With foreign students currently making up just 10% of Taiwan’s student body, President Ma Ying-Jeou is making efforts to attract more foreign students.

Yesterday, at I-Shou University in Kaohsiung County, Ma said: “It is urgently important to make local universities and colleges internationally efficient so as to recruit more students from other countries to help Taiwan sharpen its competitive edge.”

“Judging from Taiwan’s past history, it is a fact that opening to the rest of the world will make our country strong, and we hope to lure more foreign students.”

Ma’s goal is to attract 30,000 overseas students to the Republic of China over the next four years by making all university courses available in English. Currently 39 Taiwanese institutions offer English-language courses.

As well as maintaining scholarship programmes for foreign students the government has also announced a freeze on tuition and other fees for the coming year, as well as a flexible salary scheme to encourage the best researchers and professors to remain in Taiwan as educators rather than move abroad.

Ma has stated that education is a critical factor to Taiwan’s survival, with a well-educated workforce compensating for the Republic’s lack of natural resources.