Starlight, Starbright-Stellar Rural Students Trickle into Elite Universities

For the last 20 years, almost 60% of students at National Taiwan University (NTU) have been from the Greater Taipei area. Only 3-5% of the university's student body has come from Tainan City, Taichung City and Kaohsiung City. Poorer areas such as Miaoli County, Chiayi County and Hualien County have together accounted for less than 1%.

Education provides the children of the poor with an opportunity to rise out of poverty. It is the main driver of social mobility. In 2006 the Ministry of Education, acting in the belief that there are excellent students in every high school and that top-tier universities cannot limit their student bodies to graduates of prestigious urban high schools, implemented the "Stars Program." This program, which is intended to diversify university admissions, makes high-school grades the principal university admissions criterion for students who have achieved a given score on their Scholastic Attainment Tests.

Does the Stars Program really help bright children from disadvantaged areas? Does it increase social justice and bridge the gap between urban and rural areas? The program has grown very rapidly. It is time to clarify the issues and

An estimated 150,000 high-school seniors will take the Scholastic Attainment Test for College-Bound Seniors (SAT) when the 2008 university admissions exam season gets underway on February 1.

The SAT is the first hurdle in the university admissions process. Regardless of which admissions track a student chooses-a school recommendation, an individual application, or the new Stars Program-the higher his or her score on this exam (75 is the highest possible), the more likely he or she is to get through to the second stage of the process and become a university freshman.

Yeh Hao-ting, a 2007 graduate of Hualien's private Stella Maris High School, benefited from the first iteration of the Stars Program: he was admitted to the Quantitative Finance Department at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in early March, 2007.

The Stars Program, implemented in 2007, offers a new approach to university admissions. In NTHU's case, the selection criteria are that an applicant's scores on the SAT reach the so called "two excellent, three good" threshold, that is, the 88th percentile on two of the SAT's five subject areas, and the 75th percentile on the remaining three. The applicant must also rank in the top 5% of his or her high-school class. Any high school in Taiwan-urban, rural, public, private, famous or unknown-can recommend students who meet these two criteria to NTHU for admission. However, because NTHU can only accept one student from each school, the higher a given student's class ranking, the better his or her chances of being admitted.

As a middle-school student, Yeh scored 279 on the Basic Competence Test and considered attending a prestigious Taipei high school. But he had no relatives in the city with whom he could stay and neither Jianguo High School nor the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University offer dormitory accommodation to their students. Knowing his widowed mother didn't make enough from her service-industry job to rent him a room in Taipei, he gave up the idea, and instead accepted a full scholarship to the private Stella Maris High School. Following a high-school career in which he consistently ranked at the top of his class, Yeh became the first Stella Maris alumnus to attend NTHU.

The fact of a Stella Maris student being admitted to NTHU really is something special. Many of Taiwan's 403 high schools have never had a student admitted to any of Taiwan's best public universities, whether NTU, NTHU, National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), or National Chengchi University (NCCU).

What this means is that in spite of the post-1994 effort to liberalize and diversify university admissions, elite urban high schools have continued to dominate admissions at top-tier universities. The poor still don't have a realistic shot at getting in.

Between 1997 and 2000, nearly 60% of NTU's student body (57.6%) were graduates of Taipei City and County high schools. In marked contrast, Miaoli, Chiayi, Hualien, Hsinchu, Taitung, Penghu and Kinmen each accounted for less than 1% of enrollment, and no students at all were admitted from Matsu.

The number of Taiwan's colleges and universities has grown greatly over the last couple of decades, from just 28 in 1986 to 147 in 2006. The number of students matriculating each year has grown as well, from some 30,000 to more than 200,000. Even so, there is more demand for places at our national universities than there is supply. They account for just 33% of matriculating students, meaning that their admissions remain fiercely competitive.

Taiwan's public universities offer excellent resources and good value for the money. Its private universities, on the other hand, are expensive and of uneven quality. Unfortunately, the determination of what school a student attends isn't based entirely on merit. Instead, family background plays a crucial role.

Luoh then extended his research from the composition of NTU's student body to the relationship between family background and being admitted to a university. He examined parents' educational attainments and career choices (specifically, whether they worked as teachers or civil servants), as well as where students had grown up. In so doing, he discovered that in the years since the expansion of university admissions in 1987 three factors had clearly provided students with an edge in getting into university: coming from a Taipei family, having parents who were university graduates, and having one parent who was a teacher or civil servant. In fact, students who met these criteria had an 83% chance of getting into a university. Meanwhile, students from eastern Taiwan, without a parent who was a civil servant or teacher, and whose parents had only graduated from middle school, had only a 13.75% chance of being admitted. In addition, students from urban areas were six times more likely than those from rural areas to attend university.

Regressive subsidies

It remains an open question whether teachers' familiarity with testing techniques and greater access to information on advancing to the next level of schooling provides their children with an edge in getting into a university. On the other hand, family income is clearly an important factor in determining whether children attend a university, and especially whether they attend a good one.

Samuel S. Peng, director of National Taiwan Normal University's Center for Research on Educational Evaluation and Development, examined data on Taiwan's entire 2002 college and university freshman class, specifically their parents' level of education, their family's income, and the schools the children attended. His research showed that 14.6% of university students from families with incomes of less than NT$500,000 per year attended public universities, 12.6% attended public technical universities and vocational colleges, 25% attended private universities, and a whopping 47.7% attended ubiquitously poorly ranked private vocational schools. (See Table 1, page 15.)

When Peng took a closer look at the data on the 8,728 freshmen from the public Taiwan, Tsing Hua, Chiao Tung, and Cheng Kung Universities, he discovered that students from families with incomes of less than NT$500,000 per year accounted for only 16.3% of the freshman class. In contrast, 41% of the freshman class came from families with annual incomes of NT$500,000 to $1.14 million, 21.7% from families with annual incomes of NT$1.15 to NT$1.5 million, and 20.9% from families with annual incomes above NT$1.51 million. (See Table 2, page 15.)

"In Taiwan, the competition and selection for university educational opportunities begins in high school," explains NTU's Luoh. He says that the urban children of highly educated, well-to-do parents have a better chance of testing into a prestigious high school. From there, they can test straight into a public university, where tuition fees are low, the quality of education high, and educational subsidies large. In fact, the government spends an estimated NT$200,000 per student per year on tuition subsidies for public university students, or NT$800,000 over the course of a four-year university career. Students at private universities, on the other hand, receive next to nothing.

More galling still is that, as Luoh says, "This is a regressive redistribution of income." That is, low-income kids who don't have the opportunity to attend university enter the workforce at an early age, where their meager incomes are taxed to subsidize the university educations of well-to-do classmates who got good grades in high school. These subsidies, in effect, steal from the poor to aid the rich.

After more than a decade of educational reforms, Taiwanese society has shifted its focus from a single university admissions criterion (Joint University Entrance Exam scores) to more diverse criteria. International students act as indices of the degree of integration of different cultures on university campuses.

NTU closed to the poor

When National Taiwan University economics professor Luoh Ming-ching looked at data on NTU students admitted between 1982 and 2000, he discovered that 82% of them were graduates of Taiwan's 20 most prestigious high schools. Moreover, just two of the nine Taipei City high schools on the list-Jianguo and Taipei First Girls'-accounted for a stunning 37% of NTU's student body.

Taiwan's public universities admit only one-third of the island's would-be university students. Getting into National Taiwan University, Taiwan's premier university, is even more difficult. Must the triumphant few who succeed always be graduates of elite urban high schools? The photo shows NTU's library.

Good students at every school

Education used to be the strongest driver of economic and intergenerational mobility. In recent years, this has not been the case, and many scholars are worried.

To offset the difference in university admissions rates in urban and rural areas, in 2006 the MOE required 12 public and private schools receiving NT$50 billion over five years under the top universities program to implement the Stars Program. To provide students from rural areas with an opportunity to study at a top-tier school, the MOE had the schools, which included NTU, NTHU, NCTU, Yuan Ze University, and Chang Gung University, accept 786 applicants over and above those admitted by examination.

Under the program, every department at each of the schools is allowed to set its own SAT standards for admission. Then, the high-school class ranks of those who have met the SAT standards are compared. Under this system, a Jianguo High School student who got top marks on all five of the SAT's subtests but whose class rank was poor would lose out to a kid from a Hualien or Taitung high school who was at the top of his class.

The Stars Programs' first year saw students admitted from 228 high schools, 117 of which had not had a student admitted to one of these 12 universities in the previous three years.

NTNU's Peng provided the theoretical underpinnings of the Stars Program. Drawing on research by the United States' Education Testing Service (ETS), Peng, formerly a chaired professor at NTHU, learned that US university student performance was more closely correlated to high-school grades than to university entrance exam scores. That is, students who excel in their moral, intellectual, physical and social development in high school have greater potential to excel in the future than those that simply score well on one or two entrance exams.

Peng believes that universities' demand for and definition of talent will change under the Stars Program, and notes that each department at participating universities establishes its own admissions criteria. He also believes it is important that we track the students who gain admittance under the program in order to learn whether the program has been a success, and understand the reasons for its success or failure.

"Universities are society in miniature," says Hocheng Hong, NTHU's Dean of Student Affairs. "They are places where the members of a given generation come together to study. If the backgrounds of these students are too similar, their perspective will be narrow, which is counterproductive to developing people with a broad understanding of the world." Hocheng, an active participant in the Stars Program who also happens to have been the first to propose the program to the MOE, believes that Stars has added diversity to NTHU's student body and differentiated it from other schools.

NTHU admitted 150 Stars students from 150 different high schools in 2007, adding diversity to a freshman class that is usually 90% recruited from just 35 high schools. NTHU's 2007 freshman class also included students who were the first ever from their towns (16) or their high schools (24) to be admitted to the school.

"This concentration of students from just a few places is the result of long-term laziness on the part of universities," says Hocheng. "The only thing they knew how to do was rank students on the basis of a few simple test scores." In Hocheng's view, "two excellent and three good" SAT subtest scores mean very different things for students of rural and elite urban high schools. "That a rural student is able to achieve the same learning results in a much less advantageous learning environment suggests greater ambition, ability and potential," he argues.

Dragging down top schools?

NTHU developed the Stars Program, and has been more generous in its implementation than any of the other participating universities. In fact, the 150 new slots it created for the program now account for 11% of the students it recruits.

Properly speaking, NTU, which has three times NTHU's enrollment, should also have created more than 100 new spots. Instead, NTU recruited only 40 students via Stars and offered no spots in popular programs such as medicine, electrical engineering, and law. Other schools, including NCKU, NCU, and National Yang Ming University (NYMU), treat Stars as a nuisance.

"NTU Medical School has always selected the 100 most outstanding students in the country," says Chiang Been-huang, NTU's Dean of Academic Affairs. "The competition is intense. It would be tragic if we were forced to accept students who ranked below the top 1,000 in the nation." Chiang says that NTU is willing to work on behalf of students from rural areas, but is concerned that admitting students who would not be able to keep up with their classmates would do the students themselves harm. He argues further that last year's rollout of the Stars Program was rushed, leaving little time to put it into place. This year, every program except for medicine will make spots available to Stars, providing a total of 96 new places. But, Chiang says, "100 is probably our upper limit."

"Some universities have doubts," says Ho Jow-fei, director general of the MOE's Department of Higher Education. "They fear that kids recruited in this way won't be good students, that they'll have trouble with the work and will diminish the school's academic achievements and educational standards. We feel, however, that the nation's top universities partake of national resources and have a responsibility to society at large. We'd like to see them really work at doing the right thing, rather than being so half-hearted about it." Ho says that the Stars Program is completely in keeping with the MOE's principle of looking out for disadvantaged students from rural areas. He also sees it as a step along the path towards having high schools educate kids from their own communities rather than recruiting from all over. The ministry hopes that this kind of "localization" will ultimately encourage good students to attend schools in their own communities, rather than try to squeeze into one of Taiwan's more prestigious high schools.

Departments at top-tier universities have lowered their admissions standards by about ten points to provide rural students with opportunities for entry. But should they be doing so? Recommendations-based admissions have been in use for many years now. Weren't these too intended to recruit students of exceptional ability who had not performed exceptionally well on written exams? Why, after 12 years, has this recommendations program failed to achieve its objectives?

"Taiwanese society has long thought it most fair to rank on the basis of scores," says Luoh. "But students from rural high schools score lower than their urban counterparts not necessarily because they are poor students, but rather because they have had unequal access to educational resources and opportunities for the preceding 12 years. If we remain married to the idea that tests are the fairest criteria, then there's really no reason to promote diversification programs." Luoh argues that universities need to take a candid look at themselves. Are they truly welcoming these new students? If schools are willing to admit them, then they not only need to lower their admissions standards, they also need to do their utmost to integrate them into the student body to ensure that they develop to the limit of their potential.

Between 1997 and 2000, nearly 60% of NTU's student body (57.6%) were graduates of Taipei City and County high schools. In marked contrast, Miaoli, Chiayi, Hualien, Hsinchu, Taitung, Penghu and Kinmen each accounted for less than 1% of enrollment, and no students at all were admitted from Matsu.

The number of Taiwan's colleges and universities has grown greatly over the last couple of decades, from just 28 in 1986 to 147 in 2006. The number of students matriculating each year has grown as well, from some 30,000 to more than 200,000. Even so, there is more demand for places at our national universities than there is supply. They account for just 33% of matriculating students, meaning that their admissions remain fiercely competitive.

Taiwan's public universities offer excellent resources and good value for the money. Its private universities, on the other hand, are expensive and of uneven quality. Unfortunately, the determination of what school a student attends isn't based entirely on merit. Instead, family background plays a crucial role.

Luoh then extended his research from the composition of NTU's student body to the relationship between family background and being admitted to a university. He examined parents' educational attainments and career choices (specifically, whether they worked as teachers or civil servants), as well as where students had grown up. In so doing, he discovered that in the years since the expansion of university admissions in 1987 three factors had clearly provided students with an edge in getting into university: coming from a Taipei family, having parents who were university graduates, and having one parent who was a teacher or civil servant. In fact, students who met these criteria had an 83% chance of getting into a university. Meanwhile, students from eastern Taiwan, without a parent who was a civil servant or teacher, and whose parents had only graduated from middle school, had only a 13.75% chance of being admitted. In addition, students from urban areas were six times more likely than those from rural areas to attend university.

"Universities are society in miniature," says Hocheng Hong, NTHU's Dean of Student Affairs. "If students' backgrounds are too similar, their perspectives will be narrow." NTHU developed the Stars Program in hope of creating more diverse campuses.

NTHU compared students admitted via the recommendation route with those admitted on the basis of test scores, examining two extreme measures of performance-academic prizes won and academic suspension rates. The university found that students flunked out at the same rate regardless of which route they took to admission. But it also found that students admitted via the recommendation route won academic prizes at three times the rate of students admitted based on test scores. The university attributed this to the fact that recommended students prepared their application materials themselves and therefore had to really think about whether they wanted to study in the departments to which they were applying. Having actively and conscientiously made this choice for themselves, they were much more motivated to learn.

Helping second-tier schools?

The number of high schools having students admitted to top-tier universities since the Stars Program's 2007 inception suggests that the program has been very successful at providing broader access. However, the geographical distribution of the 228 high schools shows that the program's principal beneficiaries have been students at second-tier urban high schools. For example, Taipei City high schools, including Wanfang, Neihu, Cheng Yuan, and Ming Lun, had 120 students admitted via Stars, versus 78 from Taipei County high schools. Hsinchu City had 25 students admitted, versus Hsinchu County's 13. Chiayi City had 24 students admitted, versus Chiayi County's two. And Kaohsiung City had 46 students admitted, versus Kaohsiung County's 25.

These "outstanding" students from second-tier urban high schools have an easier time getting admitted because they more easily achieve "two excellent and three good" SAT subtest scores, the "good-but-not-great" standard for the Stars Program. But are these students genuinely economically and culturally disadvantaged? How much of an impact on social justice does helping them have? These are very contentious questions.

"What most of the high schools that have had students accepted have in common is that they aren't prestigious, that they graduate a lot of students, and that their students run the gamut from good to poor," explains the Department of Higher Education's Ho. "This will encourage students to study near their homes; it will positively affect their decision to attend a neighborhood high school."

Liao Chun-jen, a Hsinchu vocational-high-school teacher who is also the executive director of the National Teachers' Association, agrees. He argues that it's no bad thing that the principal beneficiaries have been second-tier urban high schools. At the very least, it means that property prices won't immediately skyrocket in the districts of Jianguo, Taipei First Girls', Taichung First, Tainan First, and other top-flight high schools while planning for the 12-year national education program is still underway.

Liao also believes that the Stars Program will make outstanding students in rural areas more willing to attend local schools. "Those that stay in their small towns will be better looked after," says Liao. "They won't have to live and study on their own away from home, and won't pick up bad habits. In addition, the quality and morale of teachers at rural high schools will improve if good students remain in small towns.

"Stars didn't provide many places last year, so it likely only helped the nation's well-to-do high schools," says NTHU's Hocheng. "If we can increase the enrollment numbers from about 1,000 to 5,000 in the future, that is, to about 5% of the enrollment of public universities, we'll reach critical mass. Then, as benefits trickle down, we'll reach the most disadvantaged students."

Reviewing recommendations

We've come a long way since the days when a student's Joint University Entrance Exam score was the only criterion for university admission. But the implementation and refinement of the new methods of the last 12 years have persuaded many that no single approach protects the interests of all students.

The fact of the matter is that the Stars Program does not differ all that greatly from recommendations-based admissions. Both suffer from the same problem-while they have the potential to offer students from rural high schools the opportunity to enroll at elite universities, most of these students don't do well enough on their SATs to make it through the first stage of the admissions process. In the end, it is still students with good test scores from top-tier high schools who are being admitted. Balancing rural and urban admissions is an admirable notion, but one that has turned out to be very difficult to put into practice.

Lee Si-chen, president of NTU and of the Joint Board, College Recruitment Commission, has suggested that the only way to achieve this kind of balance is to split rural and non-rural, and elite and non-elite, into separate groups and to guarantee places for students from non-elite rural high schools. But the questions of how to divide the groups and where to set admissions standards still require study. If 100 schools establish 100 different standards, high schools will have a terrible time assisting students with their recommendations.

The Stars Program has been up and running for a year now, and we don't yet know how effective it will be. The MOE plans to expand the program to benefit more rural students this year. To that end, it has asked 13 second- and third-tier public and private universities that receive ministry money under the Teaching Excellence Project, including National Dong Hwa University, National University of Kaohsiung, National University of Tainan, National Taiwan Normal University, and Chung Yuan Christian University, to bring the number of Stars places up to 1,742 without increasing their overall admissions. (The target for the 11 currently participating elite universities is 1,056 students. National Sun Yat-sen University has dropped out and has instead implemented its own Southern Stars Program.)

Will the new policy be vigorously implemented? Will it be put into place too hastily?

Peng's original plan called for NTHU to use information gathered from a small three-to-four-year pilot program to revise the plan before rolling it out on a large scale. "Not every university needs to participate," says Peng. "A little liberalization from the elite schools would be enough. There's no need for those that already have low entrance requirements to take part."

Regressive subsidies

It remains an open question whether teachers' familiarity with testing techniques and greater access to information on advancing to the next level of schooling provides their children with an edge in getting into a university. On the other hand, family income is clearly an important factor in determining whether children attend a university, and especially whether they attend a good one.

Samuel S. Peng, director of National Taiwan Normal University's Center for Research on Educational Evaluation and Development, examined data on Taiwan's entire 2002 college and university freshman class, specifically their parents' level of education, their family's income, and the schools the children attended. His research showed that 14.6% of university students from families with incomes of less than NT$500,000 per year attended public universities, 12.6% attended public technical universities and vocational colleges, 25% attended private universities, and a whopping 47.7% attended ubiquitously poorly ranked private vocational schools. (See Table 1, page 15.)

When Peng took a closer look at the data on the 8,728 freshmen from the public Taiwan, Tsing Hua, Chiao Tung, and Cheng Kung Universities, he discovered that students from families with incomes of less than NT$500,000 per year accounted for only 16.3% of the freshman class. In contrast, 41% of the freshman class came from families with annual incomes of NT$500,000 to $1.14 million, 21.7% from families with annual incomes of NT$1.15 to NT$1.5 million, and 20.9% from families with annual incomes above NT$1.51 million. (See Table 2, page 15.)

"In Taiwan, the competition and selection for university educational opportunities begins in high school," explains NTU's Luoh. He says that the urban children of highly educated, well-to-do parents have a better chance of testing into a prestigious high school. From there, they can test straight into a public university, where tuition fees are low, the quality of education high, and educational subsidies large. In fact, the government spends an estimated NT$200,000 per student per year on tuition subsidies for public university students, or NT$800,000 over the course of a four-year university career. Students at private universities, on the other hand, receive next to nothing.

More galling still is that, as Luoh says, "This is a regressive redistribution of income." That is, low-income kids who don't have the opportunity to attend university enter the workforce at an early age, where their meager incomes are taxed to subsidize the university educations of well-to-do classmates who got good grades in high school. These subsidies, in effect, steal from the poor to aid the rich.

NTHU looked beyond Taiwan's elite high schools when recruiting its first group of Stars students. From left to right: Chen Chien-nan (Sinrong High School, Tainan), Yeh Hao-ting (Stella Maris High School, Hualien), Tseng Fen-chi (Yuanli High School, Miaoli), Wang Yu-hsin (Bailing High School, Taipei). resolve the disputes to which it has given rise.

Universities are scholarly temples to thinking, knowledge and culture. In a way, they are very like the Milky Way that lights the nighttime sky, packed not just with stars blazing brightly enough to see with the naked eye, but also with others whose brilliance may only be glimpsed through a telescope.

Can those few small stars "lucky" enough to be selected be encouraged burn brighter? Nurtured by the thoughts of philosophers on the campuses of elite universities, their light may yet shine forth. Today's hard work and uncertainty may yet produce beautiful rewards.

Good students at every school

Education used to be the strongest driver of economic and intergenerational mobility. In recent years, this has not been the case, and many scholars are worried.

To offset the difference in university admissions rates in urban and rural areas, in 2006 the MOE required 12 public and private schools receiving NT$50 billion over five years under the top universities program to implement the Stars Program. To provide students from rural areas with an opportunity to study at a top-tier school, the MOE had the schools, which included NTU, NTHU, NCTU, Yuan Ze University, and Chang Gung University, accept 786 applicants over and above those admitted by examination.

Under the program, every department at each of the schools is allowed to set its own SAT standards for admission. Then, the high-school class ranks of those who have met the SAT standards are compared. Under this system, a Jianguo High School student who got top marks on all five of the SAT's subtests but whose class rank was poor would lose out to a kid from a Hualien or Taitung high school who was at the top of his class.

The Stars Programs' first year saw students admitted from 228 high schools, 117 of which had not had a student admitted to one of these 12 universities in the previous three years.

NTNU's Peng provided the theoretical underpinnings of the Stars Program. Drawing on research by the United States' Education Testing Service (ETS), Peng, formerly a chaired professor at NTHU, learned that US university student performance was more closely correlated to high-school grades than to university entrance exam scores. That is, students who excel in their moral, intellectual, physical and social development in high school have greater potential to excel in the future than those that simply score well on one or two entrance exams.

Peng believes that universities' demand for and definition of talent will change under the Stars Program, and notes that each department at participating universities establishes its own admissions criteria. He also believes it is important that we track the students who gain admittance under the program in order to learn whether the program has been a success, and understand the reasons for its success or failure.

"Universities are society in miniature," says Hocheng Hong, NTHU's Dean of Student Affairs. "They are places where the members of a given generation come together to study. If the backgrounds of these students are too similar, their perspective will be narrow, which is counterproductive to developing people with a broad understanding of the world." Hocheng, an active participant in the Stars Program who also happens to have been the first to propose the program to the MOE, believes that Stars has added diversity to NTHU's student body and differentiated it from other schools.

NTHU admitted 150 Stars students from 150 different high schools in 2007, adding diversity to a freshman class that is usually 90% recruited from just 35 high schools. NTHU's 2007 freshman class also included students who were the first ever from their towns (16) or their high schools (24) to be admitted to the school.

"This concentration of students from just a few places is the result of long-term laziness on the part of universities," says Hocheng. "The only thing they knew how to do was rank students on the basis of a few simple test scores." In Hocheng's view, "two excellent and three good" SAT subtest scores mean very different things for students of rural and elite urban high schools. "That a rural student is able to achieve the same learning results in a much less advantageous learning environment suggests greater ambition, ability and potential," he argues.

The Stars Program uses recommendations from high schools to get one outstanding student from each admitted to one of Taiwan's 12 elite universities. Can this kind of "subjectively" fair approach, which treats students from Taipei's Jianguo High School the same as those from rural high schools, truly shrink rural-urban disparities? Viewpoints differ.

Dragging down top schools?

NTHU developed the Stars Program, and has been more generous in its implementation than any of the other participating universities. In fact, the 150 new slots it created for the program now account for 11% of the students it recruits.

Properly speaking, NTU, which has three times NTHU's enrollment, should also have created more than 100 new spots. Instead, NTU recruited only 40 students via Stars and offered no spots in popular programs such as medicine, electrical engineering, and law. Other schools, including NCKU, NCU, and National Yang Ming University (NYMU), treat Stars as a nuisance.

"NTU Medical School has always selected the 100 most outstanding students in the country," says Chiang Been-huang, NTU's Dean of Academic Affairs. "The competition is intense. It would be tragic if we were forced to accept students who ranked below the top 1,000 in the nation." Chiang says that NTU is willing to work on behalf of students from rural areas, but is concerned that admitting students who would not be able to keep up with their classmates would do the students themselves harm. He argues further that last year's rollout of the Stars Program was rushed, leaving little time to put it into place. This year, every program except for medicine will make spots available to Stars, providing a total of 96 new places. But, Chiang says, "100 is probably our upper limit."

"Some universities have doubts," says Ho Jow-fei, director general of the MOE's Department of Higher Education. "They fear that kids recruited in this way won't be good students, that they'll have trouble with the work and will diminish the school's academic achievements and educational standards. We feel, however, that the nation's top universities partake of national resources and have a responsibility to society at large. We'd like to see them really work at doing the right thing, rather than being so half-hearted about it." Ho says that the Stars Program is completely in keeping with the MOE's principle of looking out for disadvantaged students from rural areas. He also sees it as a step along the path towards having high schools educate kids from their own communities rather than recruiting from all over. The ministry hopes that this kind of "localization" will ultimately encourage good students to attend schools in their own communities, rather than try to squeeze into one of Taiwan's more prestigious high schools.

Departments at top-tier universities have lowered their admissions standards by about ten points to provide rural students with opportunities for entry. But should they be doing so? Recommendations-based admissions have been in use for many years now. Weren't these too intended to recruit students of exceptional ability who had not performed exceptionally well on written exams? Why, after 12 years, has this recommendations program failed to achieve its objectives?

"Taiwanese society has long thought it most fair to rank on the basis of scores," says Luoh. "But students from rural high schools score lower than their urban counterparts not necessarily because they are poor students, but rather because they have had unequal access to educational resources and opportunities for the preceding 12 years. If we remain married to the idea that tests are the fairest criteria, then there's really no reason to promote diversification programs." Luoh argues that universities need to take a candid look at themselves. Are they truly welcoming these new students? If schools are willing to admit them, then they not only need to lower their admissions standards, they also need to do their utmost to integrate them into the student body to ensure that they develop to the limit of their potential.

NTHU compared students admitted via the recommendation route with those admitted on the basis of test scores, examining two extreme measures of performance-academic prizes won and academic suspension rates. The university found that students flunked out at the same rate regardless of which route they took to admission. But it also found that students admitted via the recommendation route won academic prizes at three times the rate of students admitted based on test scores. The university attributed this to the fact that recommended students prepared their application materials themselves and therefore had to really think about whether they wanted to study in the departments to which they were applying. Having actively and conscientiously made this choice for themselves, they were much more motivated to learn.

Should elite national universities cultivate talent or assist the disadvantaged? Should they make disadvantaged students with few opportunities to attend top-tier schools compete with other students for places? The debate is continuing.

Helping second-tier schools?

The number of high schools having students admitted to top-tier universities since the Stars Program's 2007 inception suggests that the program has been very successful at providing broader access. However, the geographical distribution of the 228 high schools shows that the program's principal beneficiaries have been students at second-tier urban high schools. For example, Taipei City high schools, including Wanfang, Neihu, Cheng Yuan, and Ming Lun, had 120 students admitted via Stars, versus 78 from Taipei County high schools. Hsinchu City had 25 students admitted, versus Hsinchu County's 13. Chiayi City had 24 students admitted, versus Chiayi County's two. And Kaohsiung City had 46 students admitted, versus Kaohsiung County's 25.

These "outstanding" students from second-tier urban high schools have an easier time getting admitted because they more easily achieve "two excellent and three good" SAT subtest scores, the "good-but-not-great" standard for the Stars Program. But are these students genuinely economically and culturally disadvantaged? How much of an impact on social justice does helping them have? These are very contentious questions.

"What most of the high schools that have had students accepted have in common is that they aren't prestigious, that they graduate a lot of students, and that their students run the gamut from good to poor," explains the Department of Higher Education's Ho. "This will encourage students to study near their homes; it will positively affect their decision to attend a neighborhood high school."

Liao Chun-jen, a Hsinchu vocational-high-school teacher who is also the executive director of the National Teachers' Association, agrees. He argues that it's no bad thing that the principal beneficiaries have been second-tier urban high schools. At the very least, it means that property prices won't immediately skyrocket in the districts of Jianguo, Taipei First Girls', Taichung First, Tainan First, and other top-flight high schools while planning for the 12-year national education program is still underway.

Liao also believes that the Stars Program will make outstanding students in rural areas more willing to attend local schools. "Those that stay in their small towns will be better looked after," says Liao. "They won't have to live and study on their own away from home, and won't pick up bad habits. In addition, the quality and morale of teachers at rural high schools will improve if good students remain in small towns.

"Stars didn't provide many places last year, so it likely only helped the nation's well-to-do high schools," says NTHU's Hocheng. "If we can increase the enrollment numbers from about 1,000 to 5,000 in the future, that is, to about 5% of the enrollment of public universities, we'll reach critical mass. Then, as benefits trickle down, we'll reach the most disadvantaged students."

Rural areas have fewer educational resources than urban ones, and their students tend to lag far behind. From the perspectives of human rights and social justice, society should actively seek to help them catch up. The photo shows a temporary classroom being built at Nantou's Kuanghsing Elementary School in the wake of the 1999 Chichi earthquake.

Reviewing recommendations

We've come a long way since the days when a student's Joint University Entrance Exam score was the only criterion for university admission. But the implementation and refinement of the new methods of the last 12 years have persuaded many that no single approach protects the interests of all students.

The fact of the matter is that the Stars Program does not differ all that greatly from recommendations-based admissions. Both suffer from the same problem-while they have the potential to offer students from rural high schools the opportunity to enroll at elite universities, most of these students don't do well enough on their SATs to make it through the first stage of the admissions process. In the end, it is still students with good test scores from top-tier high schools who are being admitted. Balancing rural and urban admissions is an admirable notion, but one that has turned out to be very difficult to put into practice.

Lee Si-chen, president of NTU and of the Joint Board, College Recruitment Commission, has suggested that the only way to achieve this kind of balance is to split rural and non-rural, and elite and non-elite, into separate groups and to guarantee places for students from non-elite rural high schools. But the questions of how to divide the groups and where to set admissions standards still require study. If 100 schools establish 100 different standards, high schools will have a terrible time assisting students with their recommendations.

The Stars Program has been up and running for a year now, and we don't yet know how effective it will be. The MOE plans to expand the program to benefit more rural students this year. To that end, it has asked 13 second- and third-tier public and private universities that receive ministry money under the Teaching Excellence Project, including National Dong Hwa University, National University of Kaohsiung, National University of Tainan, National Taiwan Normal University, and Chung Yuan Christian University, to bring the number of Stars places up to 1,742 without increasing their overall admissions. (The target for the 11 currently participating elite universities is 1,056 students. National Sun Yat-sen University has dropped out and has instead implemented its own Southern Stars Program.)

Will the new policy be vigorously implemented? Will it be put into place too hastily?

Peng's original plan called for NTHU to use information gathered from a small three-to-four-year pilot program to revise the plan before rolling it out on a large scale. "Not every university needs to participate," says Peng. "A little liberalization from the elite schools would be enough. There's no need for those that already have low entrance requirements to take part."

Universities are scholarly temples to thinking, knowledge and culture. In a way, they are very like the Milky Way that lights the nighttime sky, packed not just with stars blazing brightly enough to see with the naked eye, but also with others whose brilliance may only be glimpsed through a telescope.

Can those few small stars "lucky" enough to be selected be encouraged burn brighter? Nurtured by the thoughts of philosophers on the campuses of elite universities, their light may yet shine forth. Today's hard work and uncertainty may yet produce beautiful rewards.