Since Yap Ko-hua started his blog, the map that the most readers have commented about and reacted most vigorously toward, even more so than the notorious "horizontal map of Taiwan," was the 2003 National Taiwan University Student Origins map, drawing over 15,000 hits.
The source data for the map was the 2003 Basic Survey of NTU Students, conducted by the university itself. This map of students' places of origin reveals that in 2003, nearly 60% of Taipei-based NTU's students came from the urban areas of Taipei City and Taipei County, with the largest proportion coming from the Ta-an District of Taipei City-one out of every 11 students on NTU's campus grew up in Ta-an District (9% of NTU students). Ta-an District has a population of only 300,000, but the proportion of students from there exceeded that of Taichung (with 1 million people but making up 6% of NTU students) or Kaohsiung (1.5 million people but 6% of NTU students). And outside of these three major urban centers, the average numbers of students who tested into NTU were few indeed.
The same survey also showed that this skewed distribution of student origins reflected socioeconomic status: among NTU students' fathers, 27.9% were civil servants and 49.6% were mid- to upper-level white-collar businesspeople, while only 6.9% were blue-collar workers (compared to 60% of the working population nationwide) and a mere 1.6% were farmers (compared to 5% nationwide). On top of this, those NTU students from families with a monthly household income exceeding NT$80,000 accounted for 54.2% (exceeding the disposable income of 60% of Taiwan's households).
To cap it off, Yap, himself a graduate student at NTU, reminds us that not only do the highest proportion of NTU students come from mid- to upper-level white-collar households, but their tuition and miscellaneous expenses are heavily subsidized by the government (over NT$200,000 per person per year), a great expenditure of taxpayer money.
His article has numerous advocates, but at the same time has elicited a great deal of dissatisfaction among NTU students, who have left messages in droves, presenting refutations such as "they were accepted NTU because they studied harder" and "the reason more people from Ta-an attend NTU is because it's close to where they live." As one reader commented, the article "clearly evoked class anxiety among a lot of people" to bring about such a multitude of fierce reactions. It's something to think about.
