Globalization and Higher Education in Taiwan

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Within the last decade, Taiwan’s higher education system has experienced transformation along the lines of decentralization and marketization (Mok, 2000). The pressure to compete internationally and to attain global recognition has become one of the major benchmarks in evaluating university performance (Mok, 2003; Song & Tai, 2007). Together with rising concerns about the value of money, public accountability has already changed the way higher education is governed (Welch, 2004). Advanced nations, such as the UK (with its University Appropriations Committee) and the US (with its Higher Education Project Funds in the Department of Education), along with Japan and Germany, have all allocated funds to assist in the development of key universities. In Taiwan, the government has realized that globalization has accelerated competition among universities around the world (Lo & Weng, 2005; Lu, 2004; MOE, 2006). A series of large-scale projects were launched in order to catch up with the rest of the world’s higher education systems amid the powerful trend of globalization (Song & Tai, 2007). With the revision of the University Act in 1994, which prompted the restructuring of state owned higher education institutions (HEIs) into independent legal entities (Mok, 2006), thereby reducing the control of the Ministry of Education (MOE) over HEIs and making campus operations more flexible. In the following years, Taiwan’s government, acknowledging that the state alone can never satisfy the pressing demand for higher education, decided to revise its education ordinances and create room for the expansion of private higher education (Mok, 2000; Mok & James, 2005). This sparked a growth in the number of HEIs over the decades. Currently, the number of HEIs has increased dramatically from 7 in 1950 to 164 in 2008, among which are 100 universities, 49 colleges, and 15 junior colleges (MOE, 2008). This sudden increased in numbers of HEIs did not only inflame the competition among HEIs, but also hasten the internationalization of Taiwan’s HEIs. Among the major projects Taiwan’s MOE organized the Plan to Develop First-class Universities and Top-level Research Centers is the project with largest competitive fund. The empirical part of this paper analyzes the outcome of this project, adopted by the Taiwan Ministry of Education, in creating world-class universities and research centers. The prospective performances of the funded universities were evaluated with official data from the Department of Higher Education in Taiwan. The following section shall discuss the definition of globalization and internationalization of Taiwan’s higher education, which is