By Ralph Rogers, Director Taiwan.
On Friday 20 September 2019 the largest ever university delegation from Taiwan met with representatives from 30 UK universities at the UK-Taiwan Higher Education Forum organised by UUKi. The delegation was made up of 47 delegates from 17 leading Taiwanese universities and was led by Mon-Chi Lio, Deputy Minister from the Ministry of Education Taiwan.
Mon-Chi Lio said that the Ministry of Education wants to build a long-term partnership in higher education with the UK. He informed the audience that with with more than 259 partnership agreements between 66 universities in Taiwan and 125 universities in the UK, and more than 7,000 UK-Taiwan joint research papers published between 2014 and 2018 there is already a strong foundation on which to build. According to Dame Janet Beer, Vice Chancellor at the University of Liverpool, key areas for UK-Taiwan research collaboration between Taiwan and UK include physics, astronomy, medicine, engineering, biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology. Andrew Zerzan, Director of Education Programmes at the British Council challenged the conference participants to establish a formal platform for bilateral higher education exchange between Taiwan and the UK, to ensure forward momentum from the day’s discussions. He went on to say that the British Council welcomes Taiwanese students to come to the UK to further their studies. At the same time, the higher education sector in the UK increasingly recognises the importance of British students gaining an international study experience, and therefore, he also hoped to see more British students taking advantage of the excellent study opportunities in Taiwan. David Lin, Taiwan’s representative to the UK, said that education exchanges between Taiwan and UK have been steadily increasing over the last few years, with the number of Taiwanese students in the UK rising to around 12,000 in 2017 including nearly 4,000 degree students, and with 451 British students in Taiwan in 2018. Chris Chang, Pro-Vice Chancellor at The University of Portsmouth stated that the need to internationalise was clear to all universities in the UK. He declared that students in the UK are demanding it and rankings depend on it. He advised the delegates that universities in the UK all approach internationalisation differently, it is not one size fits all, so Taiwanese universities have the ability to decide what kind of engagement they want to have with UK universities, and can then find the partner that suits them. Steven Shute, Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Sussex said that international research is a priority because global challenges need global solutions. He reminded the delegates that international research partnerships bring real benefits, with all the evidence base showing that if you have more than one co-author from outside your own country, field weighted research citations go up significantly. Finally Ya-Hui Chen, from the Taipei Representative Office informed the UK participants that there are four Taiwan scholarships to support UK students wanting to study in Taiwan including the Taiwan Fellowship, The Youth Mobility Scheme, The Taiwan Scholarship, and the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship.
