Loosening requirements
The trend has also been apparent at universities, which several years ago began introducing minors, mini-programs, and double majors aimed at broadening their students’ skill sets.
When Lee Si-chen became president of National Taiwan University in 2005, he loosened the requirements on double majors in an effort to boost interest in the less popular departments in the colleges of liberal arts, agriculture, and science. By calling for students to focus on their choice of school rather than department, he hoped to attract still greater numbers of outstanding high-school students to his university.
With the university’s encouragement, the number of NTU students applying for double majors rose from 466 in 1999 to 1,470 in 2013, a threefold increase. Fields that offered students better job prospects in the business world, such as economics, finance, and accounting, were particularly popular as second majors.
At National Chengchi University, roughly 1,000 students take on second majors every year. Jason Chan, the school’s dean of academic affairs, says that the school designed its double majors, minors, and mini-programs with a particular eye to providing humanities majors with more saleable skills, because such students tend to have a harder time finding jobs than science and engineering majors.
Providence University has been one of the most aggressive of Taiwan’s private universities at promoting similar policies.
In fact, Providence greatly eased the requirements for double majoring some 20 years ago, under the leadership of then-president Richard Lee. It went on to introduce a four-year double-major program in 2006. The program aims to pair less popular majors with more popular ones, giving rise to prepackaged dual-degree programs such as Taiwanese literature with mass communication, and financial and computational mathematics with either finance or computer science. These programs seek to brighten the employment prospects of students in less “hot” fields.
The best and brightest
David Tseng, the school’s dean of academic affairs, recalls that the program had very pragmatic origins: it was intended to help unpopular departments recruit students.
Take, for example, Taiwanese literature, a relative upstart within the humanities. Although graduates of Taiwanese literature departments should be on an equal footing with those of Chinese literature departments—the departments have similar academic standing and overlapping faculties, and their graduates often find themselves competing with one another for the same jobs after graduation—the degree carries less prestige with employers. This makes it difficult for departments to recruit students, threatening their viability. Providence University therefore decided to establish a dual “Taiwanese literature and mass communication” degree aimed at giving students a leg up in the job market by giving them access to radio, television and film practicums.
But double majors aren’t without their problems. One of the most common is that required courses aren’t necessarily available when students need them, forcing them to postpone their graduation. Recognizing that some students may have difficulty affording additional semesters of study, the departments involved have developed course schedules that enable dual-degree students to graduate in four years. The departments also have established a mechanism that makes it possible for students to give up a double major if they feel a need to do so.
Although these “prepackaged” double majors don’t allow students to “mix and match” their own course of study, they do reduce the risk of graduating late.
According to Providence, students are very satisfied with its double-major system, and 20% now choose the dual-degree option. Meanwhile, the number of students giving up their second major has declined from 53% in 2009 to 30% in 2013 for those in the “Taiwanese literature and mass communication” program and from 59% (2009) to 28% (2013) for those majoring in financial and computational mathematics with finance or computer science.
Many people recognize that multidisciplinary capabilities will be important to the workers of the future, and the crucial to the world’s progress. Students who hope to ride the wave of globalization into that future would be well advised to utilize their campuses’ resources to broaden their skill sets.