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Abstract:
Education is a long-term human capital investment as mentioned in one of the most popular economics textbooks [3]. In Taiwan, there are 158 public and private universities and colleges (U&C), but its birth rate is only 8.55 per 1,000 of a population reported in CIA Factbook [1]. From 2008 to 2015, the total students in all levels of schools from kindergarten to graduate institute declined from 5,165,817 to 4,504,331 persons. Within short nine (9) years, there were 66,186 vacancies in the educational system, making recruitment of student more difficult every year. Such kind of situation is even worse in the U&C, so that professors in private U&C have to change their status from educators to salespersons. Under such a severe condition, the fairness of education budget allocation should be scrutinized. All citizen sharing equal right in education is the fundamental law of human right, so that the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Taiwan should have an obligation to allot equally all the education budget to each student. In this paper, the education budget is adjusted according to consumer price index (CPI) because education is an item in the consumer "basket" [3]. From 2008 to 2016 each student in all levels of public school was allocated 191.32 (unit =1,000 NT) of education budget while their counterpart was allocated only 115.52 (unit=1,000 NT). It is 1.66 times the difference on average. For the universities and colleges, the unfairness is even obvious. The education budget allocated to public U&C from 2012 to 2015 was on average of NT$ 610.7 billion, but to private U&C only on average of NT$ 202.13 billion. Furthermore, the number of students in private U&C was 907,640 on average from 2012 to 2015, but in public U&C only 435,749 on average. In higher education, the number of students in the private U&C students was 2.08 times that of their public counterparts. The education budget for each public U&C student from 2012 to 2015 was 481.44 (unit=1,000 NT) on average while only 76.51 (unit=1,000 NT) per private U&C student. In other words, the education budget for each public U&C student was 6.3 times that of each private U&C student. The MOE in Taiwan only gave an average value in its archive, but the mean value would be biased by the extreme numbers as mentioned in a famous statistics textbook [6]. Numbers talk! All private school students receive lower subsidy in comparison with their public counterparts, and this situation is even worse for the students in private universities and colleges. Shouldn't MOE in Taiwan pay more attention to this implicit bias?
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