As higher education struggles to catch up with the constantly shifting social climate, many modern students are being left overwhelmed by the sheer volume of choices they are being offered in a phenomenon known as the "tyranny of freedom". This issue is exacerbated when they do not have the appropriate guidance from either their parents…

This article examines the long-run effect of higher education, measured in average years of tertiary schooling, on the level and growth rate of national per capita income. It uses an improved dataset on educational attainments which not only reduces measurement error but also overcomes data comparability issues and allows us to estimate the…

Widened participation in post-compulsory and higher education is generally regarded as a result of the growing recognition of the internal and external benefits of higher education, which are categorised either as a private or public good. However, a question can be raised: once these incentives become less promising or less evident, will a strong…

In the last two decades, we have witnessed a rapid expansion of higher education in Mainland China and Taiwan, recording a significant increase in higher education enrolments in these two Chinese societies. The massification of higher education in China and Taiwan has inevitably resulted in an oversupply of university graduates, with growing…

Two major educational expansions in Taiwan have resulted in a remarkable improvement of human capital accumulation for the last three decades, which is consistent with the long-run goal of education in improving individual well-being and international competitiveness. This study focuses on the expansion of higher education starting from the late…

We exploit a natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of parental education on educational outcomes of their children when they are high school seniors. In 1968, the Taiwanese government extended compulsory education from 6 to 9 years and opened over 150 new junior high schools at a differential rate among regions. We form treatment and…

The expansion of higher education has become a significant trend in the East Asia region, and Taiwan has proven no exception. The driving forces of higher education expansion in Taiwan include enhancing national competitiveness and human capital, responding to social and industrial needs, and reducing educational inequalities among social groups.…

The primary purpose of "National CrossTalk" is to stimulate informed discussion and debate of higher education issues. This issue contains the following articles: (1) The M Word: "Marketing" Has Changed from a Dirty Word to a Buzzword in Higher Education (Jon Marcus); (2) A Contrarian View of the Testing Industry: FairTest…

Investigates the effect of education and the role of technical progress on economic growth in Taiwan from 1965-2000. Finds that education has a positive and significant effect on growth, but the role of technical progress does not appear to be extraordinarily important. Furthermore, no markedly significant relationships exist between capital and…

Uses the multiplicative Cobb-Douglas production function to model Taiwanese economic output, 1953-85, as a function of labor and capital inputs and of measures of educational attainment. Finds that expanding junior high and vocational education met human capital needs and affected economic growth, whereas elitist senior high and tertiary education…

After World War II, an optimistic, rationalist ideology infused with Jeffersonian values influenced worldwide educational growth. The idea of a universal, free, compulsory system replaced an older elitist ideology. The equality ideology held that (1) cultural integration was necessary for national unity and (2) a shortage of trained manpower was…

These four papers are from a symposium on evaluating the impact of human resource development (HRD). "Pre-Job Training and the Earnings of High-Tech Employees in Taiwan" (Tung-Chun Huang) reports on a study that concludes that public training programs have no impact on participants' earnings in later jobs, but participation in private…

This document is a summary of the situations of six Asian nations (The People's Republic of China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and India) compared to the United States in science and technology education. The paper includes a table of the production of bachelor of science degrees in science and engineering in 1990, comparing the Asian…

This document consists of three symposia papers on human resources development (HRD) in Asia. "The Impact of Action Learning on the Conflict-Handling Styles of Managers in a Malaysian Firm" (Antony Hii, Michael J. Marquardt) presented results of a quantitative study of a three-month action learning program on managers'…