Taiwan in right direction in accepting Chinese students

Initially, only 2,000 mainland Chinese students will be admitted to colleges and universities in Taiwan for diploma and graduate programs each year, accounting for about 1 percent of total annual enrollments. National universities can only accept mainland students for graduate programs, while private institutions can accept them for any of their programs.

Taiwan will officially recognize their China degrees. Allowing Chinese students to study in Taiwan necessarily means that Taiwan will have to recognize degrees conferred by universities in China. It is good news for many Taiwan students who have already obtained degrees from mainland universities, or are looking to study in Chinese universities. Many Taiwan students who have chosen to study in China have been denied equal opportunity for employment in Taiwan.

But the ministry is not ready to make a blanket recognition of all China degrees. Initially, it will only recognize the degrees from 41 Chinese universities, such as the famous Peking University. It will be a measure taken to filter out degrees obtained from universities with dubious academic records. It remains uncertain how many Taiwan students have obtained degrees from those 41 universities to be recognized, and how many more from others.

It is understandable that Taiwan's people have doubts about the standards of China's universities. Most of the universities and colleges in China are strange to them. Likewise, most of Taiwan's universities and colleges — except for a few, such as National Taiwan University — are also as strange to Chinese students.

Ironically, so many new universities have been set up in Taiwan in recent years that some of them may have never been heard of by the people of Taiwan themselves. The number of universities in Taiwan is embarrassingly high — the result of the government's solution to ease pressure on students trying to pursue higher education.

But admissions to universities have been so high in recent years (almost 100 percent) that some schools are scandalously accepting almost any students they can get hold of, despite these students' poor performance in college entrance exams. It is now not uncommon to see some departments fail to enroll any freshmen, or devote the entire staff to teaching just a few students.

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