Director: Daniel C. Levy

From Public to Private Elite Status

PROPHE Summary:

Taiwan has put forth rules requiring that universities move toward becoming private, not-for-profit institutions to be eligible for finance allocated to create world-class universities. The proposal is controversial for its concentration on just a few institutions and for its call for recipient universities to move from public to private nonprofit status. Criticism of such privatization comes from not only opposition legislators but also from some government parties.

For the full story see "University Spending Plan Triggers Heated Debate". Science, Vol 307, February 4 2005. Available to subscribers at www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/307/5710/659a.

PROPHE Observation:

The Taiwanese proposal is doubly startling. One aspect concerns the concentration of resources to create world-class universities. The second aspects concerns privatization in the radical sense-still quite unusual globally-of transforming public into private nonprofit universities. China's policy for world-class universities is about public universities. Japan's and other Asian countries' policies substantially to privatize aspects of public universities ("corporatize") do not explicitly move to private legal status. Putting the two aspects together, if Taiwanese institutions such as the National Taiwan University and the National Cheng Kung University achieve both world-class and nonprofit status they would become still very rare examples, outside the USA, of private elite universities. Meanwhile, regulations and incentives for small institutions to merge could also heavily affect Taiwan's private sector.