when it comes to facing the challenges of the 21st century,” says Wu Ching-chi. “They must support Taiwan’s plans to become an Asia-Pacific opera­tions center, to join the WTO, and to better its competitive edge in the world.”

If the institutes are to meet these goals, they must concentrate on the practical needs of industry. “We aim to turn students into readily usable employees,” says Sun Kuo-shun (孫國順), dean of student affairs at National Yunlin Institute of Technology (NYIT). “We don’t expect them to become Lee Yuan-tseh (李遠哲), [President of Academia Sinica and a Nobel laureate]. We expect them, rather, to be Y. C. Wang (王永慶), [Taiwan’s top entrepreneur]. Our students are primarily doers, rather than thinkers. Learning by doing—that’s our teaching method. What they learn in school should be of real use to them when they find jobs.”

But some observers point out that most tech institute teachers were them­selves educated in the academically ori­ented normal university system. How, then, can they train “readily usable em­ployees” for local enterprises? Anthony Ku (谷家桓), president of the National Institute of Technology at Kaohsiung (NITK), has the answer. “Our teachers have an average of 5.6 years of industrial expe­rience,” he says. “Under a newly passed MOE regulation, people who lack higher degrees can be hired as professors if they can demonstrate an outstanding track record in industry.” When asked what makes these professionals give up their remunerative careers to work as teachers, Ku points to his own case. “I’d achieved a great deal in career and financial terms,” he says. “Suddenly I found myself facing a midlife crisis, and I started to think about what I should do next. I chose teaching because I knew that passing on what I’d learned would be the most rewarding thing I could do. Many specialists now teaching in technological institutes are like me.”

These teachers have made full use of their industrial experiences. All tech institutes have an Office of Technology Coop­eration (OTC), something that is not found in normal universities. The object of these offices is to provide liaison with industry. Besides frequently visiting firms, students are required to spend part of their summer and winter vacations working in their field. “The benefits are twofold,” says Pan Chi­-ling (潘吉齡), director of Chaoyang Insti­tute of Technology’s OTC. “The student gets to work with up-to-date equipment in a real working environment, and the com­pany gets a well-trained work force. Actu­ally, the students’ performance often surprises their employers.”

But the real winners are undoubtedly the students. It is not uncommon for them to graduate and then find jobs in the com­panies that they used to work for while studying. Fan Mei-chin (范美琴) gradu­ated from Chaoyang this June and imme­diately became a software engineer with the company that Chaoyang contracts for its external computer projects. “I had become quite familiar with the company,” she says. “They hired me because they already knew what I could do, and they knew they wouldn’t have to train me all over again.”

One result of such intense cooperation is that technological institutes can often help to upgrade local enterprises. New institutes especially tend to be located in more remote areas, and naturally gravitate toward a leading role in guiding and inspiring nearby industries. Pingtung Polytech­nic Institute, for example, is situated in the southernmost county of Taiwan. It has set up seven service centers: civiI engineering, wood-processing, environmental protec­tion, aquaculture, food technology, scan­ning electron microscopy, and landscape architecture. According to Liu Shan-da (劉顯達), the institute’s president, each center provides services to local enter­prises and receives monthly income in excess of US$350,000.

Every technological institute, no mat­ter how recently established, has some­thing to boast of in terms of contribution to the community. NYIT’s wastewater treat­ment system does not only serve as a labo­ratory, it actually manages wastewater from the surrounding area. The signs on store marquees lining one particular street in Taichung county were designed by stu­dents of Chaoyang Institute of Technol­ogy, and were chosen by the provincial government as an example of how such things should be done. And some of Tai­pei’s newest buses carry air conditioning units designed by teachers and students from National Taiwan Normal Universi­ty’s Department of Industrial Education.

The institutes are awakening to the importance of strengthening their foreign language courses in an effort to support Taiwan’s Asia-Pacific Regional Opera­tions Center (APROC) plan and its bid to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). “Vocational schools have always been weak on foreign languages,” says Lee Ji-charng (李基常), head of the Depart­ment of Industrial Education at National Taiwan Normal University. “Not long ago, vocational schools offered just two hours of English a week. This was the result of too much emphasis on technical training and too little input on the humani­ties. But as the country marches toward internationalization, technological specialists will need to cultivate a global view. Language is the first thing we have to strengthen.”

Departments of Applied English, Japanese, and German, unheard of in the past, are now proliferating. “And these departments differ from those in standard universities,” Anthony Ku explains. “The universities teach Shakespeare; we teach word-processing and commercial lan­guage. They focus on literary theories; we emphasize communicative skills.” Ku is proud of the fact that NITK owns the most advanced multimedia language-teaching equipment, and is actively preparing its students for Kaohsiung’s promotion to a transshipment center as part of the APROC plan.

Other courses are also being devised to help improve Taiwan’s competitive edge. Business management, finance, and other commerce-related subjects are now part of the syllabus, which was tradition­ally dominated by technology. Communi­cations have also come on the scene, the proposed media center being an important component of the APROC plan. Environ­mental planning and protection has also drawn much attention—the Swiss-based International Institute for Management Development recently conducted a survey that put Taiwan’s environment at 39th place out of 46 countries. “Taiwan ranked poorly in that evaluation, and it was a reflection of our lack of competitive edge,” says Lien Wan-fu (連萬福), direc­tor of the Water Analysis Center at NYIT. “If Taiwan wants to improve its competi­tive edge, it must take better care of the environment.”

It seems that the technological institutes are doing their best to implement cen­tral government policies. But they have complaints about the way they are treated in return. Anthony Ku is a particularly outspoken critic. “I say that the MOE is like an irresponsible mother,” he says. “She’s had lots of children, and each one has been skinny and suffered from malnutrition. But she goes right on having more.” What is upsetting him, in other words, is that not enough money has been allocated to fund­ing the numerous new technological institutes. The central government budget has been progressively trimmed over the past few years. “More and more schools are having to function on less and less money,” Ku says. “Take my school, for example. This is our second year of enrolling stu­dents, and we still don’t have a library or a student activity center. I must say that if I had children, I wouldn’t send them here to study.”

Some technological institutes were originally junior colleges—one reason why such institutes have been able to in­crease in number so rapidly. The name of the school is changed, the student body is increased, and lo! The school is upgraded. But what about the teaching staff—are they upgraded too? “Not a bit of it,” Ku says, shaking his head. “That’s the way with public institutions. No one wants to be the bad guy. No one can be forced out. It’s like having kindergarten teachers teach high school kids. What do you think the result will be?”

Things become even more compli­cated once the politicians get involved. NITK students have to walk a long way from their dormitories to the classrooms. In fact, they have to cross under a superhighway. Why? When the planners were trying to choose a site for the new school, Kao­hsiung city and Kaohsiung county both wanted it. They compromised with a so-called “best” solution—divide the school down the middle. So NITK now sits partly in the city and partly in the county, with a superhighway running down the middle of it.

A similar situation arose with NYIT, only that school was luckier. A narrow road, rather than a highway, runs across the campus, and it creates only “slight incon­venience,” in the words of Roger Liaw (廖文城), NYIT’s dean of general affairs. “This site was originally planned for another university,” he explains. “But Yunlin county lost its bid to Chiayi county, so now here we are, the county councilors’ second choice.” Some politicians see building a new school as a trump card when it comes to garnering votes, regard­less of the school’s quality. Liaw points out that his school was lucky in another way: “We built it just before the government budget was cut.”

If the budgetary problems facing public technological institutes are serious, those affecting private institutes are much worse. Tseng Tang-kuang (曾騰光), president of Chaoyang Institute of Technology, speaks for all private institutes when he says: “The ROC constitution specifies that the gov­ernment should promote private schools. But the government has not done enough. Students at private schools pay four times more in tuition than public students. We have no choice but to charge more to make ends meet. We fight hard so as not to com­promise on quality.”

Liu Shan-da points out another prob­lem. “The government has set up new in­stitutes without planning how to give each one its own distinctive character,” he says. “As a result, every school buys almost the same equipment. It’s a waste of money. If each institute developed its own specialties and bought different equipment, we might have the best learning environment in each field at a certain institute, not the second best scattered all around the island.”

Another major complaint these institutes voice is that courses are not flexible enough. “We have to catch up with tech­nological innovations, not lag behind industry,” says Lee Ji-charng of National Taiwan Normal University. “So we must constantly revamp our courses and reintegrate departments. But MOE regula­tions say that any new department must apply for ministry approval two years prior to its establishment. It’s just too long. And the most difficult thing about opening new courses and getting rid of old ones is that teachers all want to maintain their ‘spheres of influence.”’

Technological education used to focus entirely on technical training. Lee Ji- charng studied in a vocational school during the fifties. “There were no music classes, no art, no literature,” he recalls. “We read history, but not seriously—as if it was a series of stories in a novel. We were being trained as machines, serving the cause of the nation’s planned economy. It was cruel.”

But all this has changed. Graft in the construction industry, poor infrastructure quality, and the toll that economic devel­opment has taken on the environment have shaken the country. Ordinary people, as well as educational policymakers, have woken up to the fact that a work ethic and a more comprehensive liberal education are just as important to technological education as techniques and specialties. “Science and humanity should be inte­grated,” says Wu Ching-chi of the MOE. “To really better our competitive edge, we need talented people who have not only got technological knowledge, but are also in­terested in the humanities in general.”

 A timely ruling by the ROC’s Coun­cil of Grand Justices now supports this emphasis on liberal education. In the past, universities had to teach a list of courses mandated by the MOE. The Council has ruled that this practice is not sanctioned by the constitution, which protects academic freedom. Now schools are free to design their own courses. Communicative skills, interpersonal relationships, Taiwan economic history, and comparative stud­ies are just some examples of the new courses that emphasize interdisciplinary programs.

An important question remains: How exactly should somebody who started out training as a blue-collar worker adapt to becoming a high-tech engineer? “Self­-esteem” is the battle-cry that Wu Ching-chi advocates for the present reform of technical education, which used to be con­sidered the second choice of parents and students alike. People labeled tech school students as coming from middle- or lower­-class families, eager to learn a trade so they could earn a living, and not clever enough to make it into normal senior highs. As a result, such students have habitually suf­fered from lack of self-esteem.

All this is changing with the establish­ment of new technological institutes. Chen Hung-yu (陳宏毓), a NITK sophomore, describes his own psychological shift. “When I was at vocational school, I was looked down on by the neighbors,” he recalls. “I felt inferior to my junior-high classmates who went on to regular senior highs. But now, I’m proud of having learned a useful trade. I think I can find a job more easily than regular university graduates. They only know theory. I can tear a computer apart and then reassemble it. A lot of electrical engineering Ph.D.s can’t.” This is precisely why Eric Peng (彭年) opted for a master’s program at NTAIT, despite the fact that he also earned a place at National Taiwan University, which is considered the top school in Tai­wan. “I want practical knowledge,” he stresses.

He is not alone—the competition to enter technological institutes is keen. While the university acceptance rate runs at 50 percent or more, the corresponding rate for technological institutes is lower than 20 percent. But some observers ques­tion the motivation of applicants and see the kernel of a new problem in these fig­ures. Wu Yu-ting (吳雨庭) is the president of a successful fishery and agricultural enterprise. “Our society values diplomas above everything else,” he says. “Some vocational schools now just teach students how to pass exams and that’s all.” Wu him­self is a graduate of a technological junior college, and has had to do all kinds of menial jobs to get where he is now. “No one wants to get their hands dirty these days,” he says. “The result is an influx of foreign laborers. That’s going to damage the economy. The social values that have plagued technological education for so long need to be changed.” Something for Taiwan’s education authorities to con­sider, while the island transforms itself from blue-collar to high-tech.