We plead with the government not to interfere anymore

The whole world has been competing keenly for talents, and the Taiwanese society is beginning to realise the dire consequences of a net talent outflow. If we are not able to attract talents from around the world like Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, USA, Korea and China, then we will find ourselves lagging behind very soon. The remuneration of professors in public and private universities of Taiwan is determined by their length of service and job grade; and is unrelated to their respective fields of research. We are only noticing a slight change recently that for individual faculty, part of their salary package is now tied to their research achievements or excellence. This phenomenon is similar to that of Singapore a decade or more ago. The Singapore Government realized then that it was not able to attract teaching talents from popular fields of study. This prompted the Government to set up SMU in 2000, which adopted the American model for faculty remuneration and gave the institution autonomy to recruit the best teaching talents from Europe and USA based on “market rates”. As a result, SMU rose rapidly to become the country's university boasting the best faculty lineup. Faced with stiff competition, NUS and NTU, the other two universities with a longer history, also revised their salary schemes and faculty recruitment policies to offer remuneration packages based on the fields of expertise to entice talents worldwide. Today, these universities in Singapore have become very competitive in the international arena.