Education Division, TECO in Vietnam Holds Online 2022 Taiwan Higher Education Fair
On October 22, 2022, the Education Division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Vietnam held an online Taiwan Higher Education Fair for the third year. Sixty universities in Taiwan, a historically high number, took part, giving students in Vietnam an excellent opportunity to find, and find out more about, branches of learning and courses that they were attracted to. Most of the participating universities selected students from Vietnam to help present details of their departments, specialties, and scholarship programs, and individual chat rooms were set up for answering students’ questions.
Dr. Mon-Chi Lio, Taiwan’s Political Deputy Minister of Education, began his opening remarks by welcoming everyone online who was interested in higher education in Taiwan, and he thanked Vietnam’s Ministry of Education and Training, Taiwan’s Representative in Vietam Richard R.C. Shih, and National Ilan University for their great help organizing this year’s Taiwan Higher Education Fair.
He advised the students contemplating studying abroad to consider three main factors: the quality of the education offered, the cost, and the prospects of finding employment after graduating. He explained that Taiwan’s universities offer courses taught in Chinese and also in English, offering similar content to universities in Europe and the US, and that 42 of Taiwan’s universities are listed among the top 1,000 in the world in the 2022 Times HES rankings. This number is higher than the numbers for South Korea and for Singapore.
He gave details of the very affordable cost of university studies in Taiwan, and then talked about the many industry fields in which Taiwan is a key player in their supply chain. Semiconductors, for example, have led to Taiwan being referred to as Asia’s Silicon Valley. He mentioned the many tens of thousands of Taiwanese businesses in Vietnam and more than 5,000 investment projects underway there, all of which will continue to require highly skilled professional employees. He assured all the students that if they studied hard, they would be sure to find good employment.
He told them that there were 18,755 Vietnamese students at universities and colleges in Taiwan last year, the highest number of overseas students from any one country, and he looks forward to this number increasing in post-Covid times.
He finished by expressing his hope that everyone would find the Higher Education Fair informative and rewarding and that the participating students would find a university and program in Vietnam that perfectly suited their interests.
The participating universities and the individual chat rooms, all received a very positive response. Videos of the 2022 Taiwan Higher Education Fair were also uploaded to YouTube, and by October 27, they had been viewed at least 3,500 times. The Youtube channels are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZb51-x514M, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfWax21hB6E.
