If things go according to Ministry of Education plans, within 10 years Taiwan will have 100 institutes of higher education. This throwing open of the doors of learning has aroused much debate, of which the most intense revolves around such issues as high levels of graduate unemployment, and whether a university is more than just a glorified vocational training institute. The basic questions linking universities and the labor market are: what exactly is the goal of university study? What kind of preparation can four years of university give for a 30-40-year working life? Should university provide "specialist" or "all-round" education, and can a balance be struck between the two?

Recently, at the invitation of Taipei City Government, Morris Chang, chairman of the powerhouse Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), delivered a lecture entitled "New Recruits for the 21st Century." The specification he described for modern employees included these requirements: The ability to actively participate in political and social work; an international perspective; taking pleasure in cooperative endeavor; a good general understanding of science and technology; and the ability to think independently. Finally, they should be "specialized all-rounders."

Chang did not specify just what kind of education can produce people who are both "specialists" and "all-rounders," but he did criticize a common failing of both the Taiwanese and US education systems: trying to infuse students with the totality of the specialist knowledge of their discipline. The problem is the greater in Taiwan, because education in Taiwan is so busy making students learn specialist knowledge by rote that it has no time to give them an all-round education.

Ups and downs

Whether trends in companies' personnel choices will become the new guiding star for education policy is something we cannot yet judge. But the universities have long since awoken, and reacted, to the fact that the semiconductor industry-of which Chang, one of the lecturers most popular with university students, is a leading light-is a "black hole" which draws in large numbers of graduates.

The flourishing state of the high-tech industries means that students graduating from any department related to "electricity" all gravitate towards them. Hence electrical engineering, which is the most closely related to the semiconductor industry, has become the largest department at several prestigious universities. Because the electrical engineering departments at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), National Taiwan University (NTU) and National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) each have a thousand or more staff and students, and have grown too large to operate within the traditional administrative framework, they have all been elevated to the status of colleges of electrical engineering.

Professor Lee Si-chen, dean of academic affairs at NTU, also teaches in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He recalls clearly how the vagaries of market forces have affected the popularity of various departments over the years: "Thirty years ago, NTU's most sought-after department was civil engineering, because the country needed to reconstruct and build roads, railways and dams. As we advanced towards being a developed country, civil engineering fell out of favor somewhat, but a few years ago as the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit project got under way it saw a revival. After Yang Chen-ning won the Nobel Prize, physics was popular for 10 years."

Within the scope of subjects taught in the College of Engineering, says Lee, "in fact chemical engineering has the widest range of industrial applications. But because it is already a mature field with a stable pace of research and development, and the technology can be bought, recruitment needs are limited." But in electrical engineering, from the vacuum tubes of many years ago to the semiconductors of today, new devices with new applications are always being developed, and this has created ever greater demand. But he predicts that in 10 or 20 years' time electrical engineering too may reach a bottleneck, for although semiconductor products are still becoming ever smaller and their functions ever more powerful, the size of atoms is a limiting factor. If chips cannot shrink any further, then the field may come to the end of its potential.

One function of the university is to satisfy the needs of the labor market. This applies to science and engineering faculties, and to the humanities, law and commercial subjects too. But there are differences in the level of demand for graduates and the breadth of career prospects.

Hsu Jui-lan, a third-year student in the Department of English Language and Literature at National Chengchi University (NCCU), says that since her first year she has had a sense of crisis about what she will do once she graduates. Teaching would come quite easily, but apart from that her course seems to have "breadth but not depth," so it seems she could do anything from teaching to secretarial work, translation or publishing. This problem of career prospects is similar for all humanities graduates.

When the rhododendrons began flowering in March, the annual round of recruitment fairs got under way on campuses all over Taiwan. Graduates of National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) always used to have an "iron rice bowl"-a guarantee of a job in teaching. But since the Ministry of Education relaxed entrance requirements for the teaching profession, they too have faced the same problem that "graduation equals unemployment," and for the first time ever a recruitment fair has been held on the NTNU campus.

Fictional demand predictions

However, allowing the market to dictate the direction of education, or basing manpower planning on the needs of national economic development, are notions which are coming in for more and more criticism.

April 10th Education Reform League convenor Huang Wu-hsiung, a professor in NTU's Department of Mathematics, has written that predicting the labor market for the next 30 years on the basis of current political, economic and social demand is extremely "dangerous."

Huang cites the case of vocational skills training, which is most directly controlled by national planning. Promotion of such training began in Taiwan in 1960, and in 1965 the proportion of senior high to senior vocational school students was six to four. By 1985, the balance had shifted to seven to three in the vocational schools' favor. But as Taiwan's industries have gradually modernized, they have lost the need for large numbers of basic-level skilled workers, and over the last 10 to 20 years many branches of industry have disappeared from the marketplace, leaving no demand for graduates of such courses as garment making, die and pattern making, pottery, or electrical machinery and refrigeration. Moreover, the training at vocational schools is so narrow that it does not give students the ability to respond to economic change, and when they are faced with unemployment they find it difficult to transfer to other kinds of work.

"Manpower planning is helpful in the early stages of national economic development, in that it quickly provides basic personnel. But as national income rises, this model no longer satisfies the public, for everyone wants to go to college or university," says Professor Tseng Hsien-cheng of National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, former executive secretary of the Executive Yuan's Commission on Educational Reform (CER). He says that although 70% of junior high school graduates enter the vocational training channel, the vast majority of parents still hope that their children will be able to go to university, so senior vocational school and junior college students embark on a tortuous path of resitting university entrance exams or taking tests to transfer from junior college to university. In the annual Joint University Entrance Examinations, 20% of candidates come from senior vocational schools and five-year junior colleges.

A surfeit of arts graduates?

Predicting manpower needs can also be a hit-and-miss affair.

Professor Kung Peng-cheng, president of Nanhua Management College (NHMC), says that according to a Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC) report on "Demand for Highly Qualified Personnel and Higher Education Policy in the Next Decade," in 1993 the supply of graduates in the field of education exceeded demand by 237, that of humanities graduates by 5598, and that of law graduates by 5607. But a Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) report estimates the average annual shortfall in the supply of science and engineering graduates and postgraduates from 1990 to the year 2000 at 5000 per year.

However, RDEC research shows that in 1993 demand for graduates and postgraduates was greatest in commercial disciplines, accounting for 24%; humanities came second at 20%, and science and engineering accounted for only 17%. A 1993 National Youth Commission survey on "Employment of Students of Junior Colleges and Above" also showed that the percentage of humanities graduates finding employment was second only to that of medicine graduates.

"If looking from the angle of demand is in any way meaningful, then I agree," says Kung Peng-cheng. But, he says, Taiwan currently has 115 departments and 35 graduate programs in commercial subjects, and 124 departments and 71 graduate programs in science and engineering, but only 12 departments and seven graduate programs in law. There are 215,000 students studying science and engineering, but only 6000 studying law. As the importance of the legal system grows in our society, who will deal with all the legal problems arising in the industrial and commercial fields? Today, Taiwan has 425 adult education establishments, but the only department of adult and continuing education in Taiwan is at NTNU, and it produces 60 graduates a year." Hence Kung questions on just what the assertions of an excess of law and education graduates are based.

Take note

Allowing education to be led by the market may also lead to deficiencies in teaching practices. Professor He Te-fen of NTU's Department of Law say that for law students, the best opportunity for advancement is to pass the recruitment examinations for public prosecutors and judges, or the senior civil service exams. "In class, some students only want to learn specifically how to answer exam questions, and their choice of courses depends on whether the instructor's teaching method is helpful for passing the exams." Some instructors, seeing that some students do not take good notes, even designate one who does to give them to the others for reference. But this results in most of the students taking no notes at all, because after all they will get photocopies, paid for out of the class expenses fund.

Two years ago, the CER completed a "General Consultation Report on Educational Reform." One of its main proposals was that the past system of controlling the establishment, expansion and contraction of departments in higher education on the basis of estimates of personnel demand should be "relaxed."

Education cannot be made merely to narrowly serve the economy. Yet in reality, "the reason most parents are willing to pay to put their children through university is certainly not that they hope they will become passionate seekers after truth, but to enable them to find good careers," says Providence University president Li Chia-tung bluntly.

"We acknowledge that education can't be an ivory tower, because it involves the application of national resources. But paradoxically, although education is a market, of itself it is unable to respond to the market," says Professor Lin Ku-fang of NHMC. He says that the pace of social change far exceeds the speed of change on quiet, placid campuses, especially in the information age. On graduating, students find that the "latest" technology they learned on campus is actually way behind the pack, especially where computer equipment is concerned.

For male students, this problem is compounded: after 22 months' military service following graduation, they return to the labor market only to discover that companies have long since moved on from the computer hardware and software they used at university.

All-rounders compete better

However, Li Chia-tung believes that even in terms of job market prospects, excessive specialization without a broad perspective, or overstressing "practical" skills, does not give students a competitive edge, but rather limits their career development. For example, if English graduates lack general knowledge, then they will not even be able to do translation work properly. It is not enough for trainee interpreters simply to know English: they also need a broad range of knowledge in order to be able to cope with translating various different kinds of subject matter.

By the same token, students of science and engineering also face difficulties when it comes to management tasks. Industries in Taiwan sell mainly to export, and in order to market products overseas one must have a good knowledge of the customs and cultures of other countries, and be aware of international developments. If science and engineering students only have specialist technical knowledge, they will only be able to do technical work and not to participate in major company strategic decisions.

"All academic fields are multidisciplinary in nature," says Professor He Te-fen of NTU's Department of Law. Can law students afford to concern themselves only with legal paragraphs? If they don't understand such things as juvenile delinquency or stock market operations, once they become lawyers or judges, will they be able to deal with cases simply by the letter of the statutes?

"When departments are set up to cater to a particular profession, it actually limits students' prospects," says Li Chia-tung. For example, he says, 30 years ago nuclear engineering was popular for a time, but today most people blanch at the mention of things "nuclear," and NTHU had no choice but to bend to social trends and rename its Department of Nuclear Engineering the Department of Engineering and System Science.

The department's chairman, Professor Chou Huai-pu, describes the name change as part of a process of "evolution." For the last decade and more, every time the Legislative Yuan has reviewed Taiwan Power Company's budget, it has sparked off a wave of anti-nuclear protests, and the nuclear industry's market has developed extremely slowly. But a name cannot be changed on a whim-the content of courses and research programs has to be planned beforehand. Chou is also aware how quickly times are changing: even the situation five years from now cannot be predicted, and someone who is only familiar with one branch of knowledge cannot respond to change. The orientation of systems science is for students to learn how to "integrate" knowledge of different fields such as materials science, thermal flux and nuclear engineering.

Changing a department name is the quickest way to reverse a decline. Lee Si-chen remarks that NTU's College of Agriculture has 12 departments, but society at large has the impression that agriculture is something backward and old fashioned, and nothing to do with high technology. Faced with a crisis of more students transferring out than in, the college has also been discussing whether to change its name and reorganize its courses, hoping to incorporate such fields such as sustainable resource management, bioresources, environmental science and life science.

Crisis of overdivision

The way departments are established is related to division of labor and social development. The division of labor leads to compartmentalization of knowledge, as if every field needed its own branch of learning; but development theory stresses "critical mass," and the quickest way of developing a university and acquiring resources is to add new departments and programs, for only then can one obtain allocations of teaching staff and recruit students.

That academic learning involves specialization is beyond doubt. The division of universities into departments goes back to ancient times. Confucian learning was divided into the four fields of moral conduct, rhetoric, government and letters; and Emperor Wendi (ruled 424-453) of the Southern Dynasties Song period divided scholarship into metaphysics, Confucianist learning, letters and history. Medieval universities in the West also distinguished the "trivium" of grammar, rhetoric and logic and the "quadrivium" of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy; together, they comprised the seven liberal arts.

But in modern times the trend has been for ever greater and ever finer academic specialization. Professor Ambrose Y.C. King of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in his book Daxue de Linian (The Idea of the University), writes that the University of California offers over 10,000 different courses. Such specialization not only erects seemingly insurmountable barriers between different fields; even scholars in the same field often find themselves unable to communicate with each other meaningfully about their research and experience. The crisis of overspecialization may lead to people being "unable to properly interpret the past, rationally judge the present or predict the future."

Undergraduate education in the US has long stressed breadth of knowledge, but in the face of the pressures of ever more intense specialization and commercialization, core curriculum courses have tended to become disjointed, and educators have been faced with the knotty question of "what makes an educated man?"

In 1978, Harvard University published a report which reexamined core curriculum education. The report attracted much attention throughout the US, and was described in the media as a "quiet revolution."

The Harvard report listed such fields as literature, art, history, social analysis, moral reasoning, natural sciences, mathematics, foreign languages and foreign cultures, with eight to 10 classes offered in each field; each student had to choose a class from among these fields.

The message of this 36-page report was that "in an age of ever-greater specialization, after comprehensive discussion and study, Harvard continued to affirm the value of the core curriculum. In an academic climate of ever-greater departmental rivalry, Harvard still had the courage to break down academic fences," writes Ambrose King.

A quiet revolution

The need for holistic understanding is something which also finds resonance in universities in the ROC.

Professor Huang Wu-hsiung of NTU's Department of Mathematics once observed that the biggest problem in university education is the tendency to reduce knowledge to operational exercises. In his view, any field comprises both "holistic knowledge" and "analytical understanding." If one dispenses with the former and reduces the latter to operational exercises, then all that remains is technique. This problem may emerge in any field, from the natural sciences to law, economics, languages, textual analysis or poetry.

However, core curriculum education has made less impact in Taiwan than in the US. This is because its promotion is burdened with some historical luggage.

Professor Lin An-wu, director of NTHU's center for general education, says that students have always tended to associate core curriculum teaching with the compulsory courses intended to instill national consciousness, such as basic military training, field nursing, "Sun Yat-sen thought" or "the mainland issue." But fortunately, "such courses are now a thing of the past."

"The reason we need a broad education is because human beings are multifaceted and society is complex," says Kung Peng-cheng. Living within society, we are sure to come into contact with legal issues, and when we go home and listen to music, or go to a bookshop, we need some sense of artistic appreciation. What's more, many matters cannot be dealt with from a single perspective. For instance, issues to do with death span such fields as medicine, religion, ethics, literature and art.

Over a decade ago, NTU president Yu Chao-chung came to the realization that from the point of view of human spiritual and intellectual development, very few people tend to be so narrow as to only concern themselves with a single branch of learning such as mathematics or philosophy. But universities require students to specialize too early and too heavily, so that they lack knowledge outside their own specialisms and are unable to keep fully abreast of the development of modern knowledge.

Although there is a willingness to combat the tendency for overspecialization, the reality is that this is easier said than done. To take NTU as an example, there are 3500 students in each year, so even in classes of 50 it would take dozens of teachers to teach them core curriculum classes. Also, the instructors now teaching in universities are all themselves products of the specialist system, and it is doubtful whether they would be up to the job. Thus in the past NTU has offered courses such as "identifying precious stones" or "pet care," which are useful but not very much in keeping with the spirit of core curriculum education. Other schools have also taught such classes as "astrology and love" or "geomancy," and as a result the concept of core curriculum education has become even more muddied.

But what is the reaction of ordinary students?

Chuang Hsiao-ya, a third-year undergraduate in NTU's Department of International Business, says that core curriculum classes are not regarded as all that important by students, sometimes because of their perceived lack of "usefulness," and sometimes because compulsory courses already take up too much of their time. However, it also depends on how well the instructor teaches. For instance, Chuang took "appreciating Western music," and found it very helpful for relieving study stress. She feels that at university one ought to study broadly, because entering university at only 18, one is sometimes not very clear about one's own interests, and if one's field is too narrow, it will be difficult to change direction.

But Hung Le-wen of the Department of Electrical Engineering takes the opposite view: "If you have to study everything, you could go on for eight years and still not be finished." He believes that one does need a certain degree of specialization, otherwise the division into departments is pointless. If the idea of core curriculum courses is for students to come into contact with a wide range of fields, then this can be achieved simply by taking option courses in other departments.

NTU's joint education committee once discussed expanding core curriculum courses from 12 to 30 credits, but most departments opposed this, regarding their own departmental courses as more important.

Making man the starting point

"When you understand all about the sun and all about the atmosphere and all about the rotation of the earth, you may still miss the radiance of the sunset." So wrote English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

"The advocacy of core curriculum teaching is in itself a very important education for teachers." Lin Ku-fang says that when NHMC was set up it made broad-based education one of its founding principles, but discovered that attitudes were very hard to change, because "people today feel they are respected for their profession rather than their personality." Although when first studying an academic discipline one starts from a general outline, nonetheless one must be very well versed in a subject to teach it well. "There is a great sense of challenge about core curriculum teaching, but many people make the mistake of thinking it is very simple," says Lin.

The scope of core curriculum teaching appears very broad, but it still has to start from the basics. In Lin Ku-fang's view, any branch of academic learning can be viewed on the three levels of "man and nature," "man and man," and "man and the supernatural, or that which transcends self." To take the example of earth science, a very specialized discipline, man's cognitive knowledge of nature is its specialist content, but to go a step higher and investigate the interactive relationship between man and ecology or man and the future condition of life requires a broad-based, multidisciplinary approach.

When the Chinese speak of a person having all-encompassing knowledge, they often say he or she is "versed in the ways of Heaven above and Earth below." Lin Ku-fang says this does not so much mean that the person is steeped in every branch of learning, but rather that the facets of his interest "project out from man as the starting point, and have the universe as their compass, so that the workings of heaven and earth are all relevant to him." But the division of learning into different disciplines causes students to think that many branches of knowledge have nothing to do with them. Thus the broad-based approach "represents man returning to the starting point of the relationship between learning and life."

Breaking the departmental mold

Many universities have evidently arrived at the same view, and are trying to break free from division into specialisms, and from departmental parochialism.

Last year, the College of Management at Yuan Ze University experimentally began admitting students without assigning them to departments during their first year. The college's Departments of International Business, Finance, Accounting and Business Administration each gave up 10 first-year places to allow this. The main reason the scheme was not applied to all first-year students was that the college wished to test the level of acceptance among applicants.

In fact, admission by college rather than department was tried eight or nine years ago by the College of Sciences at National Central University. Students who tested into the college first took two years of foundation courses, after which, without further screening, they could freely choose to enter any one of the Departments of Mathematics, Physics, Atmospheric Sciences and Earth Science. But under this flexible system most students chose to study physics, leading to a great imbalance in the allocation of teachers and their teaching load, so the scheme was abandoned.

Lee Si-chen notes that NTU's College of Management has also long wished to eliminate its departmental structure. But because public universities have so many departments and individuals with established reputations, it is very difficult for them to make large changes in their personnel structure. New establishments are subject to less pressure, so it is easier for them to do such things.

Administrative heads at public universities generally agree that reorganizing courses rather than departments may be a more viable approach. From this year, NCCU's College of Communication is to revamp the course structure in its Departments of Journalism, Advertising, and Radio and Television. Instead of a structure based around the concept of the department, there will be 11 courses based on three fields-knowledge of the humanities and social sciences, specialist journalistic skills, and basic theory-comprising a broad range of classes including journalistic writing, broadcasting, digital media and public relations.

"Any discussion should address the question of whether we have returned to the basic nature of education," says Professor Chung Wei-wen of NCCU's journalism department. "After all, advertising, broadcasting and journalism are not independent from each other. Perhaps we should ask what is the basic nature of these areas of work, and even if we have no answer, we will have begun to be more flexible."

Knowledge is like building blocks

"The goals of university education are not something that can be described in just a few sentences, but when things go wrong with it everyone is sure to notice very quickly," says Li Chia-tung.

Recently, the president of Tokyo University apologized to the Japanese public for corruption among Japanese government officials, many of whom are its alumni. In our own universities, first there was a murder case, then a group of students complained that they had been the victims of religious fraud, and so on. As problems keep appearing on university campuses, members of the public ask why such highly educated people would do such things. "I'm afraid that's the question any university president least likes to answer," says Li Chia-tung.

"We can't blame society outside, because it is right that they should demand certain standards of universities. The question is whether the members of the university community can strive to maintain the ideals of the university," says Chung Wei-wen.

In his view, most students who are disappointed by university had hoped that what they learned there could be put to use immediately. But knowledge can be said to have two aspects: "structure" and "application." Its structure is like building blocks; its application is how they are arranged and combined. With an ever-changing external environment, it is not possible to have a body of knowledge which completely reproduces the external environment. The future is infinite, so how could a university teach one to try to apply the same knowledge to all situations?

"Academic education sometimes has no answers, because you can't apply it step by step like a recipe. What a university teaches is the ability to improvise. The purpose is not to apply knowledge mechanically, but to combine and synthesize," says Chung.

Not the be-all and end-all

Interestingly, once they are in the world of work some people have different ideas about whether university education should be "specialized" or "all-embracing."

Lee Si-chen says that for example, the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers once conducted a large-scale survey which asked working engineers what part of their university education they found most helpful in their subsequent careers. Interestingly, engineers over 35 all wished they had spent more time on basic subjects such as maths and physics, because specific practical skills all become out of date in time.

This result tallies very much with the ideas of TSMC president Morris Chang. Recently, while leafing though the doctoral thesis which he wrote at Stanford University in 1963, he discovered many formulae which he had either forgotten or no longer understood. From this he realized that of the specialist know ledge one learns at university, one is not likely to use more than 10-20% in one's future career. But the most valuable things he gained from his student days were the habit of reading and the ability to think independently.

In his autobiography, Chang reveals that the key period which shaped his life was the year he spent at Harvard at age 18. Compulsory courses there included an extensive review of the Western classics, and this not only allowed him to become familiar with the development of Western culture, but also laid down the foundations of his understanding of the humanities.

Cheng Jui-cheng, dean of NCCU's College of Communication, once asked a prominent member of the advertising world: "What kind of courses must one follow to become an advertising person?" The reply he received was: "Listen to music, take part in cultural acivities, read, talk with people, and find out the best sources of information--that's all." This seems to go back to the basics of how to conduct oneself as a human being.

Does graduating from university mark the end of one's learning career? Or just the beginning?

[Picture Caption]

The smiling faces of youth in its prime. . . .Graduation is another turning point in life. (Sinorama file photo)

The Hsinchu Science-Based industrial Park has always been the home of the "nobility" of Taiwan's high-tech industries, and it holds great attraction for recent university grads.

Communing with the spirits of the ancients and the moderns, university is a hallowed place of knowledge.

Hanging out and talking freely about every subject under the sun--while staying in the cool shade of a tree! University leaves memories that last a lifetime.

Besides burying your head in the books, you are also exposed to the arts. Music and art appreciation are also part of life.

The transmission of knowledge is not only uni-directional. Discussion fans the fires of wisdom.

Are universities less idealistic these days? In a speech at National Taiwan University, Academic Sinica president Lee Yuan-tseh called universities "revolutionary organizations" which should lead society forward into the unknown.

There is no limit to knowledge. For many people, university has been thelast stop for their personal school bus, but it's becoming more common these days for people to go back for a refueling.

Celebrating a school anniversary in song and dance. . . . Today I feel proud of you, in the future you will feel proud of me.

Communing with the spirits of the ancients and the moderns, university is a hallowed place of knowledge.

Hanging out and talking freely about every subject under the sun--while staying in the cool shade of a tree! University leaves memories that last a lifetime.

Besides burying your head in the books, you are also exposed to the arts. Music and art appreciation are also part of life.

The transmission of knowledge is not only uni-directional. Discussion fans the fires of wisdom.

Are universities less idealistic these days? In a speech at National Taiwan University, Academic Sinica president Lee Yuan-tseh called universities "revolutionary organizations" which should lead society forward into the unknown.

There is no limit to knowledge. For many people, university has been thelast stop for their personal school bus, but it's becoming more common these days for people to go back for a refueling.

Celebrating a school anniversary in song and dance. . . . Today I feel proud of you, in the future you will feel proud of me.