Friday, November 16, 2007

Universities in Taiwan, U.S. work hard to globalize

Taipei, Nov. 14 (CNA) Universities in Taiwan and the United States have been working hard to globalize in the context of the "flattening of the world" -- an important, but difficult task -- to improve universities' core competitiveness, educators from Taiwan and the U.S. said Wednesday.

"All universities want to internationalize because we now face a world of global networks, which means you can't go anywhere, or do anything, without interacting with people and receiving information from foreign countries," said Susan Sutton, Associate Vice Chancellor of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), in a digital video conference hosted by the American Cultural Center.

Most local universities didn't make efforts to internationalization until 10 years ago because an internationalized campus meant extra work and posed "troublesome" tasks to the foreign students service, which is why most schools concentrated only on sending students overseas, said Ellen Chen, Chairperson of the International College, Min Chuan University.

Currently, the U.S. is still the No. 1 destination of Taiwanese students seeking to study overseas. In the 2006-07 school year, there were 29,094 Taiwanese students studying in the U.S., according to the annual report published by the U.S. Institute of International Education (IIE) . Taiwan is now the fifth largest source of foreign students in America.

Taiwanese universities are also working to recruit international students and faculty with foreign experience, in part by setting up diversified curricula and various joint courses with international partners. For example, National Taiwan University (NTU) currently has 1,938 foreign students and offers 13 dual degree programs, said Shen Tung, NTU's Dean of Office of International Affairs.

NTU, with more than 56 percent of its full-time faculty being U.S. alumni, also offers video conferencing courses with Japan's Kyoto University, one of its 251 international partners, Shen said.

To create an internationalized campus, it's important to provide scholarships and services to foreign students and to take advantage of modern-day technology to maximize the university's "web presence," said Martin Bennett, who serves as Director of International Services at Ball State University, a school located in Muncie, Indiana.

Enrollments from Taiwan have been on the decline in recent years after peaking in 1993-94 with 37,581 students in America, the IIE report stated. China displaced Taiwan as the leading source of overseas students in 1988-89, and Taiwan has fallen gradually ever since, with 2005-06 and 2006-07 being the first years showing a significant increase in enrollment since the late 1990s, according to the report.

In 1987-88, Taiwan was the leading source of students to the U.S., taking up 8.4 percent of all places held by foreign students.