National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) vice president Jason Yi-Bing Lin is a giant in the field of telecommunications in Taiwan, and a beneficiary of the Merit Bonus Program. (Hsueh Chi-kuang)

Because the skills of exceptionally qualified employees are so very rare, it costs a lot of money to recruit them. Indeed, the sums can be astronomical. Such is the fundamental labor-market logic of a capitalist society.

But academia in Taiwan has long adopted civil-service-style seniority pay. The problem with this system is that retirement pensions vary little from one professor to the next, regardless how a particular individual might excel in research or instruction even as others slog through decades as one-trick ponies.

An institution incapable of rewarding excellence will naturally be unable to retain the very best talent, which is why the ROC government in July 2010 adopted its Merit Bonus Program for the Recruitment and Retention of Exceptional Talent at Institutions of Higher Education. Under this program, the Ministry of Education and the National Science Council are working together to help universities offer pay raises to outstanding faculty members.

Has the Merit Bonus Program shown positive results in the year-plus since it was launched? Can it really resolve the problem of low pay in academia and help retain talent?

National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) vice president Jason Yi-Bing Lin, who recently won a National Chair Award, is a world-famous expert in the fields of mobile communications and information networks. He was also the first person from Taiwan to be named as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, on the strength of research conducted in Taiwan, and in the year of his induction was the only person from Taiwan among 17 ethnic Chinese inductees.

Lin is almost single-handedly responsible for every major breakthrough in Taiwan in policy and technical matters regarding research on dual-band networks, prepaid card services, mobile base stations, phone-number portability, and other areas of mobile telecommunications. As the head of Taiwan’s first 4G Testbed, he will also be playing a key role in the push to launch 4G mobile communications in Taiwan.