Bridge school
Conservative estimates suggest that over the past 60-plus years, tens of thousands of Indonesian students have completed degrees in Taiwan and returned home. In particular, many Indonesian Overseas Chinese who returned with degrees from top-ranked National Taiwan University are now among the elites of their society.
Jiang Zemin says that Indonesian alumni from Taiwan universities who are now in their 40s and 50s returned home just in time to hit the takeoff of the Indonesian economy, and most have been able to put their studies to good use and enjoy successful careers.
After returning to her country, Rini Lestari took a job as a researcher at the Indonesian food company ABC. Two years later she left that post to help her family’s business. Then after getting married she struck out her own, founding an independent building materials firm, and today she has more than 50 employees working in her factory.
Johan Iskandar first took a job in the air conditioner industry after graduating from NTU’s Department of Electrical Engineering. Later he went in with his brother-in-law in an investment in a factory to make suitcases. At their peak, they had over 2000 employees and an 80% market share in Indonesia. In 2000, unable to compete with cutthroat price competition from mainland China, they downsized the plant to today’s level of 500 employees.
Although many Indonesian students have studied in Taiwan over the past six decades, and the first alumni association was founded in Indonesia in 1963, over many years these alumni have scattered to the four winds, and at no point has their influence been concentrated and channeled.
When Rini Lestari was elected president of IFTAA’s Jakarta branch in 2008, she decided to restructure the association. She started by seeking out alumni from NTU, National Cheng Kung University, and National Chengchi University—these three schools accounting for the largest number of Indonesian alumni—and spread the word about alumni activities through their interpersonal networks. She also advertised in Indonesia’s largest-circulation Chinese publication, hoping to recruit more people to join. After five years of hard work, there are nine regional alumni associations (including in Jakarta, Surabaya, and Medan) with more than 5000 alumni.
Rini took over the job of president of IFTAA in 2012, and began to strongly promote exchanges between Taiwan and Indonesia. She says that alumni who have graduated from Taiwan universities are more familiar than anyone with the environments in the two countries, and thus should play a key role in promoting bilateral cultural and educational exchange.
In addition to helping Chung Yuan Christian University, NTU, and other schools hold recruitment seminars, she has successfully urged Tunghai University, Chinese Culture University, and other tertiary educational institutions to sign memoranda of understanding with Penabur and other middle schools in Indonesia, providing scholarships so that outstanding graduates can go on to study in Taiwan.
Rini states that because education using Chinese as the language of instruction was banned for such a long time, Indonesian students made Australia or the US their preferred destinations for study abroad. In recent years, Singapore, Japan, and Korea have also been actively recruiting, and some universities from mainland China have even set up branch campuses in Indonesia. It is clear that the brand visibility of Taiwan universities needs to be seriously upgraded.
Bilingual benefits
Many universities in Taiwan have already become conscious of the fact that the pool of international students for recruitment is simply not large enough, and they are taking more aggressive measures to seek them out. Shawn Kao, dean of the Office of International Education and Programs at Tunghai University, says that the school already has come up with a plan to increase its name recognition in Indonesia: They will offer their Chinese majors practical training opportunities by sending them to teach Chinese at cooperating high schools in Indonesia.
When Kao went on a fact-finding mission to Indonesia ten years ago, he discovered that there were not enough teachers in Indonesia qualified to teach the Chinese language, so he came up with the idea for the Chinese language courses. After two years of running around, it looks like Tunghai will this year launch a program for training and certifying teachers with Chinese language skills.
The craving for Chinese speakers in the wake of mainland China’s rise has yet to abate. Jiang Zemin says that students who study in Taiwan—capable of operating in Chinese, English, and Indonesian—are coveted by many Indonesian firms as well as Taiwanese and mainland Chinese enterprises. As a result, starting salaries for alumni from Taiwan universities are 20–30% higher than those of their competitors in the job market.
Lin Zhongxian already had job offers even before graduating in 2013, and he has begun working at INDEX, a Taiwanese company that offers services to Indonesian workers in Taiwan. Lin says that a degree from Taiwan is a big advantage in the job market in Indonesia. Each time he returns home he transforms himself into a spokesperson encouraging friends, relatives, and schoolmates to study in Taiwan.
Conservative estimates put the number of Indonesians of Chinese ancestry at about 7 million. If universities in Taiwan, who are having trouble filling their departments because of the secular decline in the local birthrate, can recruit more students from Indonesia, then higher education in Taiwan will benefit from an infusion of fresh vitality and enthusiasm.