Toward a universal higher education system: a case study of Taiwan

This study aims to scrutinize the antecedents that force the evolution of Taiwanese higher education from an elite to a universal system in the past two decades. From policy perspective, this study looks at how Taiwanese government encouraged educational reform in a way that has led to the massive expansion of both the numbers of colleges and universities and the increasing enrollment rate in higher education. This study also discusses the governmental policies that emphasized the quality enhancement and identified the lack of mechanism of quality assurance in Taiwan’s early educational reformation and how government reacted to the concerns associate with quality assurance that has been brought by the public after the educational reform. Taiwan’s case illustrated in this paper reveals a possible dilemma and lesson that developing countries may encounter when seeking to expand higher education for human capital by imposing incongruous policies that on the one hand promote the growth of higher education institutions, especially the private ones, and on the other depress their existence for the sake of quality assurance.