The Foundation for International Cooperation in Higher Education of Taiwan recently conducted a survey amongst participants to APAIE 2013 to invite views from countries around the world in the following areas:

• Preferred formats of collaboration
• Subject/area interests
• Taiwan’s attraction for foreign students

The survey results indicated strong interests from foreign institutions to work with Taiwanese institutions on student exchange programmes (23%). Many looked for opportunities to build institutional relationship (21%), while staff exchange was also a popular type of collaboration (17%).

On subject/area focus, ‘business management’ (23%) topped the list, ‘short-term credit bearing courses’, ‘arts and humanities’, and ‘science, technology and engineering’ also named by the respondents as areas of interests (16%).

In terms of Taiwan’s attraction to foreign students, the excellent quality of education was highly recognised by the respondents (34%), followed by the English-taught courses (33%) and the safe environment (17%).

Taiwan has been promoting its Chinese language teaching around the world. Many local institutions provide quality programmes that receive very positive reviews from students, and the government also have a number of incentive schemes to attract foreign learners. However, this did not seem to have been reflected in the survey. Only 9% of respondents were looking for collaboration opportunities in Chinese learning and 6% saw the cultural elements in Taiwan an attraction to their students.

The respondents of the FICHET survey came from Europe (54%), Asia (23%), Americas (14%), Oceania (5%) and Africa (4%), reported FICHET.