Academic calls for government support for universities

A university professor has said the government should provide long-term support for Taiwanese universities in order to boost the competitiveness of the country's higher education institutions, write Phoenix Hsu and Kuan-lin Liu for Focus Taiwan.

With fewer graduate and doctoral students, National Taiwan University has dropped again in this year's 2017 Nature index for academic institutions, from 98 in 2016, to 148 in 2017. The index compiles its rankings based on the number of high-quality research papers from 500 universities in the previous year.

Lee Fang-jen, head of National Taiwan University’s Office of Research and Development, said there is a decline in students doing research beyond the undergraduate level, so naturally, the quality and quantity of research have dropped. While Lee maintained that the Nature index is limited because the publishing group only looks at articles in its own publications, he asserted that his university's ranking would go up if it received more funding.
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